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.

Discussing early Haitian Poetry written in Creole brings the researcher outside their usual field of investigation (literature) as they have to sift through antropological texts to locate those early texts. As a result, Oswald Durand’s Choucoune is considered as the first literary work written in Haitian Creole even though there is evidence of prior texts published and/or written in that language. Similarly, Georges Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! is the first collection of poems published by a Haitian writer. This chapter offers an overview of this early poetry in Haitian Creole, followed by a more detailed examination of Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! with a view to identifying the characteristic features of this poetry and establishing a connection with Haitian popular culture. The ‘bare-footed poets’ from the countryside are recognized for the influence left on their urban educated counterparts, particularly through the chante pwent, which appears to be a consistent feature of Haitian poetry in Creole up to today.

This chapter explores Jean Fouchard’s body of work on the history of culture and literacy in Saint-Domingue and its implications for the study of the long-term history of Haitian literature. Fouchard’s books, I argue, opened up portals into the worlds of Saint-Domingue that had previously been evoked in certain writings but not explored in the depth he offered: indigenous cultures and their continuing legacies, theatre, music, dance, and a constellation of handwritten texts produced by both enslaved and free people of African descent, and through these the broader cultural and intellectual visions and aspirations of these communities. Fouchard saw the history of writing, and literature, in Saint-Domingue as part of a deep and long process stretching from colonial times to the present day, and to identify continuities between different eras. Ultimately, Fouchard’s collective of work, which can be seen as all part of a larger overarching project, asks of us to see the cultural and literary history of his country holistically, as a connected and enduring series of struggles driven by a search for true expression, and therefore freedom.

This chapter considers socialist intellectual Roumain’s significance as a creative writer and political activist whose shadow looms large over twentieth-century Haitian letters. Looking closely at Roumain’s singular position as an internationally circulating witness to and participant in critical moments in both Haitian and global history, Chemla offers a thorough accounting of Roumain’s astonishing impact on literary modernity. He argues that while Roumain wrote of the specific context of the US American occupation and the rise of Indigenism, the insights and perspective that mark his essays and prose fiction likewise anticipated the fascist, colorist statecraft of the Duvalier regime from its origins in the Indigenist perspectives and racialized thinking of the late 1920s. Chemla places Roumain at the center of an extended network of thinkers, writers, and political actors in France, the United States, and throughout the Caribbean.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.