Haiti Noir

“Through a disconcerting paradox,” he wrote in his seminal work, Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle),

these people who have had, if not the finest, at least the most binding, the most moving history of the world-that of the transplantation of a human race to a foreign soil under the worst biological conditions-these people feel an embarrassment barely concealed, indeed shame, in hearing of their distant past. It is those who during four centuries were the architects of black slavery because they had force and science at their service that magnified the enterprise by spreading the idea that Negroes were the scum of society, without history, without morality, without religion, who had to be infused by any manner whatsoever with new moral values, to be humanized anew.

Forget trying to rewrite the great works of French literature on which you had been raised, he exhorted the Haitian writers of his time. Turn to Haitian life and history and folklore and find your inspiration there.

Some of his contemporaries, and many among the generation that followed, took Price-Mars’s advice to heart. Ida Salomon Faubert, one of Haiti ’s first published female writers, wrote of the country’s tropical nights from both Haiti and France, where she eventually made her home. The ethnologist/ poet/novelist Jacques Roumain placed his Langston Hughes- translated masterpiece Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew) in a peasant setting. Jacques Stephen Alexis, Haiti ’s doctor/revolutionary/novelist, wrote about a massacre of cane workers in the Dominican Republic. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin’s The Beast of the Haitian Hills took a satirical look at peasant life and Vodou through the eyes of a grieving urban shopkeeper who moves to the countryside. One of the grande dames of Haitian letters, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, wrote her world-renowned novels and plays about, among other things, rural and urban oppression. And Haitian literature has continued to thrive ever since.

Many of the writers you will read here are part of the flourishing contemporary scene in Haitian literature, both in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora, including France, Canada, and the United States. Migration is such an integral part of the Haitian experience that those living outside of the country were once designated as part of a “tenth department,” an ideological auxiliary to Haiti ’s first geographical nine. That’s why this anthology includes writers from both inside and outside of Haiti, with two Haitiphile blan as well.

The writers range in age from early twenties to late sixties. Some are at the very beginning of their careers and are being published in book form for the first time. Others have been publishing in several genres for decades. However, only a handful might have considered themselves writers of noir (the mystery/detective kind) before this experience.

I can honestly say that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in Haiti right now, I have never felt a greater sense of joy working on any collective project than I have on this book. I don’t want to summarize all the stories here because I want you, my dear reader, to experience the same sense of discovery I felt each time I picked one up and delved in. Seeing a book emerge before my eyes was truly a thrill and I have organized it here so that your experience somehow mirrors mine as the stories unfold. Each story is of course its own single treasure, but together they create a nuanced and complex view of Haiti and many of its neighborhoods and people.

I was nearly done with the collection when the earthquake happened on January 12, 2010, so I was afraid to reread the stories we had already selected, fearing that such a cataclysmic event, which has so reshaped Haiti ’s physical and psychological landscape, would somehow render them all irrelevant. I was very glad to discover, upon reading them again, that this was not at all true. If anything, each story is now, on top of everything else, a kind of preservation corner, a snapshot of places that in some cases have been irreparably altered. (The fictional places, however, remain unchanged.)