This chapter considers politically oriented works by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edris Saint-Amand, Anthony Lespès, and Jacques Roumain, all communist writer-activists who came of age during the US occupation and were committed to the twinned ideologies of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Kaussen shows how their Indigenist writings make explicit the connection between literature, Marxism, and the so-called folk, advocating for the embrace of Haiti’s African cultural origins, as expressed through the traditions of the peasantry. Not only do these writers put forward meaningful and incisive critiques of the existing social order, Kaussen observes, but they also present a wide array of imagined alternatives. Her chapter emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of Haitian socialism, noting the points of both intersection and diversion from Franco-European political models.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

The imposition of ‘civilising measures’ in the context of a policy of indirect rule included reinforcing the position of the king while at the same time weakening and eventually destroying his symbolic power base. This led to a dramatic shift of authority, as did the imposition of central rule to the entire country and the introduction of a uniform and ‘rational’ administration, even where the kingdom had no historical presence or legitimacy. Together with this extension of the central kingdom’s reach, the spreading of the Tutsi political monopoly, while Hutu had held political office in the past, greatly contributed to Hutu resentment.

Haitian writers produced a broad array of compelling texts during the nineteen years their country was under direct US rule. Today, it has become commonplace to identify Haitian literary production during that time as one of resistance. However, Haiti’s occupation-era literature is incredibly diverse. Many works from the period do not engage with the occupation at all, focusing instead on historical events, domestic dramas, or romance. In addition to thematic diversity, texts of this period reflect a variety of genres and forms. Some poets chose to experiment formally whereas others chose to create within the confines of fixed forms such as sonnets. Essayists displayed diverse ideological and political positions. This chapter offers a brief overview of Haitian literary works published during the US occupation of the country, from 1915 to 1934.

The focus of this chapter is Francophone Haitian women writers. These are writers who are bound by a common idiom, French and/or Creole, and who share similar concerns. What is to be ascertained is whether they occupy a territory in which literature acquires its full meaning. Given the dominance of male writers in Haitian literature, women writers may appear as marginal figures or minor voices. However, what this chapter demonstrates is that women writers have, over many years, challenged the status quo by simply being present and making their voices heard. They offer a female-centered perspective on the tensions and contradictions of Haitian society and, as such, open new doors to imagination. Dealing with such themes as love, loss, otherness, memory, and empathy, Haitian women writers have effectively affirmed the humanistic value of literature. The term écriture de l’urgence, coined by Yanick Lahens to define Haitian literature in general, acquires a special meaning when considering women authors. Urgency does not equate haste. Rather, it refers to the direct confrontation of the writer with reality, history, and the endless possibilities of language.

This chapter examines René Depestre’s epic poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien. It contextualizes Vodou as a cultural and spiritual lieu de mémoire that was a major turning point leading to the Haitian Revolution. It analyzes the monumental role that the Vodou religion played in creating a sense of collective identity and consciousness that would eventually lead to the Ceremony of Bois Caïman. I argue that Vodou was at the heart of the resistance movement and provided agency for the enslaved. This agency allowed them to question the colonized Christian white god and embrace their own African spirituality. In so doing the enslaved were able to come together to create community and affirm their identity/ies. I then argue that the five sections of the poem depict Vodou as a framework for denouncing racism in the US South, as various lwas travel to Alabama, where lynching was commonplace, to decry the US’s political and religious hypocrisy and to avenge the enslaved and their families in the face of the wickedness and hatred associated with slavery. Depestre decries the hypocrisy of the white god and suggests to readers that the lwas show true humanity.

The first republic born from the revolution rapidly became authoritarian and crumbled under its own contradictions, and was toppled by a military coup in 1973. The second republic again fell prey to personal and regional conflicts. It failed to solve the refugee problem and embarked too late on a democratisation process.

Linking up with the precolonial past, after seizing power the RPF privileged military solutions and used a performant armed force ‒ based in part on experience in its Ugandan years ‒ to capture power, which was its aim since the 1990 attack. During the civil war and after its takeover, the maintenance of military norms and ethos motivated the military’s centrality and penetration of all society’s sectors, economically, politically, socially and institutionally, with the ultimate aim of first capturing and later retaining power. The achievements of good technocratic/bureaucratic governance risk being undone by flawed political governance.

This chapter examines the works of Haitian and diasporic Haitian authors who have addressed the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the 1937 massacre to 2013 when the Dominican Constitutional Court issued Ruling 168-13, also known as La Sentencia, which denationalized thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. While earlier writers and intellectuals largely followed a Marxist approach initiated by Jacques Roumain following the 1937 massacre, an ideological shift took place in the 1990s, imbricating race, nation, gender, and class. This shift reflected both global geopolitical changes, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a broader identity turn drawing on race, feminist, and gender discourses in the United States. Fiction and essays by diasporic authors Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, and Deisy Toussaint foreground the imperative to confront this violent past as a first step to purge its haunting effects, much of which inform the social resonance of anti-Haitian discrimination policies, including Court Ruling 168-13.

This chapter reads twentieth-century Haitian fictions of the Haitian Revolution to address how the political uses of Haiti’s independence war have made it a difficult literary subject for Haitian writers. The political custom of using Haitian revolutionists to express partisan political aims is prevalent in Haiti, so much so that it is the socio-political context animating Haitian narratives of the Revolution. I read Marie Chauvet’s novel, Dance on the Volcano (1957); René Depestre’s Vodou epic, A Rainbow for the Christian West (1967); Évelyne Trouillot’s novel, The Infamous Rosalie (2003); and Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel, Quiet Dawn (1990), fictional autobiography, I, Toussaint Louverture, with the Complicit Pen of the Author (2004), and novel, One Hour for Eternity (2008), and consider how each of these works addresses the exploitative uses of the Revolution in the prevailing political discourses of their time. I examine the painful intimacies of socio-political disunity presented in their writings, showing how creative treatment of the Revolution requires, at worst, questioning the Revolution’s success and, at best, resigning oneself to its unfinished nature.

Before the aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti subsided, writers had already begun to record their eye-witness accounts. These ‘provisional writings’ served as the basis for the creation of new literary archives as authors drafted, refined, and published their non-fiction accounts over time. Authors of fiction similarly imbued their fiction with details from life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, instilling an archival quality into their work. This chapter asks how fiction might serve as an archive. I examine how it preserves two specific narratives in the aftermath of the earthquake: Haitian mothers searching for their lost children, and the lives of queer and gender creative Haitians living in Port-au-Prince. I illustrate how fiction can record and center the lives of mothers living with the new realities imposed by the earthquake. I then focus on the depiction and portrayal of queer and gender creative individuals in novels that perform archival work by imagining and documenting individual walks of life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, preserving a record of queer Haitians’ lived struggle for visibility and acceptance.

The conclusion outlines continuity and change over the longue durée, whereby continuities outweigh changes.

Starting in 1990, the lethal combination of three factors led to genocide: political transition, civil war and bipolar ethnicity. In the second half of 1990, the start of the democratisation process coincided with an attack by the RPF, the political–military organisation of the Tutsi refugees. Despite the signing of a peace accord in 1993, the civil war resumed in 1994 and led to the RPF's victory. From April to July, the Tutsi were the victims of a genocide orchestrated by Hutu hardliners.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

This chapter uses contemporary Haitian fiction by feminist authors to explore the Haitian uses of the erotic. Emmelie Prophète’s Un ailleurs à soi (2018) and Kettly Mars’s Je suis vivant (2015) offer rich examples of how representations of same-sex desire map feminist geographies that foreground the relationship between the body, intimacy, and identity. I begin with a brief discussion of how representations of the erotic have evolved in Haitian literature, then continue with close readings of Prophète and Mars’s women-loving-women protagonists physical and verbal interactions. Guided by Caribbean feminist methodologies, I argue that these authors actively amplify the erotic as a source of freedom that can be powerfully ordinary and quietly mundane which is especially significant in the context of twenty-first-century literature.

This chapter argues that twenty-first-century poetry, notably by Port-au-Prince-based poets takes up the vexed theorization of contemporary Haitian public life, deploying and recuperating the centuries-old knowledge of the Vodou lwa Papa Loko and his avatars (the butterfly and the wind). The chapter considers poet and writer James Noël’s challenge to readers of contemporary Haitian poetry to grapple with the troubling quotidian realities of present-day Haitian civil society. In particular, I examine the fugacity of what I refer to as Lokoian ethics as a means of, first, advocating for an ethos of the non-predatory through an ecocritical analysis of the butterfly (in contrast with the dragonfly); and, second, decoupling the binary of staying/leaving, debunking the longstanding debate over whether staying or leaving Haiti is ‘better’ for the country, for one’s family, for one’s own future. In particular, the chapter works with the poetry of James Noël and Lyonel Trouillot, putting them into conversation with poetry by Getro Bernabé, Georges Castera, and Ida Faubert.