One of the central concerns that has consistently marked the literature of the French-speaking Caribbean is, of course, that of accurately conveying the physical and emotional reality of the postcolonial individual. Gayatri Spivak, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” reflects on the problematic disparity between the necessarily elitist—albeit sympathetic—discourse of the postcolonial writing subject and the supposed mutism of the object of this discourse. Addressing more specifically the Caribbean situation, Maryse Condé questions the troublingly narrow configurations of the individual and collective in the works of “canonical” male writers of the French-speaking Americas in “Order, Disorder,...

Frankétienne’sMûr à creveris in many respects the most accessible—the most traditional, it might be argued—of all the Spiralist prose works. With an articulation of the Spiralist perspective woven into the very fabric of the narration, the novel offers at once the most explicit delineation of the Spiralist aesthetic and, by that very fact, the most atypical illustration of the creative practices it describes. The basic elements of the story are straightforward and uncomplicated, and the narrative trajectory of a central character is presented with relative coherence. In this,Mûr à creverwould seem to depart from...

In a geo-social context in which there has long existed a marked distance between intellectual and popular culture, the writer of the (Frenchspeaking) Americas has had to take particular care in negotiating the necessarily elitist world of letters. Whether through Creole terminology and proverbs woven into written texts, or extended imaginings on the lives of unsung Caribbean heroes, many of the region’s most prominent writers make use of folk elements as springboards for their literary endeavors. Such borrowings from popular culture, when looked to for more than a source of colorful content, provide the foundations of these works, shaping them...

Where Frankétienne makes use of the zombie, both literal and metaphorical, to emphasize the fundamentally dual and often conflicted essence of his characters, Jean-Claude Fignolé and René Philoctète might be said to have embraced schizophrenia as a principal configurative point of departure. Though perhaps less directly issued from Haiti’s popular culture, the schizophrenia presented in the Spiralists’ works strikes individuals who exist and struggle with/in a contextual space that is decidedly Haitian. At the same time, however, Fignolé and Philoctète explore the potential of the Haitian folkloric universe to provide insight into non-Haitian-specific problematics. Expanding on the model created by...

How might non-indigenous, post-slavery, irrevocably traumatized, and broken individuals and communities such as those described by the Spiralists possibly hope to take possession of the island landscape and to escape the tragic history to which this landscape has borne witness? This is a question that has implicitly and explicitly determined the treatment of time and space in Caribbean literature since the very beginning of the nineteenth century, and such concerns as the “repossession” of history and the landscape have since become veritable catchphrases in literature and theory of the (French-speaking) Americas. Césaire’s and Brathwaite’s reliance on an historical and geographical...

Although, again, more straightforward in many ways than others of the Spiralist prose works, Frankétienne’sMûr à creverproposes striking destabilizations of time and space. The text functions primarily through the maintenance of certain tensions (between the public and the private; among the real, the remembered, and the imagined; among the insular, the regional, and the global; etc.), and so problematizes spatial boundaries and undermines chronological progression. On the one hand,Mûr à creveris very precisely situated in time and space: multiple references to the war in Vietnam suffice to establish the time of the present and set the...

Unfinished stories—unfinished business—are the very foundations upon which Jean-Claude Fignolé’sAube Tranquilleis constructed. From the very beginning of the novel, we understand that this is a narrative in which time will not be keeping to its proper place. We realize within the first few phrases that this is a tale of haunting, of vengeful ghosts consumed by centuries-old grudges. We learn that the drama will play out in a series of specific, overlapping spaces and moments—at once conflated and opposed. InAube Tranquille, Fignolé takes as his point of departure the (Bakhtinian) notion that time and...

Though as rich with descriptive elements as the at least nominally spatio-temporally framed narratives discussed in the previous chapter, Frankétienne’sLes Affres d’un défiis, 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...

The postcolonial Caribbean writer lives, broadly speaking, a veritable drama of self-expression. His or her relationship to the wor(l)d is determined by a host of complex and significant tensions and contradictions—between the oral and the written, between the intellectual elite and the popular majority, between discourse and the cry, etc. Some of these tensions are, of course, part of the challenges to writing that individuals of any cultural background might face, particularly those writers who have similarly experienced colonialization and/or imperialist occupation. Indeed, often implicit in the process of writing is a refusal—or at least an interrogation— of...

Of the three Spiralists, Frankétienne has been perhaps the most overt in his attention to the specifically formal challenges to writing in and from a geographical space where the distance between the written and the real is so remarkable. Author of the world’s first full-length novel in Haitian Creole, resolute refuser of exile, math teacher, and community leader, Frankétienne’s actions reveal a commitment to the insular collective that inspires his literary production. At the same time, however, the sesquipedalian acrobatics of his prose fiction certainly appear, at first (and second and third) glance, to be at odds with any sort...

The stylistic choices Fignolé makes in his prose fiction works might certainly be considered a direct response to the traumatic silencing he evokes in his description of Frankétienne’s fiction. Similarly to Frankétienne, Fignolé addresses the perceived opposition of the spoken and the written word, and his narratives reflect a decided discomfort with, or at the very least an implicit challenge to, the privilege and privileging of the scribal. BothLes Possédés de la pleine luneandAube Tranquilletake up this issue of the ostensibly fundamental linkage between writing and silence through the almost excessive orality of the textual worlds...

With absolute specificity, fearlessness, and humor, Philoctète ventures to write the unspeakable (that is, disgusting and unbelievable) hours of the Dominican Vespers. The events of these two days—so known and so denied, so unfathomable and yet so emblematic of a contemporary, worldwide ethical failure with respect to blackness and difference—are mired in trauma and shame. Stunned silence might well seem an appropriate response. How, though, to write the fiction of such real horror? Whose story to tell? In what language? Philoctète seems to find some answers in the schizophonic offerings of the spiral. InLe Peuple des terres...