3 - Émile Ollivier. Passing Through

Summary

To live in this country that people only want to leave? Bitter homeland!

(Bérard Cénatus)

The forced departure of Depestre in 1959 and Alexis's violent demise two years later were two of the most high-profile manifestations of François Duvalier's growing intolerance of any kind of opposition. Even if his early addresses promised national unity and reconciliation, Duvalier was quick to repress the business community, opposition newspapers, the army, the communists, the trade unions, the church, even the Boy Scouts. Any semblance of democratic government was finally abandoned on 22 October 1961, when elections took place for Haiti's single legislative chamber, and only Duvalier supporters were permitted to stand. Duvalier had his own name inscribed on the top of each ballot paper, and when the results came in it was declared that he had been elected unanimously to his second term of office. Having drastically weakened the opposition – many of his adversaries were by now dead or in exile – Duvalier was able to consolidate his autocratic rule, and in 1964, following another mock election, he declared himself “president for life.” It was in this tense and restrictive political context that Émile Ollivier, whose 1991 novel Passages is the focus of this chapter, was to emerge as a promising young writer.

Haïti littéraire

In contrast to Duvalierism's closed nationalist and racial ideology, the most prominent literary group of this period, Haïti littéraire, was uncompromisingly universalist, and refused to limit itself to the narrow set of themes dictated by indigenism.