Book contents
6 - Haiti in the Whirl/World
from Part III - Space-Time of the Spiral
Summary
Les Affres d'un défi and Ultravocal
The Caribbean could be seen as well as a loosely-bounded figure combining straight lines and curves, let's say, a spiral galaxy tending outward—to the universe—that bends and folds over its own history, its own inwardness.
—Antonio Benítez-RojoWe have a conception of time in a spiral that corresponds neither to the linear time of Westerners nor to the circular time of Precolumbians or Asian philosophers, but that is a sort of combination of the two, that is, a circular movement, but always with an escape from that circularity towards something else—that is what constitutes the spiral.
—Edouard GlissantThough as rich with descriptive elements as the at least nominally spatio-temporally framed narratives discussed in the previous chapter, Frankétienne's Les Affres d'un défi is, for the most part, almost entirely unreferential with respect to the configuration of time and space. The highly allegorical Bois-Neuf provides the backdrop for the stories of the named characters, and scattered references are made to Port-au-Prince as well. The great majority of the narrative spaces are, however, unidentified and unbound. They appear as a series of individual tableaux, without continuity but contextually aligned, and so mimetically display the profound dispossession and unrootedness that have historically plagued New World post-slavery communities. In its spatio-temporal incoherence, Les Affres d'un défi evokes a physical situation in space that both reflects and determines the psychological conditions of the region's inhabitants. In this, Frankétienne's narrative precisely echoes Fignolé's contentions regarding the geographical reality of the Caribbean and its direct connection to the schizophrenia—the psychic fracturing—of those who inhabit it. Fignolé writes, “We sought in vain some centralizing point around which to assemble space. To deny the void. In whichever direction we look, the Caribbean is fragments. Of sweat and blood” (“Poétique”). Along with excrement, semen, bile, and decompositional seepage, sweat and blood are in fact the most pervasive spatial elements of Les Affres d'un défi. Products of violence done to man and nature, the presence of these fluids provides the underlying association among the various discrete constructions of space in the narrative. They are the building blocks of the deranged dystopia—the “[m]elancholy landscape with its cadaverous odor and exhalation of sperm” (121)—in which the “We” struggles to survive. The majority of the spaces of Les Affres d'un défi confront the reader with images of scatological excess, decomposition, sterility, and, indeed, bloodshed.
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- Haiti UnboundA Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, pp. 157 - 178Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010