6 - Traumatic Indigeneity: The (Anti)Colonial Politics of “Having” a Creole Literary Culture

Summary

Let Haitian writers follow the example of American novelists; let them learn to create an African, American, tropical, and Haitian literature, and when the day comes that, still respecting the French language, they discover originality […] on that day they will conquer in Europe the readers they lack in the Antilles. […] Let us pass quickly over Creole literature. Blacks, we will say echoing many others, are big children.

Alexandre Bonneau, “Les Noirs, les jaunes, et la littérature française en Haïti”

Imitation is not so simple. […] What is civilization, in the end? Pastiche or copy. Everywhere. All civilization consists in an exchange of imitations, more or less appropriate, intelligent, and opportune.

Louis Joseph Janvier, La République d'Haïti et ses visiteurs

Creating Diasporan Nationalism

From the Parisian Parnassus of the Revue contemporaine in 1856, the French journalist and diplomat Alexandre Bonneau airily laid out the seemingly impossible stakes of an original new Haitian literature. It would have to be an Afro-American, tropico-Haitian corpus; in French, yet unlike French literature; inspired by genius, but a genius other than the Haitian “genius for imitation”; and certainly not in Creole, because for Bonneau it seemed safe to say, after all, that blacks were “big children.” The multiple “catch 22s” of this pronouncement include the insinuation that Haitian writers were only black if they wrote in Kreyòl, and that a local Creole and black literature, which would ostensibly qualify as Afro-American and tropico-Haitian, and thus as not purely imitative, was simultaneously impossible for racial reasons.