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Il acceptait son nouvel tat

avec philosphie: Depestre,
Cuba, and Popular Expression
Paul B. Miller
Published online: 30 Apr 2015.

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To cite this article: Paul B. Miller (2015) Il acceptait son nouvel tat avec philosphie:
Depestre, Cuba, and Popular Expression, Contemporary French and Francophone
Studies, 19:3, 249-260, DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2015.1028788
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Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2015

Vol. 19, No. 3, 249 260, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2015.1028788

IL ACCEPTAIT SON NOUVEL ETAT
AVEC
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PHILOSPHIE: DEPESTRE, CUBA, AND

POPULAR EXPRESSION

Paul B. Miller

ABSTRACT This essay partially traces the mediation in the work of the Haitian writer
Ren
e Depestre (b. 1926) between a high culture associated with his poetic vocation and
manifestations of and accessibility to popular expression. This issue surfaced spectacularly
in a 1950s querelle with Aim
e C
esaire, who belittled Depestres commitment to placing
his poetry at the service of humanity by following Louis Aragons precepts about returning
to the traditional parameters of French rhyme and versification. The essay argues that
many of Depestres ideas expressed in the querelle, such as his recurrent references to
Nicol
as Guill
en, prefigure his fascination with Cuba and the Cuban Revolution and his
eventual emigration from Haiti to Cuba. Finally, the essay discusses the numerous ways in
which Depestre interacted with the cultural production of Cuba in the 1960s, including
collaboration with film, publishing, translation, and of course writing. Analyses of two
texts, a poem and a short story, conclude the essay by showing that even in texts marked
by different decades and widely divergent ideological commitments, the problematic of a
high/popular cultural mediation is a persistent factor that provides a unity to the
historical arc of Depestres production.
Keywords: Depestre; Cuba; Haiti; Castro; Cuban Revolution; C
esaire; Aragon

In two of the greatest Cuban films by Tom
as Guti
errez Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), the question of emigration

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CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

is a Damocletian sword hanging over the heads of the protagonists. For the bourgeois protagonist Sergio in the 1968 film, emigration to the United States is
more than a possibilityindeed, his wife, parents, and friends have all abandoned
Cuba in 1961. Sergio, however, decides to stay in Cuba, because the Revolution
holds a fascination for him. He is not particularly interested in the political and
social changes occasioned by the Revolutionindeed, these changes are tantamount to his own destruction as a bourgeois subjectbut rather he has a morbid
curiosity to observe Cubas social transformations as a performance beheld from
a close distance, as a spectacle observed from above.
In Gutierrez Aleas later film, Strawberry and Chocolate, migration from Cuba
is still determined by ideological considerations, but in this instance the films
cinematic consciousness, its ethos, so to speak, is allied with the protagonist, an
openly gay man in the 1970s, and sympathizes with the reasons for his need to
leave Cuba. In both cases the question of emigrating from Cuba to the United
States or elsewhere is a latent threat, a possibility, or a horizon rather than
a realized action; but in both cases ideology in one form or another is the
motivating factor.
When we speak of migration issues surrounding Cuba it is almost always a
question of emigration from the island, and rarely one of immigration to Cuba.
In the rare instances that we do think of immigrants to Cuba, we tend to think
of the Haitian braceros who came to Cuba to cut sugar cane in the 1920s and
30s, depicted in the fictional character of Manuel, the protagonist of Jacques
Roumainss Gouverneurs de la ros
ee. (The descendants of these migrant Haitians,
some of whom settled in Cuba while others were forcibly repatriated, have
been portrayed in a recent documentary by Gloria Rolando, Reembarque).
But what about ideological immigration to Cuba? The case of the Haitian
writer Ren
e Depestre, who immigrated to Cuba in 1959 and remained almost
twenty years, represents a departure from the usual migration paradigms associated with the largest of the Greater Antilles. Unlike Assata Shakur and other
members of the black panthers who fled to Cuba seeking asylum, Depestres
was a voluntary migration. He was attracted to Cuba precisely because of its
ideological program and was drawn there after listening to the short-wave radio
transmissions of Radio Rebelde emanating from the Sierra Maestra en el Oriente
province of Cuba that were within earshot of Port-au-Prince.
Depestre is one of the most celebrated Francophone Caribbean writers of
the twentieth century; and yet I find the specific conditions of cultural production in Cuba in the 1960s, the micro-ideological considerations, if you will, are
usually neglected as a factor in the interpretation of his works on the part of
Francophone critics in favor of a focus on his macro-ideological engagement
with the Castro regime and Cuban socialism in general. On the other hand,
Depestres contribution and impact on the Cuban cultural and literary milieu of
the 1960s has not been adequately taken into account by critics and scholars of
the Hispanic Caribbean and Cuba.


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Since I began this essay speaking about a Cuban cinema, it is appropriate in

this context to mention that Depestre, perhaps to the surprise of some, actually
appears in the aforementioned film by Guti
errez Alea (with whom Depestre
also collaborated in Cumbite, Guti
errez Aleas cinematic rendering of Roumains
novel), Memories of Underdevelopment from 1968. One scene depicts a literary
roundtable, Literature and Underdevelopment. The participants, in addition
to Depestre, include some luminaries of the Latin American and global cultural
left-wing intelligentsia of the 1960s, such as Salvador Bueno, David Vi~nas,
Gianni Toti, and Edmundo Desnoes. Depestre opens the symposium scene with
the following words spoken in Spanish:
La cultura en un pa
s subdesarrollado no puede ser otra cosa que una operaci
on a veces costosa, dolorosa, mediante la cual un pueblo toma consciencia de su capacidad de transformar su vida social, de escribir su propia
historia, y de recoger lo mejor de sus tradiciones para hacerlas fructificar y
para enriquecerlas con las condiciones de la lucha de la liberaci
on nacional.
[Culture in an underdeveloped country can be nothing other than an at
times painful and costly operation through which a nation takes consciousness of its capacity to transform social life, to write its own history, and to
gather up the best of its traditions in order to make them bear fruit and to
enrich them within the conditions of the struggle for national liberation.]1
In this apparently insignificant cameo intervention, Depestres comment on the
nature of culture in an underdeveloped country amounts, in my view, not
only to a miniature pronouncement on the relationship between culture and the
people, the value of the former to the latter, and especially on how people
from below, popular classes, must seize control of their national culture, their
history, and define it for their own purposes; the comment also opens up a specific insight into Depestres literary impetus and his attraction to revolutionary
Cuba. The costoso, doloroso epithet allegorizes the emergence of a genuinely
popular, democratic culture as a painful birtha procedure that implies a kind
of cultural triage in which heretofore neglected manifestations of popular culture, such as popular language, tales, songs, legends, sayings, and percussion,
are canonized alongsideor at the expense ofsome manifestations of high
cultural forms.
The cameo pronouncement in Memories of Underdevelopment is certainly not
the only occasion on which Depestre spoke of the problem of artistic expression
and its mediated rapport with the popular masses. In one of the most celebrated
querelles of Francophone literary history (admirably recapitulated by Maryse
Cond
e), Depestre published a Lettre to Dobzynsky in Lettres franc aises in 1955
in which he intimated that he was reevaluating the stylistic impetus of his poetry
under the influence of Louis Aragons advocacy of a return to the traditional

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techniques of French versification, including rhyme and regular meter, that Aragon had expounded in his Journal dune po
esie nationale. In what will be an important textual anticipation of events to unfold in his geographical and poetic
migrations, Depestre evokes the Cuban Nicol
as Guill
en as an example of a
Caribbean poet who has understood how to integrate African elements into
forms coming from Spain (47).
In response to Depestres letter to Dobzynsky, Aim
e C
esaire penned a
notorious rejoinder-in-verse, Le verbe marroner/a Ren
e Depestre, poete
haitien that lambasted Depestres embrace of Aragons retrograde aesthetics,
while turning a blind eye to Depestres evocation of Guill
ens African elements. If Depestre referred to the revolutionary culture as a painful birth in
his cameo appearance in Memories of Underdevelopment, C
esaire employed the
same metaphor to evoke Boukman, Bois Caman, and the birth of the Haitian
nation in the opening lines of this poetic tour de force:
Cest une nuit de Seine
et moi je me souviens comme ivre
du chant d
ement de Boukmann accouchant ton pays
aux forceps de lorage. (50)
The slave rebel of Jamaican origin, Boukmann Dutty, is portrayed as a midwife
(a role one might expect to be attributed to C
ecile Fatiman, the mambo priestess allegedly present at Bois Caman?) who births a revolutionary people; the
forceps he uses connotes the difficulty of this passage from bondage to freedom.
But perhaps the most notorious lines from C
esaires poemcuriously omitted
from subsequent republications of the poem (Cond
e 178) as well as from the
version published in the well-regarded bilingual edition of Collected Poetry (Eshleman and Smith 368 370)mock the poetic principles of which Aragon is a
proponent and which were so appealing to Depestre:
que le poeme tourne bien ou mal sur lhuile de ses gonds
fous-t-en Depestre fous-t-en laisse dire Aragon. (51)
With this satirical rhyming couplet C
esaires pedagogical missive is saying that a
poem should be like a door swinging freely on its well-oiled hinges in opposition, apparently, to the strict precepts prescribed by Aragon. Depestres letter
to Dobzynski and C
esaires poetic epistle to Depestre are the most well-known
texts in this querelle, but Depestres lengthy response to C
esaire in 1956,
Introduction a un art po
etique haitien, also (re-)published in Optique, is especially relevant here.
In response to C
esaires sardonic poem, Depestre adopts an understandably
defensive posture. He attempts to justify his aesthetic alliance with Aragon on
the basis of a shared linguistic heritage and ideology. Though from different
countries, both poets speak the French language and both share a revolutionary


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motivation. Depestre makes this point through a revealing comparison. He again

evokes the figure of the Cuban poet Nicol
as Guill
en, but this time in constellation with a Spanish poet, Miguel Hernandez, who died of tuberculosis in a Spanish prison for the crime of opposing Franco and fascism. Depestres
understated question is in fact an excellent one: why should an ideological and
aesthetic alliance or comparison between Hern
andez and Guill
en seem appropriate while a similar such constellation between Depestre and Aragon might be
deemed controversial or even a reiteration of a colonial paradigm?
Voici donc deux grands poetes,
egalement pr
eoccup
es de faire dans leur
po
esie un sort grandiose a la r
ealit
e de leur peuple,
egalement soucieux,
quand au contenu de leur chant, dexalter la marche du progres humain
dans le monde; sont-ils pour autant interchangeables comme une goutte de
ros
ee dEspagne et une goutte de ros
ee des matins de Cuba? (9)
Depestres question is worth pondering by Caribbeanists interested in comparative and pan-regional approaches. If the judgment of Bovarysme collectif,
articulated by Jean Price-Mars in 1928, along with the contemporary indigenisme
movement and N
egritude soon to follow, virtually relegated a century of Haitian poetic production to critical oblivion,2 why is there no corresponding judgment (Negrismo notwithstanding) in Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean, despite
the fact that Cuba was a Spanish colony until 1898? Stated otherwise, why didnt
the decree of Bovarysime collectif and the populist and Africanist injunction that
accompanied it unfold in the same categorically Manichean fashion in Cuba? The
response to that question would have to take into account with specificity of
post-colonial paradigms and the fallacy of the blanket application of post-colonial
theory in the Caribbean and elsewhere in Latin America (see Klor de Alva for a
discussion of the problem of post-colonial analysis in Latin American culture).
That an aesthetic and political alliance between Depestre and Aragon should
elicit accusations of betrayal from C
esaire (est-il vrai que tu doutes de la for^et
natale?) while comparisons between Guill
en and Spanish poets such as Hern
andez, Garc
a Lorca, Rafael Alberti, or even Juan Ram
on Jim
enez summon no
such controversy explains in some degree Depestres attraction to Cuba.
This problem of how to mediate between popular classes and high culture
that Depestre evoked at length in his exchange with C
esaire was also a preoccupation of artists, writers, and musicians in Cuba since the beginning of the Revolution and throughout the 60s especially. In one of Fidel Castros most
notorious speeches on the topic of culture, Palabras a los intelectuales from
1961, he pronounced two phrases that would have a chilling effect on Cuban
writers and artists for the entire decade of the 1960s and beyond: With the
Revolution, everything is permitted; against the Revolution, nothing is
permitted. But that unsettling Manichaeism aside, Castros characteristically
lengthy speech asserts other paradigms about the role of culture and the artist in

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a revolutionary society. Specifically, he also makes declarations about the revolutionary duty of artists, writers, and scholars to make culture accessible to the
people:

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De la misma manera debemos propiciar las condiciones necesarias para que

todos esos bienes culturales lleguen al pueblo. No quiere decir eso que el
artista tenga que sacrificar el valor de sus creaciones, y que necesariamente
tenga que sacrificar su calidad. Quiere decir que tenemos que luchar en
todos los sentidos para que el creador produzca para el pueblo y el pueblo a
su vez eleve su nivel cultural a fin de acercarse tambi
en a los creadores.
[In the same way we must provide the necessary conditions so that all these
cultural goods arrive at the disposition of the people. This doesnt mean
that the artist has to sacrifice the value of his creations, or that he necessarily
has to sacrifice his commitment to quality. It does mean that we have to
struggle in every way for the creator to produce for the people and for the
people in their turn to elevate their cultural level so as to approach as well
the creators.]
In what can only be described as a dialectical process, the artists duty, says Castro in no uncertain terms, is to make culture accessible to the people, but at the
same time to elevate the peoples access to culture. It is this simultaneous
making accessible on the part of cultural practitioners on the one hand, and
the peoples elevating its cultural level (the grammar in the speech is careful
to attribute this agency to the people themselves) that is intriguing. How is this
process of cultural rapprochement mediated?
In a remarkable confluence of circumstances, one of the Cuban Revolutions
first acts to make high culture accessible to the people was the publication, at the
personal behest of Castro, of El Ingenioso Caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha (see
Santonja and Estrada). The nationalized Imprenta Nacional that took on the mission of producing 100,000 copies the Cuban edition of the Quijote was directed
at that time by none other than Ren
e Depestre. (There is some controversy
over who is the author of the anonymous prologue to the Cuban edition of the
Quijote. Basilio Baltasar, seeking an answer in Cuba, concludes that no one in
Cuba knows, and goes on to suggest that it was perhaps Carlos Franqui, the
director of the important newspaper Revoluci
on and creator of its famous literary
supplement Lunes de Revoluci
on. For what its worth, Depestre intimated to me
in our conversation in 2011 that he was the author of the prologue.)
In a Cuban decade packed with cultural and literary heavy-hitters, from
Cabrera Infante to Nancy Morej
on to Silvio Rodr
guez to Guti
errez Alea himself, Depestre was a major figure, taking over the leadership of the national publishing house and fostering friendships and collaborations across the ideological
spectrum of Cuban cultural practice in the 1960s. But Depestre also impacted

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this flowering renaissance of Cuban letters in the 1960s. While Depestre was
working in collaboration with none other than Che Guevara, a hardliner if there
ever was one, Virgilio Pi~nera, one of the regimes outsiders, translated
Depestres Minerai noir. Similarly, Depestre worked with writers from across
the ideological spectrum, translating Nicol
as Guill
ens El gran zoo in 1966 and
preparing an Anthologie de la po
esie cubaine with Heberto Padilla (Couffon 68).
Writers like Pi~nera, Lezama Lima, Padilla, and the indomitable Reinaldo Arenas
would go on to form a literary class of their own within the cultural expression
of the Cuban revolution: dissident literature. In an anecdote that has not
received sufficient attention in discussions of post-revolutionary Cuban literary
history, Depestre claims that he was present during the infamous auto-da-fe or
acto de repudio (in revolutionary parlance) in 1971 of the Cuban poet Heberto
Padilla, whose dissident book of poems, Fuera del juego, had earned the author
ostracization and even political persecution. Depestre claims that during the
public convocation in which Padilla was publicly rebuked by his fellow writers
and artists and coerced into a bogus confession of counter-revolutionary ideas,
that he, Depestre, was present but refused to condemn the defenseless Padilla.
To the contrary, in an interview with Martin Munro (199), and as he described
in Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (91), Depestre indicates that he was the only one to
speak publically in Padillas defense, expressed his outrage at the proceedings
and was enthusiastically applauded and personally thanked by Padilla himself.3
Munro provides a compelling discussion of some of the verses from
Depestres Poete a Cuba (1976) in order to show that, if Depestres did experience a disillusionment with the direction of the Cuban Revolution after the
Padilla affair, his poetry only expressed this ideological sentiment in a gradual
and ambivalent fashion (198 200). Nevertheless, Depestres disenchantment
with the Cuban Revolution and subsequent rupture with communism are
some of the more well-documented aspects of his writing career. As I will
discuss momentarily, a turn from poetry to prose fiction is one way of gauging this disillusionment along with an increasing emphasis on eroticism. But
another way to understand these ruptures, transformations, and continuities
in Depestres work is to consider them as part of a longer evolution of his
early attitudes about the mediation between artistic expression and popular
access, which are closely intertwined with his views on nationhood, race, and
language dating from at least the 1950s. These attitudes, as I have argued,
were part of the attraction that Cuba and the Cuban Revolution held for him
in the first place.
I would like to tentatively gauge this evolutionary timeline by looking
briefly at two specific texts that frame a significant segment of Depestres Cuban
sojourn: one, a poem from his early Cuban years and a short story written
briefly after his departure. In the poem Lettre de ma mere from Journal dun
animal marin (1964), the mediation between poetic creation and the popular
expression is attempted by exposing the rift between writing and orality, signs

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and recitation. Moreover this dialectical relationship implies allegorically or in

parallel fashion the simultaneous distance and remotenessgeographically,
ideologically, and psychologicallybetween Haiti and Cuba for Depestre.
Depestres poem is a double inscription: the poet has audaciously taken a letter
written from his mother and transcribed it into verse. And yet at the same time,
the poem reads like an oral recitation, a voice speaking from afar:
Quelle surprise, ta lettre derniere!
Ma main tremble encore
De la joie quelle ma donn
ee.
Quelle surprise aux yeux perc ants!
Mes yeux a moi sont malades,
Lil droit ne distingue plus
Un oiseau dune mangue
Ni une chaise dun chien.
(2006, 142)
The incongruous juxtapositions of a bird and mango, a chair and a dog,
remind me of Sartres description of the poetic techniques of surrealism, that
consist of throwing a bridge between two extremely unrelated or separated
terms and hopingwithout really believingthat this throw of the dice
will uncover some hidden aspect of Being (310). Though Sartres comments
are intended to distinguish surrealism from negritude poetry, the incongruity
of the images in the verses cited above are an example of neither. Rather the
mothers blindness nullifies the distinction between objects, thereby linking
them poetically through a negative association. Similarly, the epistle is
intended to attenuate the distance between mother and son as well as
between Haiti and Cuba.
Depestres mother was a practitioner of lodyans, a Haitian genre of public
storytelling (Anglade 7) and was well known in Jacmel for her public recitations
in intimate contact with the public (Miller 2011). And yet this celebrated tireuse
de lodyans here displays the quintessential components of writing: remoteness
and solitude. If lodyans implies proximity, presence, and intimacy, then writing,
and especially epistolary writing, implies an absent or distant interlocutor, as
well as an evocation of Depestres continuous exile.
It could be said about this splendid poem that the letter represents a mediating point between orality and writing, the condition of remoteness and conjured
presence reduced to its most intimate condition. The poet hints at this condition
in the following verses:
Je crois que je te verrais
Si je pouvais me rendre
Jusquau nord-ouest de notre pays.


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On dit que nos terres

Sont si proches
Que par temps clair
La fum
ee dun pays peut voir
Ce qui se passe dans la fum
ee.
Qui monte dans lautre pays.
Ainsi je pourrais te voir vivre
Dans la fum
ee de Cuba, mon fils!
Tu es si pres de moi. (143)
For the old storyteller, voice, timbre, and gestures would normally be the tools
of her trade, but in these verses sight and vision are the predominant sensorial
trope underlying the distance associated with writing and exile. The poems
crowning image of the smoke signals symbolizes both the geographical and historical distance and proximity between Cuba and Haiti and are themselves a
kind of writing.
But if in Lettre de ma mere the poetic vocation and popular culture are
mediated through the figure of the epistolary missive, in Ros
ena dans la montagne, a short story from the 1980 collection All
eluia pour une femme jardin,
Depestres foray into the short story genre implies a disillusionment with verse
and an embrace of the corporeal through prose. In this miniature bildungsroman
a Haitian adolescent named Alain longs to become a priest as a way of escaping
the sadness of Haiti. Nothing better represents better Alains vocation for the
priesthood than his interest in books and writing, and his wish to escape the
squalor of his social milieu. And books and writing are intimately associated
with Father Mulligan in the story, an Irish missionary priest in Haiti who also
teaches philosophy at the school at the rue des Miracles. Alain describes his
office as containing piles and piles of books, and walls lined, tapiss
es with
books.
If Father Mulligan is associated with books, reading, writing, it is precisely
the spoken word from which Alain wishes to escape, and which he associates
with the sadness of Hati: Je me sentais destin
e a me lever chaque jour de ma
vie a deux heures du matin, a dormir chaque nuit dans mon cercueil, et a prononcer trois mots par semaine. . . .Si le monde est une vall
ee de larmes, Hati
est le coin le mieux arros
e de la vall
ee (40). Alain discerns consciously or
unconsciously a link between spoken language and the misery of Haitiescaping the latter entails renouncing the former.
Nevertheless, on a spiritual summer retreat to the mountains with his new
Irish master to study Latin, Alain is initiated sexually by Mulligans antithesis,
Ros
ena, la femme de m
enage, whose physical beauty is described as
eblouissante.
Father Mulligan remarks, jattendais une femme de m
enage, et on nous a
envoy
e une lionne, un scandale biologique! (47). With Ros
enas natural attributes, both Father Mulligan and Alain fall under her spell. She expounds her

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natural philosphy to Alain: L^ame, l^ame, vous navez que cette fum
ee a la
bouche! Moi, je nai pas honte d^etre femelle et davoir une boulangerie sous
ma robe! Alains first reaction upon hearing these words is to strike Ros
ena in
the mouth. On their next encounter, as they perform an errand together,
Ros
ena bathes nude in the river, again tantalizing Alain, she splashes water on
him and recites her pagan prayer: Je te baptise au nom de ma bouche, de mes
seins et de mon saint-esprit (55).
Finally Alain surrenders to the temptations of the flesh and when Father
Mulligan surprises the young Haitian couple in carnal flagrante delicto, he strikes
Alain in the mouth, just as Alain wished to strike Ros
ena. These repeated images
and references to the mouth are not so much evocative of C
esaires metonymic
bouche de ceux qui nont point de bouche, but rather a mouth that evokes the body
first and parole only in an ancillary sense.
To defend Alain from Mulligans aggression, Ros
ena grabs a kitchen
knife, orders Mulligan to drop his drawers, and strikes a blow at his tumescent member. Ros
ena and Alain beat a hasty retreat as Mulligan applies a bandage to his wound. Some weeks later, Alain inquires discreetly at the hospital
and learns that Mulligan, having received an unfortunate kick from a horse in
his private parts, was convalescent. He was accepting his condition with
philosophy.
The thematic takeaways from Ros
ena en la montagne are fairly clear: not
only does the story mark a stylistic and tonal departure from Depestres earlier
work in Cuba (with a notable addition of humor, a trait that was also apparent
in Mat de coc^agne, 1977) the associations of philosophy, literature, writing, and
the general life of the mind as embodied by Father mulligan is now represented
as a kind of castration. Alain rejects his prior vocation and embraces the sensuality of the body and the voice that coalesce metonymically in the image of the
mouth. It would be hard to take issue with Silvio Torres Saillants observation
that as political ideas have vanished from Depestres literary discourse, human
interchange through sexual contact has grown in prominence (209). Depestres
recurring allegorical excursion into sexuality may be a refuge from the disenchantment of his Cuban experience and politics in general. Nevertheless, we
can still trace the continuity of Depestres work through his prolonged quest to
seek out a mediation between the writers vocation and the multifaceted expressions of the popular.

Notes
1
2

Translations from Spanish are my own unless otherwise indicated.

See Dash for a brilliant invitation to reconsider the Bovaryiste
untouchables.


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I L A C C E P T A I T S O N N O U V E L ET

Though Depestre repeated some of these points about his active participation
in the Padilla affair in my interview with him, I believe they require corroboration since I have not seen his name evoked in other descriptions of this
notorious episode.

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Paul B. Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. He published Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination (UVA Press) in 2010 and is currently working on a manuscript
that constellates Haitian and Cuban writers in dialogue.