AFTERWORD

Jason Herbeck

When, after twenty-five years in exile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier unexpectedly returned to Haiti on January 16, 2011, the polarized yet strikingly muted public response was in some ways eerily reminiscent of public reaction during the decades-long era of repression in which he and his father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, ruled Haiti (1957–86). While hundreds of Haitians took to the streets in a “carnival-like atmosphere”¹ to cheer the arrival of Baby Doc in Port-au-Prince, the apprehension of a large swath of Haiti’s population was, surprisingly, by and large indiscernible. In fact, Duvalier’s “unbelievable” reappearance on the Haitian scene resulted in remarkably few manifestations of outright public protest,² and, in the days following his return, many of those who did speak out attributed his arrival in Haiti to a shrewd political maneuver on the part of outgoing President René Préval, who, it was suggested, wanted to divert attention from a highly critical report delivered only days earlier by the Joint Organization of American States– Caribbean Community Electoral Observation Mission.³ Such theories have remained speculative at best. However, the failure of the Préval administration to take an immediate stance on Duvalier’s homecoming is nonetheless surprising given Préval’s public statement in 2007 that Duvalier would face charges of political tyranny, corruption, and crimes against humanity should he choose to return.

While a handful of Haitian organizations such as the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) immediately denounced Duvalier’s return and demanded that he be brought to justice for his past crimes,⁴ the prevailing response in Haiti was described as one of stupefaction and “deafening silence.”⁵ In what clearly amounts to an understatement, Lemoine Bonneau, a journalist for Le Nouvelliste, noted the day after Duvalier’s return, “If this visit elates the Duvalierists who dream of a time past, it also constitutes for certain victims of the dictatorship an immense disappointment.”⁶ Perhaps most telling of the disquiet with which many Haitians reacted to Duvalier fils’s homecoming is that only five of the estimated tens of thousands of people allegedly detained and tortured during the dictator’s fifteen-year rule formally brought personal charges against him in the months following his arrival at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the nation’s capital.⁷

In terms of immediate response, the international community proved by far the most critical and vehement about Jean-Claude Duvalier’s return. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other humanitarian organizations from around the world urged President Préval’s administration to take swift action in charging Duvalier with a long list of crimes he and his secret paramilitary police, the Tonton Macoutes, had allegedly committed during his brutal fifteen-year reign.

In the days following Jean-Claude Duvalier’s return, the Haitian government eventually introduced charges, including corruption and embezzlement (the ousted dictator is believed to have fled the country with an estimated $300 million belonging to the Haitian people). However, Duvalier was soon afterward released from custody, and a court order placing him under house arrest on March 24, 2011, was criticized as pro forma when—in clear defiance of the warrant—Duvalier was seen driving around Port-au-Prince and dining at upscale restaurants in neighboring Pétionville.⁸

The ambivalent state of affairs surrounding the former dictator has hardly become more transparent under the current administration of President Michel Joseph Martelly (2011–present). Curiously, Martelly’s stance on both Duvalier and the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who, coincidentally, returned from exile to Haiti two months after Duvalier, on March 18, 2011)⁹ appears to have come nearly full circle since Martelly’s presidential election campaign, when he suggested that both men be granted amnesty. Although Martelly soon afterward retracted the statement, expressing his deference to the court system, his government—in seeming contradiction to the court-ordered house arrest—renewed Duvalier’s diplomatic passport under the pretense that he was entitled to it as a former head of state. Similarly, the official invitation Martelly extended to Duvalier and Matthieu Prosper Avril¹⁰ to attend the January 1, 2014, ceremony in Gonaïves in commemoration of the 210th anniversary of the country’s independence was decried as both “an unspeakable insult to the nation” and “an affront to the memory of thousands of victims of the Duvalierist dictatorship.”¹¹ When questioned about the implications of impunity that the invitation might convey, a spokesperson for Martelly insisted that the decision be understood as a “call for unity.”

On February 28, 2013, more than two years after his return to Haitian soil, Jean-Claude Duvalier appeared in court for the first time to face charges of corruption and human rights violations. During the five-hour-long hearing, he unequivocally denied any wrongdoing in relation to alleged crimes ranging from embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, and theft to repression, torture, and political assassinations. Furthermore, when asked if he had fully assumed his responsibilities as head of state from 1971 to 1986, a clearly indignant Duvalier became in turn accusatory: “I did as much as I could as the person responsible for assuring a better way of life to my fellow countryman. However, at the time, my government was dealing effectively with poverty. During that period, all State businesses were making money [and] parents could afford to send their children to school. I’m not saying life was ideal, but the people could at least live decently. . . . I have come back to a ruined country [and] limitless corruption that impedes development. . . . And so in returning, I can ask, ‘What have you done with my country?’ ”¹² Although the picture the ousted dictator paints of Haiti in the 1970s and early 1980s is arguably rosier than many might remember it, it is nevertheless true that under Duvalierism the Haitian population’s basic sanitary, educational, and economic needs were met with much greater consistency than when he returned in 2011. Even making allowance for political instability, UN embargos, devastating tropical storms, a mass rural exodus to urban areas, and the 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak, Haiti’s infrastructure and overall quality of life have significantly deteriorated since Duvalier relinquished power. Furthermore, because upward of 60 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, the vast majority of Haitians have no personal memory with which to look back—critically or otherwise—upon Duvalierist rule. Consequently, as William Booth states, “Although an older generation in Haiti recalls with a shudder the bad things that happened in the Duvalier years, many Haitians are nostalgic for the era, when the country was more prosperous, tourists were not afraid to come and Haiti was the world’s leading maker of baseballs.”¹³

Regardless of the conflicting degrees of interest, horror, and skepticism with which generations of Haitians view the return of Baby Doc to Haiti and the urgency of bringing him to trial, the attention of the Haitian population as a whole can only be sustained for so long.¹⁴ Given the more pressing, immediate concerns of day-to-day survival, dwelling too long on the past means turnings one’s thoughts from the present and immediate future—something that for many constitutes an ill-afforded luxury.

Nonetheless, as the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier demonstrates, the shadows of the Duvalier era have clearly not receded for good and continue to throw a dark veil on the country today, contributing unmistakably to the complex panorama of present-day preoccupations. As the journalist Danièle Magloire wrote in 2013, on the eve of the fifty-year anniversary of the April 26, 1963, roundup and massacre of more than seventy presumed opponents of François Duvalier, “We will not forget what the Duvalierist dictatorship was!”¹⁵ Refusing to forget, however, presents a double-edged sword. Among the first five individuals to come forward to press personal charges against Duvalier fils, Robert Duval—a soccer coach who spent nearly eighteen months in the notorious political prison of Fort Dimanche instituted by Duvalier père—expressed little surprise at the relative dearth of plaintiffs: “That’s the strength of the stigma that Duvalier left on this country. He may not have been on our minds, but now that he’s back, we see that the fear of him is still in our hearts.”¹⁶

François Duvalier

Although François Duvalier’s (1907–1971) nickname “Papa Doc” came to signify repression and violence during his reign as dictator, evoking in many a sense of dread, the sobriquet was initially bestowed upon him affectionately in reference to the discipline to which he devoted himself from a young age. Having graduated from the University of Haiti School of Medicine in 1934, the Port-au-Prince-born son of a middle-class immigrant family from Martinique (his father was a teacher and magistrate, his mother a baker) rose swiftly through the ranks of the profession. While working as a hospital staff physician in 1939, Duvalier married a nurse, Simone Ovide, with whom he would have four children: Marie Denise, Nicole, Simone, and Jean-Claude. In 1943, Duvalier’s interest in combatting the spread of tropical diseases led to his becoming active in an anti-yaws campaign sponsored by the US Army Medical Corps. After studying briefly at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1944–45, he returned to Haiti, where he quickly ascended under President Dumarsais Estimé to become director general of the National Public Health Service in 1946 and deputy minister of labor in 1948 before being appointed to the post of minister of public health and labor in 1950.

Duvalier remained supportive of Estimé despite the president’s dwindling credibility following an unsuccessful attempt to modify the constitution as a means of pursuing a second consecutive term as president. Consequently, when Duvalier openly disapproved of the military coup organized by Paul E. Magloire that forced Estimé into exile in 1950, he left his government post and returned to practicing medicine. Rejoining the American Sanitary Mission in 1951, he used his connections in rural communities in which he worked to organize a grassroots movement in opposition to newly elected President Magloire and, in 1954, was himself forced into hiding as his notoriety in the resistance became more pronounced. When Magloire announced a general amnesty for political opponents in 1956, Duvalier resurfaced and declared his candidacy for president.

During a particularly unstable political period even according to Haitian standards, Duvalier’s influence further increased over the subsequent ten months, thanks in part to supporters who played an active role in many of the six governments that came into existence at that time. As a candidate for the upcoming election, Duvalier, who as a child had personally experienced the racial polarization and conflicts spurred by the American occupation of Haiti in 1915–34, appealed to the country’s large black majority with a populist, noiriste (black nationalism) campaign. As a cofounder of the Griot movement of the 1930s and author of a book on Vodou, Duvalier was “an astute observer of Haitian life and a student of his country’s history,” and he thus aligned himself with spiritual elements of Haitian culture as a way of expanding his following. Having won over the army and negotiated deals with other presidential candidates, he readily defeated his main opponent, Louis Déjoie, a member of the mulatto elite, on September 22, 1957.

The start of François Duvalier’s presidency was anything but smooth, however. In an attempt to consolidate power as quickly as possible, Duvalier effectively banned all opposition parties—as well as, more generally, public or private gatherings of any sort, including film clubs, reading groups, and so forth—and demanded that Parliament allow him to govern by decree. After an attempted military coup failed to oust him from power in July 1958, Papa Doc decided to reduce the army—which he now considered a threat—and, in 1959, created a private paramilitary group called the Volunteers for National Security (Volontaires de la sécurité nationale, or VSN) as a means of suppressing alleged foes of the regime. Better known as the Tonton Macoutes, these “bogeymen,” many of whom were not necessarily salaried and thus stole from the people they were ordered to abduct, torture, and kill, readily resorted to intimidation tactics to force the Haitian population into subservience. In April 1961, Duvalier dissolved Parliament, eventually proclaiming himself “president for life” in 1964.

The considerable resources Haiti received from the US government in the form of aid grants during the early years of Duvalier’s presidency began to dry up. The increasingly evident modus operandi of coercion and violence behind Duvalier’s rule, coupled with his unwillingness to follow the United States’ strict accounting procedures as a precondition for continued aid, soon outweighed the benefits of the Haitian president’s anti-Communist sentiment along with Haiti’s strategic position relative to Cuba, which had initially helped secure US economic support. President John F. Kennedy’s administration eventually suspended all aid in mid-1962. Shortly afterward, in 1963, tensions rose drastically between Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic, which increasingly provided support and asylum to Haitian exiles opposed to the Duvalier regime.

Duvalier remained a formidable dictator up until his death in 1971. During his tenure, Haiti’s per-capita income remained the hemisphere’s lowest, at less than $75.¹⁸ Able to fend off challenges from both within Haiti and abroad, Duvalier successfully managed a deadly campaign of terror throughout his time in power, which did not end before he had once again modified the Haitian constitution in order to designate his only son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, as his successor.

As feared as Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and their Tonton Macoutes were during their nearly three decades in power, the suppressive institution of Duvalierism was not maintained solely on terror, massacres, and the systematic theft of state and personal possessions. As noted by Haïti lutte contre l’impunité (Haiti fights against impunity), “it was also obscurantism in the fullest sense of the word—the type that no government could have imagined as a means of perpetuating its power. Duvalierist terror impregnated the Church [and] religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Vodou), and colonized the collective imagination.”¹⁹ In 1964, Duvalier, in claiming he was the living incarnation of legendary Haitian revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, and Alexandre Pétion, presented himself as “the supreme commander of the revolution,” “the biggest patriot of all time,” and “the champion of national dignity.”²⁰ The Lord’s Prayer was rewritten with François Duvalier substituted in place of the Father, or God. Duvalier’s uses of Vodou as a way of extending his control and influence were multifold, and increased throughout his presidency. Pretending to be an ougan, or Vodou priest, he would often dress like the Vodou divinity Baron Samedi (with a black suit, dark sunglasses, and top hat), affecting a staring gaze and whispered, heavily nasalized speech. Upon falling seriously ill in 1971 (he suffered from prostate cancer, diabetes, and heart trouble), Duvalier summoned a Vodou priest to the presidential palace to hold a ceremony.

To suggest that fear and trepidation were ubiquitous during the Duvalier era is by no means an overstatement. In addition to his own carefully crafted public image, Duvalier’s foreboding presence manifested itself physically in the form of the Tonton Macoutes militia and the Fort Dimanche torturer Madame Max Adolphe,²¹ as well as emotionally, as a more abstract yet no less ominously perceived threat that ingrained itself at the very heart of the Haitian psyche. Edwidge Danticat, who begins her book Create Dangerously with a detailed account of the 1964 public execution of the dissident group Jeune Haïti (Young Haiti, also known as “Les Treize,” or “The Thirteen”) members Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, explains how, in the context of this era of suspicion, literature that in appearance had nothing to do with Duvalier’s reign could be perceived as highly subversive. Consequently, as evidenced by the clandestine readings of Albert Camus’s play Caligula, literary works could not only serve as a means of resistance but could be punishable by death: “[B]ooks that might seem innocent . . . could easily betray [those who had them in their possession]. Novels with the wrong titles. Treatises with the right titles and intentions. Strings of words that, uttered, written, or read, could cause a person’s death” (9).²²

It is estimated that up to a million Haitians fled into exile as a result of the systematic human rights violations during the thirty years François and Jean-Claude Duvalier held power²³—either because of the repressive censorship that caused people to fear for their lives or because of the harsh living conditions that compelled them to leave for purely economic reasons.

Évelyne Trouillot

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1954, Évelyne Trouillot spent her childhood and adolescence under the Duvalier dictatorship, growing up in a family of intellectuals who have contributed significantly to understanding, promoting, and enriching Haiti’s vibrant cultural, educational, and historical landscape.²⁴ Trouillot’s father taught history at the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, a Catholic school founded in the nation’s capital in 1872, and he later became a lawyer, serving as president of the bar in Haiti for several years. Working as a nurse in the medical center of a working-class neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Trouillot’s mother, Anne-Marie Morisset, would return home from work each day full of stories to tell Évelyne and her three siblings. As a young nurse she once crossed paths with François Duvalier, and she described to her children the dictator’s evil, piercing gaze—although, as Évelyne notes, her mother’s perception of Duvalier might very well have been influenced by her knowledge of the countless heinous acts he had committed.

The third of four children, Évelyne was not, like her older brother, sister, and cousins, an official member of the Rallye de l’effort, an association founded and supervised by priests from the Pères du Saint-Esprit congregation at the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial; she did, however, accompany them to various meetings and events. Although the group was not political per se, its emphasis on social issues did not sit well with the Duvalierist regime, which decreed it (like all other groups and gatherings) subversive. In a culmination of his ongoing conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, Duvalier ordered the expulsion of all Jesuit priests from Haiti in 1964—the same year Drouin and Numa, members of “The Thirteen,” were publicly executed for their role in attempting to overthrow Duvalier.

Although Trouillot did not personally witness the assassination of Drouin and Numa, she, like generations of men and women in Haiti, was deeply marked by the Duvalier period. Noting how, growing up, “the world of writing was at once the most invited and the most honored [guest in our house],” she explained in an interview with Edwidge Danticat in 2005 to what extent her scholarly upbringing conflicted with the repressive atmosphere of the regime: “My most striking memory of the Duvalier dictatorship is still the image of the militiamen on the roof of the Chapelle Saint Antoine, a few meters from our home. And the imminent threat of searches in the houses in the quarter to find books deemed subversive. Then the feverish ha[s]te and the dull sound of books that one would get rid of in the latrines. This image of the condemned books remains for me one of the strongest images of the repression, this repression of knowledge and of creative freedom.”²⁵

Trouillot left Haiti with her mother and younger brother at age seventeen, in 1971, shortly after earning her high school diploma. Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier had recently replaced his deceased father as president. While personal reasons contributed to her mother’s departure from Haiti, the tense, oppressive atmosphere generated by the Duvalierist regime also factored significantly in her decision. Immigrating to the United States (New York and Florida), Trouillot attended college, studying languages and pedagogy. After Jean-Claude Duvalier fled Haiti in 1986, she returned the following year to Port-au-Prince, where she now lives, writes, and teaches French at the Université d’État d’Haïti. Trouillot has published works both in Creole and in French and is cofounder with her brother Lyonel and daughter, Nadève Ménard, of Pré-texte, a production company that organizes writing and reading workshops. After the 2010 earthquake, she created, with siblings Lyonel, Jocelyne, and Michel-Rolph, the Centre Culturel Anne-Marie Morisset as a way to provide children and young adults access to Haiti’s wealth of cultural goods and artifacts; she also chronicled the devastating event in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times.²⁶

Since the 1996 publication of her first collection of short stories, La chambre interdite (The forbidden room), Trouillot has published a broad array of literary texts that—through an impressive diversity of genres—address an extensive range of chapters from Haiti’s complicated past. If a common theme traverses what over the past two decades has come to constitute her exceedingly rich oeuvre, it might best be described as the social and political maelstrom to which individuals have been subjected over the course of the country’s history. Indeed, while Trouillot’s works bear due testimony to the havoc wreaked on the country by natural disasters, the images with which she leaves her readers are seldom those of the hurricanes, flooding, and earthquakes that have—indelibly, it would seem—been etched for better or for worse on the world’s consciousness. Rather, it is the impact and alarmingly inescapable nature of societal and human forces that are consistently articulated in Trouillot’s works, and that, in compelling her characters to struggle as a means of individual and collective survival, render them in turn so compelling.

In relating the experiences of Lisette, a young house servant growing up on a plantation in the 1750s, Rosalie l’infâme (2003; The Infamous Rosalie, 2013)²⁷ paints a vivid portrait of slavery and slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, providing an enlightening perspective on the loss and separation suffered due to colonization and the Middle Passage. Trouillot’s illustrated children’s book L’île de Ti Jean (Dapper, 2004; Little John’s island) tells the magical tale of another young protagonist, Ti Jean, and his determination to bring about harmony in Haiti and—by extension—the world, employing an unassailable appreciation for and defense of the environment. Although set in the early 2000s, the meandering thoughts and memories of the aging narrator of the short story “Je m’appelle Fridhomme”²⁸ cast a harsh light on the American occupation of 1915–34, all the while contrasting the ever bitter taste that older generations have of that time period with the excitement that subsequent generations feel about the opportunity to live in the United States.

Depicting the myriad of personal and legal issues facing members of the Haitian diaspora, Trouillot has addressed issues related to immigration in other genres and settings as well. Absences sans frontières (Éditions Chèvre-feuille étoilée, 2013; Absences without borders) traces the long-distance relationship between Géraldine and her father, Gérard, whom, because he moved illegally to the United States in search of work before she was born, she has never met. In this work it is against the backdrop of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s short-lived presidency, General Raoul Cédras’s bloody coup d’état, the US embargo on Haiti, September 11, and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 that relationships and identities alike are forged, sustained, and explored. And employing the dramatic device of a covered truck en route to an illegal border crossing to the Dominican Republic, Trouillot’s award-winning play Le bleu de l’île (2012; The Blue of the Island, 2012)²⁹ frames the complex landscape of immigration in terms of the sacrifices that twelve Haitians are prepared to endure in choosing to leave their homeland.

Discussing Le bleu de l’île in 2010, Trouillot remarks, “I’m greatly drawn to the theme [of migration]. But there are other themes, such as the dictatorship—because we lived 30 years under the dictatorship of Duvalier père and fils. The effects of such hardship on the people, on love, on relationships between individuals in that environment, how those relationships evolved, the relations between the various social groups: those are the themes that Haitian writers address.”³⁰ In the eponymous story of La chambre interdite, Trouillot broached the Duvalier dictatorship for the first time in her writings and, therein, the shroud of mystery that not only pervaded the period but in many ways exists to this day, haunting those who experienced it or who listened to the memories of those who did. Published in 2002, Parlez-moi d’amour . . . (Imprimerie Caraïbe, 2002; Speak to me of love) is a collection of short stories drawn from Trouillot’s childhood: “They are true stories, even though I changed many of the circumstances; they are nightmares come true, facts that one would rather forget.”³¹ One of the stories in the collection, “L’héritage des Chareron,”³² recounts how when members of the Chareron family are killed by the Tonton Macoutes, friends of the family neglect to pay their respects out of fear that they, too, will become targets of Duvalier’s militia. La mémoire aux abois (Éditions Hoëbeke, 2010)—translated here as Memory at Bay—is Trouillot’s first novel devoted fully to Duvalierism and the legacy it left to generations of Haitians.

The Duvalier Era in Haitian Literature

Censorship, brutality, and fear were commonplace during the three decades Duvalier père and fils remained in power; expressing dissent was extremely dangerous, punishable by death. Commenting on the status of literature under Duvalier, Yves Chemla notes in Cultures Sud, “For a long time, the violence that was carried out mollified fiction, with but only a few exceptions. The period defied words.”³³ It is unsurprising, then, that the body of literature addressing the Duvalier period that was produced in Haiti from 1957 to 1971 is glaringly sparse. Those Haitians who did write or speak critically about the dictatorship were either killed (Jacques-Stephen Alexis) or forced into exile abroad (Gérard Étienne, Pierre Clitandre, Paul Laraque, Rassoul Labuchin).³⁴

The most renowned literary work to date on the Duvalier era is one of the few texts written during the period itself—Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, colère, folie (Paris: Gallimard, 1968; Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Tragedy, 2009).³⁵ Each of the three novellas offers a stark example of how Papa Doc’s nightmarish reign affected those forced to live under its stifling restrictions and brazen corruption. Vieux-Chauvet originally believed she had succeeded in sufficiently disguising the harsh accusations leveled in her novel against the dictatorship. However, once the manuscript was accepted for publication by the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard, friends and acquaintances who read the text felt that her novel drew too- evident parallels to the Duvalier dictatorship and that, as a result, the novel would surely incur the regime’s wrath. For example, as Laurent Dubois points out, “In 1962, the president had declared, ‘I am even now an immaterial being,’ and it was all too easy to conclude that Vieux-Chauvet’s portrait of a ghostly, all-powerful leader was meant to describe him.”³⁶ Madison Smartt Bell, noting that three members of the Vieux-Chauvet family had already been “lost” to the regime, explains, “Vieux-Chauvet persuaded Gallimard to withdraw [the book], while she went into permanent exile in New York City. . . . Her husband, Pierre Chauvet, made an emergency trip to Haiti, where he purchased as many copies of the book already in circulation there as he could recover—in order to destroy them.”³⁷ The trilogy was eventually republished in 2005 (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose/Emina Soleil) to great acclaim.

Although less well-known, Vieux-Chauvet’s 1986 novel Les rapaces (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps; The birds of prey),³⁸ levels in some ways a more unequivocally harsh portrait of the repressive Duvalier regime. Described as an autopsy of Haitian society of the 1970s and 1980s, the allegorical work (the three parts of which are entitled “The Cat,” “The Poor,” and “The Police”), set in Port-au-Prince, recounts the brutal reign of a tyrant son who in the book’s opening pages ascends to power following an elaborate state funeral in honor of his deceased dictator father.³⁹

In her 2010 interview with Danticat, Trouillot states with respect to the relative dearth of literary works on the Duvalier regime, “I think that we often tend not to face the pages of our history that upset us. I would have thought that there would be many more texts, many more stories around the Duvalier dictatorship.”⁴⁰ Curiously, the vast majority of works on the period have been produced in the past twenty years.

Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire d’une amnésique (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1984; Memoir of an Amnesiac, Coconut Creek, Florida: Caribbean Studies Press, 2008) illustrates the horror of living under the Duvalier regime, in particular as told by a woman (Paul) struggling to put into words the horrific events she endured at the time. The telling of Paul’s story begins in 1957 upon her return from exile to Haiti, where, at the early age of six, she is forced to confront the social tensions of the country, the intrusion of the Tonton Macoutes on daily life, and, more generally, what is in effect another chapter of “a history of domination on Haitians.”⁴¹ After all, her father had—at the same age and while living in the very same house—experienced the invasion of American soldiers during the US occupation.⁴²

Published a decade after Mémoire d’une amnésique, in 1994, Anne-christine d’Adesky’s Under the Bone (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) further develops the systemic links between the two periods, “exhum[ing] the true terrors of the Duvalier regime as well as examin[ing] their military roots in the period during the 1915–1934 U.S. Occupation of Haiti.”⁴³ Multiple storylines explore these connections, such as that of Gerard Metellus, a lawyer investigating the disappearance of missing persons, who—in concert with the United States—is also searching for the plunder the Duvaliers may have hidden away before fleeing the country, and that of Leslie Doyle, an American human rights activist who arrives in Haiti in 1986, soon after Jean-Claude Duvalier’s departure, to research and compile the oral histories of women persecuted during the Duvalier era.

“La chambre bleue” (“The Blue Room”) in Yanick Lahens’s collection of short stories Tante Resia et les dieux (L’Harmattan, 1994; Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories, 2010),⁴⁴ is narrated by an adult who, in vividly recalling a particularly traumatic event in her childhood, is unable to come to grips with an experience that, years later, continues to haunt her. Although the reader is led to believe that some better understanding might be reached, the narrative, in returning to the “present” of the Duvalier era, is recounted through the eyes of a young child whose confused perspective is eerily emblematic of a period in Haiti’s past that remains in many respects shrouded in uncertainty. “Les survivants” (“The Survivors”) in the same collection focuses on the contagious nature of fear that a group of men feel—and share—in planning to undermine the regime.

In 1995, Edwidge Danticat published Krik? Krak! (Soho Press), a collection of short stories that examine the country’s hardships from a variety of angles. “Children of the Sea” paints a particularly grim portrait by way of alternating narrators and lovers, one of whom has decided to flee the harsh environment of the Duvalier regime and set out by boat with thirty-six others in an attempt to forge a better life for himself. In Danticat’s novel The Dew Breaker (Knopf, 2004), the violent past of a seemingly ordinary Haitian immigrant living in Brooklyn is gradually revealed. The man was in fact a member of the Tonton Macoutes in the 1960s, something he has hidden from those around him, including fellow immigrants whom he has himself tortured.

Marie-Célie Agnant’s 2007 novel Un alligator nommé Rosa (Éditions du Remue-ménage; An alligator named Rosa) also deals with one of the members of Duvalier’s dreaded arsenal—the torturer and executioner Rosa Bosquet (the maiden name of Madame Max Adolphe). Now into her seventies and ailing in southern France, Rosa is bedridden and desperately in need of someone able to care for her. At first glance, the mild-tempered, seemingly well-meaning Antoine Guibert appears to be the perfect fit. However, what is gradually divulged in Agnant’s text is that Antoine’s family was murdered at the hand of Rosa herself because of his journalist father’s contentious writings. The sole survivor of the devastating house fire she set when he was ten, Antoine has waited forty years for the opportunity to exact his revenge.

Like Un alligator nommé Rosa, Saisons sauvages (Mercure, 2010; Savage Seasons, 2015),⁴⁵ by Kettly Mars, also emphasizes the dangers of being a journalist during the Duvalier period—especially when it comes to being editor-in-chief of a newspaper opposed to the regime, as is the case with Daniel Leroy. When Daniel’s actions and increasingly overt critical stance lead to his abduction, his wife, Nirvah, pays a visit to the secretary of state for public safety, Raoul Vincent, to ask for information about her husband’s whereabouts and to attempt to arrange his safe return. However, she soon realizes that in order to obtain favors from Raoul, she, in turn, will have to submit to his whims. As the novel progresses, it is increasingly less clear to what extent Nirvah continues to resist her new role as mistress, or if—quite to the contrary—the privileges that such a position afford her in fact outweigh the loss of her husband and reproachful eyes of her neighbors, friends, and relatives.

Memory at Bay: The Constraints of Intimacy

Personal correspondence with her agent in 2006 reveals that Évelyne Trouillot began work on Memory at Bay well before its publication in 2010,⁴⁶ contemplating early on the fictitious names of her characters, the human qualities of the dictator’s widow, and where the plot should unfold. Despite appearing at first glance far removed in time and place from Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship, from its opening pages the completed novel can be read as a roman à clef: nearly all of the main characters (with the evident exception of Marie-Ange) represent a real-life person from the time period. Twenty-three-year-old Marie-Ange, a nurse’s aide in a Parisian nursing home, has just been assigned to a new patient, Odile Savien Doréval, a decrepit woman in her eighties quickly nearing the end of her life. Of course, the hospice director’s ironic comment, according to which any potential conflict of interest Marie-Ange might foresee with the patient is in fact irrelevant because, “in any case, this is no concern of yours” (5),⁴⁷ hints early on both at a key theme in the novel as well as at what is essentially the dilemma with which Marie-Ange will be faced: is it her duty to avenge her family and her country for the suffering and loss that can be traced directly back to the bedridden woman before her, or should her present professional responsibilities trump any such vendetta, personal or otherwise? In other words, because—as her boss is quick to point out—the dictator was already dead before Marie-Ange was born, does that preclude her right to effectively “get carried away” (5; or exagérer, in the original) by the burden of memories entrusted to her by her recently deceased mother? As the director’s cautionary words suggest, it is alternately the assignment and appropriation of stories—willingly or otherwise—that constitute the crux of Trouillot’s novel and that ultimately decide the fate of both protagonists.

Reflecting upon the impetus behind her writing, Trouillot has noted, “The social calls out to me. In Haiti, in fact, there are many things that call to creative people: injustices of all kinds, religious or sexual taboos, sadness, evil, lust for life. Personally I am fascinated by what constraint can create in people.”⁴⁸ Perhaps in no other work by Trouillot are constraints—whether it be those capable of driving individuals or, conversely, those that stall them in their tracks—more palpable. For Marie-Ange, determining what barrier to erect between the past and present, between Haiti and France, is fundamental to her being able to grapple with her own identity and future. Her hope of moving forward with her life hinges on her ability to successfully identify and act upon these vexed juxtapositions, and yet when, like her mother before her, she starts responding to the countless e-mails and phone calls arriving from Haiti, the difficulty of negotiating such juxtapositions confuses the clarity with which she desires to act: “I tried to resist the abyss of knotty problems, the morass of difficulties with their thorny tangles. But what drew me inexorably were the silences, the ellipses and dead spaces, the voids infiltrated by a mute perplexity. The moments of drift in which despair overpowers all of life and stifles all expression. . . . These contacts [with troubled young Quisque- yans] throw me into a world where reality nudges me along and shakes up my memory” (101).

In contrast to her caretaker, the vast majority of events that Odile Savien Doréval evokes from her past are recalled with satisfaction and, moreover, in a state of quiet reserve: “Silence is ultimately the surest means of control. . . . The only solution lay in her ability to curtail all communication with the outside world” (5). Odile’s memories take the form of calculated moral and philosophical justifications, not only with respect to her own imperious ethos but in terms of the draconian measures employed by her husband and son. In short, “governing a nation entails sacrifice. As their great friend Lambert Chambral used to say, ‘A good Dorévalist is always ready to murder his children, the children to eliminate their parents’ ” (27). Whereas Marie-Ange often resents the memories with which she is burdened—“I detest this dour gravity I inherited from you” (104)—Odile dreads the growing frequency with which her memory has begun to fail her: “She realized that it was becoming more and more of a strain for her to think about all that, but she focused single-mindedly on her snatches of memory” (75).

Trouillot’s descriptions of the declining state of Odile’s mental acuity, her modest origins, the apparent innocence of her early ambitions, and her desire to be eventually “if not loved, then at least understood” (103) by her caretaker offer an intimate and even sympathetic view of the wife of Haiti’s most notoriously corrupt and deadly leader. By presenting an unexpectedly human side of Simone Ovide Duvalier, Trouillot challenges readers in much the same way that Marie-Ange herself is challenged. Marie-Ange must confront the disquieting image of her (family’s and country’s) past as an inseparable part of her own existence, as readers in turn struggle to reconcile the portrait of a generally reviled person who nonetheless has genuinely human (and even humane) characteristics not unlike those of Marie-Ange herself—including those of feeling fear, loneliness, and a fundamental desire to be understood. In this respect, the constraints that Trouillot’s text impose upon the reader introduce a sense of startling intimacy with those responsible for the horrors, despite the unquestionable damage that the Duvalier regime (père and fils) inflicted on Haiti in terms of human lives, financial resources, and sustainable development.

It is important to note that by juxtaposing the narratives of Odile and Simone in Memory at Bay, Trouillot provides a perspective that is by definition not one-sided. The narrative by which we come to know the dictator’s widow, while humanizing her to the extent that we sense her insecurities, emotions, and even warmth, also casts shadows on her, placing her just out of reach of our full comprehension. As if subject to the same progressing senility as Odile, we as readers are increasingly forced to question our view of her and, consequently, to question how and why we might ultimately condemn or forgive her. After all, any potential position we might take is based on perceptions that prove to be just as unfounded and subjective as they are defensible.

Although Simone Duvalier was never a political figure on a national scale, some historians have contended that she played an instrumental role behind the scenes.⁴⁹ In Trouillot’s novel, it is fittingly difficult to detect where Odile’s decisions and actions overlap with those of her husband, Fabien: “She knew how to take revenge without fretting over it, striking hard and accurately” (112). Similarly, the subtle, clever manner with which Odile attempts to conceal the true state of her lucidity from Marie-Ange can be read as suggestive of the woman who, following her husband’s death, ensured the continuation of the family dynasty by personally making decisions for her nineteen-year-old son at the start of his presidency:⁵⁰ “Her chest subsided farther under the weight of an inaudible sigh. Feeling more than seeing the circumspect gaze of the young aide turn toward her, she quickly recast her features to those of a decrepit old lady with lifeless eyes” (73).

Marie-Ange’s native land may seem somewhat enigmatic to readers, but Quisqueya is one of the names given by indigenous populations, before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, to Hispaniola—the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In addition, semantic and phonetic similarities make it possible to match the deceased Fabien Doréval to dictator François Duvalier, Odile Savien Doréval to Simone Ovide Duvalier, the Fort Décembre prison to that of Fort Dimanche, Port-du-Roi to Port-au-Prince, Rallye de l’effort to Rally for Friendship, and more. By way of these key markers, it is further possible to link other references in the novel to important events and figures in Haitian history, such as the assassination of Numa and Drouin, the extravagant wedding of Jean-Claude Duva- lier to Michèle Bennett in May 1980, Simone and François Duvalier’s appreciation of Vodou, and the death of François Duvalier.

Trouillot’s borderline ludic substitution of fictitious names for those of actual people in Memory at Bay is clearly not akin to Vieux-Chauvet’s desire and (unsuccessful) attempt to disguise Love, Anger, Madness’s indictment of François Duvalier. Avoiding real names provides Trouillot with a greater liberty to mix fiction and reality; after all, as a work of literature, the work is not meant to be a precise historical account of the Duvalier regime. Moreover, not identifying specific names, dates, and events opens the text to a potentially broader range of interpretations; the silent, painful struggle that ensues between Marie-Ange and Odile is not unique to the legacy of Duvalierism or Haiti, and it poignantly depicts the at times both fragile and brutal nature of social and political relationships irrespective of time or place. Clearly, Trouillot’s intention was not to write a subversive narrative whose “code” would remain deeply embedded within the text but instead to allow for reflection on the tenuous relationship between the past and the present, the personal and the public, as well as the real and the imagined of all historical events.

In this regard, Marie-Ange and Odile’s alternating narratives reflect the inherently dynamic nature of social struggle in proving to be both correspondent and contradictory. In one respect, the memories recounted by each protagonist match: places, people, and predicaments, as well as preoccupations relative to family and country, echo one another. With frequently overlapping place markers, events, and emotions, the two narratives can be understood to correspond, albeit in a strained, eerily silent manner. However, without fail, the parallel versions of the past recounted by Marie-Ange and Odile prove incongruous—because the memories they have are, respectively, either those of individuals who suffered grave injustices at the hands of the regime or of those responsible for causing these very same injustices. The inexorable constraints of memory in the novel are born of this profound tension. Short of taking action, of doing away with the image judged to be unfaithful or incompatible, how does one resolve the pain of ever-divergent memories? What role should our memories, and those of others, play in our ability to determine right from wrong, action from inaction? For Marie-Ange and Odile, the unsettled notions of impunity and forgiveness are, agonizingly, further blurred by forgetfulness. Whether desired but impossible, or shunned but unavoidable, forgetting is, like memory, an individual phenomenon with profoundly social implications. Coincidentally, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s unexpected return to Haiti one year after the publication of Memory at Bay has forced generations of Haitians to grapple with the constraints of a suddenly intimate past. Indeed, an important chapter of Haiti’s collective history depends in part on how the Duvalier era is remembered today.⁵¹

Notes

1. “Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier returns to Haiti,” Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8264366/Jean-Claude-Baby-Doc-Duva lier-returns-to-Haiti.html?image=3.

2. Belmondo Ndengue, “Jean-Claude Duvalier: L’incroyable retour,” Le Nouvelliste, January 18, 2011, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/article print/87884.html.

Michèle Montas, the journalist and widow of the journalist Jean-Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2002, was the first public figure to openly disapprove of Duvalier’s return and appearance on the Haitian political scene.

3. The report questioned the validity of the first round of the 2010–11 Haitian presidential election held on November 28, and it effectively prevented President Préval’s own Unity (INITE) Party candidate, Jude Célestin, from participating in the second round, to be held only three weeks after Duvalier’s return to Haiti.

4. Ndengue, “Jean-Claude Duvalier: L’incroyable retour.”

5. Ginger Thompson, “In Haiti, Return of Duvalier Reopens Old Wounds,” New York Times, January 29, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/world /americas/30haiti.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

6. Lemoine Bonneau, “À qui profite l’arrivée de Jean-Claude Duvalier?” Le Nouvelliste, January 17, 2011, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/articleprint/87924.html.

7. While the number of individuals who have filed human rights complaints against Duvalier has climbed to thirty as of April 2014, this represents a small fraction of the number of people who were either tortured or know of others who were killed or simply disappeared during Baby Doc’s fifteen-year reign.

8. “Haiti renews passport for ex-dictator Duvalier,” USA Today, January 5, 2013.http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/05/haiti-du valier-passport/1811483/

9. As the first democratically elected president of Haiti, Aristide served two incomplete terms (1991, 1994–1996; 2001–2004). In 2004, Aristide left Haiti under disputed circumstances and eventually took up residence in South Africa, where he lived in exile for seven years before returning to Haiti in 2011.

10. A well-placed member of François Duvalier’s Presidential Guard and close financial adviser to Jean-Claude Duvalier, “the intelligent Prosper Avril” briefly became president of Haiti (1988–1990) after leading a military coup against the transition government of Leslie Manigat that was set in place after Duvalier fils fled the country in 1986.

11. Danio Darius, “Jean-Claude Duvalier aux Gonaïves, la présidence s’explique sur l’invitation,” Le Nouvelliste, January 9, 2014, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/articleprint/126055.html.

12. Jean-Robert Fleury, “Les minutes de l’audition de Jean-Claude Duvalier,” Le Nouvelliste, March 1, 2013, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/articleprint/114014.html.

13. William Booth, “In Haiti, Former Dictator ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier Is Thriving,” Washington Post, January 17, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/in-haiti-the-former-dictator-duvalier-thrives/2012/01/13/gIQAaYbM6P_story.html.

14. In February 2014, a three-judge panel ruled that Duvalier should indeed stand trial for allegations he tortured, killed, and imprisoned opponents.

15. Danièle Magloire, “Nous n’oublierons pas ce qu’a été la dictature duvaliériste!” Le Nouvelliste, April 24, 2013, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenou velliste/articleprint/116058.html

16. Thompson, “In Haiti, Return of Duvalier Reopens Old Wounds.”

17. Richard A. Haggerty, ed., Haiti: A Country Study (Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1989), http://countrystudies.us/haiti/17.htm.

18. “The Death and Legacy of Papa Doc Duvalier,” Time, January 17, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876967,00.html.

19. “L’état duvaliérien,” Haïti lutte contre l’impunité, www.haitilutte contre-impunite.org/index_by_tag/2?locale=fr.

20. Etzer Charles, Le pouvoir politique en Haïti de 1957 à nos jours (Éditions Karthala, 1994), 265, my translation.

21. Known also as Rosalie Bosquet (her maiden name) during the time she served under François Duvalier as prison warden of Fort Dimanche, Madame Max Adolphe also came to serve as commander in chief of the Tonton Macoutes, a position she held for more than twenty years, until Jean-Claude Duvalier fled Haiti in 1986.

22. Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New York: First Vintage Books, 2011).

23. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012), 354.

24. Évelyne’s uncle, Henock Trouillot, was a historian, novelist, and playwright; her younger brother, Lyonel, is, like Évelyne, an award-winning writer, perhaps most noted for his novels Yanvalou pour Charlie (Arles: Actes Sud, 2009, Prix Wepler-Fondation la Poste; The wake for Charlie) and Parabole du failli (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013, Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde; The parable of failure); Jocelyne, Évelyne’s sister, is a leading educational expert and chancellor at the Université Caraïbes in Haiti, as well as an author of pedagogical texts and children’s books in Creole; Évelyne’s older brother, Michel-Rolph, was a renowned professor of anthropology and of social sciences at the University of Chicago who authored seminal theoretical works on Haitian culture and politics, such as Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacies of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990) and Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Michel-Rolph’s death in 2012 elicited homages from around the world, including an academic symposium at New York University in March 2013 and a special issue devoted to him and his works in the Journal of Haitian Studies 19.2 (Fall 2013).

25. “Évelyne Trouillot,” interview by Edwidge Danticat, Bomb 90 (Winter 2005), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2708/evelyne-trouillot.

26. Évelyne Trouillot, “Aftershocks,” New York Times, January 20, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/opinion/21trouillot.html?_r=0.

27. Rosalie l’infâme received the Prix de la romancière francophone du Club Soroptimist de Grenoble (2004) and was published in English as The Infamous Rosalie, trans. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

28. Évelyne Trouillot, “My Name Is Fridhomme,” trans. Jason Herbeck, Caribbean Writer 25 (2011): 206–12.

29. Although not published until 2012, Le bleu de l’île was performed much earlier and received the Beaumarchais award from l’Écriture Théâtrale de la Caraïbe in 2005.

30. Anne-Claire Veluire, “Haïti: La littérature pour exorciser la catastrophe,” Cultures sans frontières, March 28, 2010, http://www.radio.cz/fr/article/126393 (my translation).

31. “Évelyne Trouillot,” interview by Edwidge Danticat.

32. The story was published in English as “The Chareron Inheritance,” trans. Avriel Goldberger, in Words without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers—An Anthology, (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 311–22.

33. Yves Chemla, “Kettly Mars, Saisons sauvages,” Cultures Sud, my translation, www.culturessud.com/contenu.php?id=157.

34. Although the death of Alexis has never been confirmed, it is believed that he and four friends were arrested, tortured, and executed by the Tonton Macoutes in 1961.

After going into exile in Canada in 1964, the poet and novelist Étienne wrote, for instance, Le nègre crucifié (Éditions Francophone et Nouvelle Optique, 1974; Crucified in Haiti, trans. Claudia Harris, Montréal: Éditions du Marais, 2006) and Un ambassadeur macoute à Montréal (Nouvelle Optique, 1979; A Macoute ambassador in Montreal).

In 1980, Clitandre, along with other journalists such as the renowned Radio Inter broadcaster Jean Dominique, was expelled from Haiti. His novel Cathédrale du mois d’août (Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 1979; Cathedral of the August Heat, trans. Bridget Jones, New York: Readers International, 1987) chronicles the extreme poverty and brutal militiamen of Port-au-Prince under Duvalier.

As a poet who counts among the first generation of Haitians to write in Creole, Laraque went into exile (United States and Spain) in 1961 after being dismissed from the military. His works include Les armes quotidiennes—Poésie quotidienne (La Havane: Casa de las Americas, 1979; Daily weapons—Daily poetry) and Le vieux nègre et l’exil (Paris: Silex, 1988; The old negro and exile). His poem “Exile Is Stale Bread” was published in Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry, eds. Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 25.

The poet, actor, playwright, and founder of the Mouvement Théâtral Ouvrier, Labuchin was captured and imprisoned in Fort Dimanche three times before being sent into exile in France in 1982 for the remainder of Baby Doc’s rule. His poem “Tonton Macoutes Steal Dreams” can be found in Open Gate, 29.

For a detailed discussion of writing and terror during the Duvalier era, see Joseph F. Ferdinand, “Doctrines littéraires et climats politiques sous les Duvalier,” in Écrire en pays assiégé—Haiti—Writing under Siege, eds. Marie-Agnès Sourieau and Kathleen M. Balutansky (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 193–230.

35. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Tragedy, trans. Rose-Miriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009).

36. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012), 313.

37. Madison Smartt Bell, “Permanent Exile: On Marie Vieux-Chauvet,” Nation, February 1, 2010, www.thenation.com/article/permanent-exile-ma rie-vieux-chauvet.

38. Les rapaces was published posthumously under the author’s maiden name, Marie Vieux. Vieux, divorced from her husband, died in Brooklyn, New York, in 1973.

39. See Dieulermession Petit-Frère, “Relire ‘Les rapaces’ de Marie Vieux Chauvet,” Le Nouvelliste, October 4, 2012, http://lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/article/109523/Relire-Les-Rapaces-de-Marie-Vieux-Chauvet.html.

40. “Évelyne Trouillot,” interview by Edwidge Danticat.

41. Myriam J. A. Chancy, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 92.

42. Another notable exception when it comes to literary works addressing the Duvalier era published prior to the 1990s is Mémoire en colin- maillard (Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1976; Memory in blind man’s buff) by Anthony Phelps, which recounts events taking place over the course of the morning and early afternoon of September 23 (most likely, 1969), viewed from the vantage point of the protagonist’s balcony.

43. Chancy, 143.

44. Yanick Lahens, Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories, trans. Betty Wilson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

45. Kettly Mars, Savage Seasons, trans. Jeanine Herman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

46. The novel was awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde (2010).

47. In the original French, the expression used by Trouillot—“ce ne sont pas vos histoires” (7)—is particularly telling as, literally, it means “these stories are not yours.”

48. “Évelyne Trouillot,” interview by Edwidge Danticat.

49. Alix Michel, Manières haïtiennes: Le combat pour implanter démocratie et capitalisme dans la première république nègre (Xlibris, 2013), 124. Michel reports in his study that he was unable to find any trace of speeches or political appearances organized by Simone Duvalier. See also Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012), 321.

50. Alix Michel, Manières haïtiennes, 125.

51. Jean-Claude Duvalier died of a heart attack on October 4, 2014, at the age of sixty-three. Following an initial tweet by Haitian president Michel Martelly, who referred to the former dictator as “an authentic son of Haiti,” and the declaration of Martelly’s spokesman suggesting that, according to proper protocol, a state funeral would be warranted, public outrage in Haiti and the international community soon convinced the administration to deny Duvalier an official ceremony. He was buried on October 11 after a family ceremony at a chapel in Port-au-Prince.