The Haitian Flight for Freedom in Maryse Condé’s Rêves amers and Marie-Célie Agnant’s Alexis d’Haïti

Abstract

This article analyzes how Maryse Condé and Marie-Célie Agnant portray the struggles faced by Haitian “boat people” in their novels Rêves amers and Alexis d’Haïti which feature child protagonists forced to leave their homeland in search of a better life in the United States. As children and migrants, they are often forgotten and misrepresented in official histories. I argue that by restoring the voices of the most vulnerable, Condé and Agnant rectify what Michel-Rolph Trouillot labels the “silencing of the past”¹ of Haitian history.

Keywords:

• Haiti
• immigration
• refugees
• prejudice
• history
• literature

Notes on contributor

Molly Krueger Enz is Associate Professor of French at South Dakota State University. Her research focuses on Francophone literature and cinema from the Caribbean and West Africa and has been published in journals such as Black Camera: An International Film Journal, African Studies Quarterly, Journal of the African Literature Association, The French Review, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

Notes

1 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon P, 1995.

2 On January 11, 2018 during a bipartisan meeting at the White House to discuss immigration policies, President Trump allegedly questioned why the United States should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti (Davis, Stolberg, and Kaplan).

3 The novel was first published by Bayard Press under the name Haïti chérie in the magazine Je bouquine. For more details on the title change, see Pfaff, Françoise. Conversations with Maryse Condé. U of Nebraska P, 1996.

4 https://www.justice.gov.il/Units/Trafficking/MainDocs/Global_Slavery_Index_2014_final_lowres.pdf.

5 Raoul Cédras was Lieutenant General in the Haitian army responsible for the coup d’état that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on September 29, 1991. Several human rights groups critiqued Cédras’ rule due to the mass killing of innocent people, and in 1995 the U.S. State Department reported: “more than 3,000 men, women and children were murdered by or with the complicity of Haiti’s then-coup regime” (Whitney 321).

6 The Krome Service Processing Center is a federal detention camp in Miami that has been the subject of much criticism. Jacob Bernstein writes: “During its eighteen-year history, the center has been forced into the public eye by a litany of scandal, usually brought to light by lawyers, journalists, and whistle blowers. Throughout the 1990s news accounts have detailed allegations of inmate neglect, sexual misconduct, beatings, and guards’ use of stun guns. Detainees regularly staged hunger strikes. Advocates held demonstrations to protest the conditions and testified before innumerable boards to draw attention to abuses. In 1990 two teachers who worked at Krome were removed after complaining to the media about inmate treatment.”

7 This is similar to the Kreyòl word “Ayibobo” which means “Amen” or “Hallelujah.” In his essay “Point of View,” Thomas Spear describes the term: “Ayibobo, an expression of joy, of praise, of exclamation to the lwa” (42).