Halfway Between Rubble and Stars: (Re)thinking Haitian Identities Through the Poetic Work of Évelyne Trouillot
Contemporary Haitian Poetry; Diasporic Memory and Identity; Évelyne Trouillot.
This research focuses on the poetry of Haitian author Évelyne Trouillot written after the seismic shocks of January 12, 2010, on the western side of the island of Hispaniola. Despite this backdrop, her verses are not limited to complaints or pleas for sympathy but aim to heal past wounds and current misfortunes (Doucey, 2010). Understanding Trouillot's poetics as an agency of Haiti's history and present, this dissertation seeks to understand how the poet reinterprets Haitian identities. To this end, these pages use the figure of the self as the guiding thread for its three chapters, exploring its relationships with landscape, the foreign other, and the alter ego. In the first chapter, "Lettre à ma ville" is analyzed, discussing the memorial construction of the landscape (Collot, 2004, 2013, 2015) that navigates between the individual and the collective (Bernabé; Chamoiseau; Confiant, 1998; Glissant, 2005) and preserves fortuitous memories (Stallybrass, 2008) and historical wounds (Ferdinand, 2022). In the second chapter, "Promesses" is examined through the relationship of the Haitian self with the foreign other, highlighting the issue of intersubjectivity (Silva, 2012), especially in the colonial context (Fanon, 2008, 2022). The necessity of the poet to depict the misfortune stemming from the other (Didi-Huberman, 2003) is discussed, while not ignoring the dignified existence of that subject (Macé 2016; Bona, 2020). In the third chapter, "L’errance devenue chair" is examined, understanding the poet as a body scarred by her experience and a receptacle for the other’s experiences (Evaristo, 2020; Bona, 2020). This interpretive work highlights Haitian identities as always in process and in dialogue with landscape, the other, and the self. It also notes that Trouillot's poetics reframes images of Haiti, exposing not only the sorrows but also the joys of this community of contrasting realities.