Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
The early history of Haitian Kreyol remains subject to intense debate among linguists, though there is no doubt it was the principal medium through which slave revolts were organized and the foundations of Haitian culture set. By the end of the nineteenth century there were already significant literary texts, in particular Oswald Durand's "Choucoune" and Georges Sylvian's Cric? Crac! During the thirties and forties, proponents of Kreyol struggled to have it recognized as the national language and standardized. This process did not bear fruit until the IPN (Institut de pedagogie national) orthography became official in the eighties. Beginning in the fifties, there had already been a renaissance of poetry in Kreyol, the leading figure of which was Feliks Moriso-Lewa. At least two generations of writers have followed in his footsteps. In the person of Franketyen, Kreyol has one of the most fascinating contemporary writers in world literature.
Even the basic history of literature in Haitian Kreyol cannot be crammed into this small space.1 The first extant poem, "Lisette quitte la plaine," was composGcl in the mid-eighteenth century, and this lover's lament must have been only one among others of a kind, remaining examples of its genre having been lost to the record. In other words, literature in Kreyol predates independence by decades, and the language itself does by as much as a century. It was the medium in which Haitian independence was conceived and best expressed, as backhandedly shown by the attempt of Trench authorities to issue proclamations in it during the preceding revolutionary tumult, though they got the language wrong and wrote in Martinican Kriyol (see Confiant).
Long before the proclamations of its status as national language in 1983, and as official in 1987, Kreyol was the essential instrument of national life. As Albert VaIdman wrote in 1984, "no domain of use and no communicative situation is exempt from the encroachment of Creole. In rural Haiti and among the urban masses, all intellectual, psychological, and social needs are served by Creole" (79). Most writers belong to the approximately five per cent who can speak French fluently and prefer Io write in it, for reasons which need not be reiterated here. Nonetheless, literature in Kreyol and the ongoing expansion of its use in...