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6 Given these factors, the Spiralists’ determination to remain in Haiti in the 1960s through the 1980s as well as the fact of their having always written in French, and to some extent Creole, has meant a certain foreclosing of possibilities. 5 And as the United States has become an increasingly more dominant superpower in Haiti-more politically and economically influential than France, the original imperial center-English has come to supplant French as the de facto second language in Haiti. Constrained within an insular space whose reading public was limited at best, they have never had a significant local audience. The Spiralists’ adamant refusal of displacement came at a real cost. 4 Given that leaving Haiti might well have meant being denied reentry, the Spiralists refused circulation in a global space, unwilling to risk the situation of permanent exile that became the fate of so many of their contemporaries. Yet, if the three authors nonetheless chose to remain in Haiti, it was because the greatest risk they could imagine was not, in fact, staying on the island. 3 As such, Philoctète, Frankétienne, and Fignolé faced constant and immediate danger. As Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken has rightly noted in her review essay, state violence under the Duvaliers was omnipresent-by no means limited to explicit political and social actors, writers and artists were equally likely to be targeted by the regime. The Spiralists resolved, first and foremost, to remain and to write literature in Haiti during the thirty-year François and Jean-Claude Duvalier presidencies, despite the climate of brutal, totalitarian repression that marked this period in Haiti’s history. Together they are the Spiralists, a loosely bound group of artists who, beginning in the mid-1960s, began to articulate a shared set of aesthetic and philosophical idea(l)s. The author of those words is one of three writers-along with Frankétienne and Jean-Claude Fignolé-in whose work I have long been invested. More gently put: a story is nothing without an audience.
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As unfashionable as it may sound, a book is, indeed, a product. Creating works that live primarily as intellectually fetichized cultural artifacts rather than as actual, dynamic presences in the world is unsatisfying and insufficient. Philoctète is clear: there is no honor for a writer in being unread, unknown. At the risk of overdramatizing, I can say that these five sentences have resonated at the core of all the work I have done and likely will continue to do as a translator-and as a scholar, for that matter. 2 They have remained with me-front of mind-ever since.
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It is a commercial product which is going to stay here, insulted by dust.” 1 I first encountered these words in the course of researching and writing my first book manuscript, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. But if they cannot read, my book is worth nothing. I write in order to be read, in order to sell to the people around me. In a 1992 interview for the journal Callaloo the late Haitian writer René Philoctète said, in what I have always imagined to be a tone inflected with some combination of puzzled annoyance and simmering rage, “What is a book anyway? It is a product, a commercial item.