Haitian Creole Comes of Age: Philology, Orthography, Education, and Literature in the &quot;Haitian Sixties,&quot; 1934-1957

Matt Robertshaw

The twenty-three years (1934-1957) between the end of the US Occupation and the start of the Duvalier era were a dynamic period of introspection and change in Haitian society. The relatively high degree of freedom of expression, the proliferation of ideologies like Marxism and Noirisme, and the "Revolution of 1946" were all linked to a transformation of Haitian politics and culture unprecedented since 1804. One clear indication of the spirit of this chapter of the country's history, which I have labeled the Haitian Sixties, was the progress made by the Kreyòl movement. After the setbacks under the US Occupation, the call for a legitimation of the popular language entered a phase of renewed vigor: it was bolstered by groundbreaking philological studies, concerted attempts to create a standard orthography, experiments in the use of the Kreyòl language as a medium of instruction, and a renaissance in Kreyòl-language literature. Yet as the movement progressed, it was hampered by new internal divisions and longstanding prejudices at different levels of Haitian society.

The Journal of Haitian Studies, Volume 26 No. 1 © 2020 haitian Creole Comes of age: philology, orthography, eDuCation, anD literature in the “haitian sixties,” 1934–1957 Matthew Robertshaw York University Rezime: Venn twa lane (1934–1957) ki separe fen peryòd okipasyon ameriken an ak kòmansman rejim Divayle a te yon peryòd entwospeksyon ak chanjman ki dinamik pou sosyete ayisyen an. Libète lapawòl te yon ti jan amelyore nan peryòd sa a, anpil ideyoloji maksis ak nwaris t ap feraye, epi « Revolisyon 1946 » la te an mouvman. Tout faktè sa yo te fè yonn pou fasilite yon transfòmasyon nan politik ak kilti ayisyen an nou pa te wè depi 1804. Yon endikatè enpòtan ki make lespri epòk la (yon epòk ke mwen rele « ane swasant ayisyen yo »), se te jan mouvman kreyòl la te make pa pandan peryòd sa a. Apre tout desepsyon pandan okipasyon ameriken an, demann pou fè lang kreyòl la vin yon lang ofisyèl t apral reprann fòs li. Te gen anpil faktè enpòtan ki te ba li jarèt tou tankou: nouvo etid filolojik, jèfò pou kreye yon òtograf estab, esperimantasyon ak kreyòl kòm lang enstriksyon, epi yon renesans nan literati an kreyòl. Antan mouvman an t ap pwogrese, li te fè fas ak nouvo divizyon anndan li menm ansanm ak vye prejije ki la depi lontan nan diferan nivo sosyete ayisyen an. Abstract: The twenty-three years (1934–1957) between the end of the US Occupation and the start of the Duvalier era were a dynamic period of introspection and change in Haitian society. The relatively high degree of freedom of expression, the proliferation of ideologies like Marxism and Noirisme, and the “Revolution of 1946” were all linked to a transformation of Haitian politics and culture unprecedented since 1804. One clear indication of the spirit of this chapter of the country’s history, which I have labeled the Haitian Sixties, was the progress made by the Kreyòl movement. After the setbacks under the US Occupation, the call for a legitimation of the popular language entered a phase of renewed vigor: it was bolstered by groundbreaking philological studies, concerted attempts to create a standard orthography, experiments in the use of the Kreyòl language as a medium of instruction, and a renaissance in Kreyòl-language literature. Yet as the movement progressed, it was hampered by new internal divisions and longstanding prejudices at different levels of Haitian society. 5 Haitian Creole Comes of Age “When I raised the question as to the possibility of writing simple Creole and teaching adults to read Creole, considering that 85 to 90% of the population spoke only Creole and could not read, I was met with ridicule. ‘To begin with you could not write Creole. How would you possibly write such and such a sound? In any case, even if you could write Creole satisfactorily and if people could be taught to read and write it, the government would never allow it, since French is the official language.’ Met with this rebuff, we stopped talking about it.” —H. Ormonde McConnell, Haiti Diary 1933–1970, recalling 1937 “M ap ekri yon liv nan lang pa m Mesye a yo mèt ri M konn sa m ap fè M gen 2 ou 3 bagay pou m di M gen yon koze pou m koze Ak moun pa m”1 —Félix Morisseau-Leroy, “Kristyan Bolye o,” 1953 Haitian Creole, or Kreyòl, is the mother tongue of the entire population of Haiti. Only a tiny fraction of the population has ever been able to speak French fluently, yet the French language has consistently held a privileged position in Haitian society, effectively barring the masses from having a voice. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, attitudes toward the Haitian language went through a major transformation. Long considered a vulgar dialect of French, suitable only for private or informal settings, by the end of the twentieth century it had been recast as a language in its own right, acceptable for use in most written and formal contexts.2 Today, this linguistic revolution remains incomplete; the French language still stubbornly holds a privileged position. But compared to the case in 1900, Haitians today are able to express themselves with a far greater degree of freedom in their mother tongue—Kreyòl. This process did not happen automatically. It is largely thanks to the work of writers, intellectuals, and activists who have consistently engaged with the shifting sociopolitical landscape that today Kreyòl is formally recognized as the language of the Haitian people. In 1901, the poet and intellectual Georges Sylvain inaugurated the debate, writing that the use of Kreyòl in Haitian classrooms would be a major boon to the country’s development, and he and his contemporaries began to lay the groundwork for his proposed linguistic revolution by putting Kreyòl to use in their works of literature.3 This effort petered out during the US Occupation (1915– 6 Matthew Robertshaw 1934), when growing opposition to the foreign intervention demanded national unity.4 In the wake of the Occupation, however, the question reemerged in force. This article is an overview and analysis of the Kreyòl debate as it matured in this period, which I refer to as the “Haitian Sixties.”5 Several critical contributions to the Kreyòl legitimation project occurred in these years. First, in the late 1930s, two Haitian scholars, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain and Jules Faine, undertook the first serious scientific studies of the language, analyzing its history and grammar. Second, the first comprehensive Kreyòl orthographies were developed. Third, in cooperation with Dumarsais Estimé’s government, UNESCO carried out a pilot project in mother-tongue instruction. And finally, Félix MorisseauLeroy and his peers established a sustained literary corpus in Kreyòl. These initiatives could well have occasioned Georges Sylvain’s linguistic revolution, but history got in the way. The election of François Duvalier in 1957 put a definitive end to this rare period of opportunity. Yet even before 1957 the linguistic revolution was by no means inevitable. The movement splintered as it progressed, and it continued to face opposition on multiple fronts. This article presents the major contributions to the Kreyòl project in this period in the realms of philology, orthography, education, and literature, and it examines the factors that continued to forestall the revolution that Sylvain had proposed half a century earlier. It is often supposed that Haiti’s insular elites are to blame for the sluggish development of democratizing policies like language rights and public education, but tracing the process of Kreyòl legitimation reveals that divisions within the movement itself were a major impediment to the goal of a linguistic revolution, and that opposition to the wider use of Kreyòl existed at multiple levels within Haitian society. Context: why “the haitian sixties”? The end of the US Occupation in 1934 initiated a time of self-reflection throughout Haitian society. The years 1934 to 1957 were a period of intense discourse and intellectual productivity, enabled by stints of political stability and relative civil liberty. It was by no measure a free and democratic society: authoritarian practices, extreme poverty, and civil rights abuses continued to plague the nation. But compared to the repressiveness of the recent occupation and the upcoming terror under the Duvalier regime, these twenty-three years were a rare period of openness and new possibilities. Press freedom was reestablished, and party politics, hitherto unknown in the country, took shape. Ideologies like Marxism and Noirisme (a distinctively Haitian brand of Black Power) gained sizeable Haitian Creole Comes of Age 7 followings across the social strata. Matthew J. Smith calls the era “modern Haiti’s greatest moment of political promise,” and Michel-Rolph Trouillot refers to “an ideological tidal wave unprecedented in Haitian history.”6 The worldwide spirit of change and revolt found a footing in Haiti during this twenty-three-year period. Hence, these years may fittingly be labelled the “Haitian Sixties.” The years 1934 to 1946 showed many continuities with the Occupation. Presidents Sténio Vincent (1930–1941) and Élie Lescot (1941–1946) were members of the traditional light-skinned elite, and very little changed in the economic or social structures of the country during their rule.7 Vincent was elected on an anti-Occupation platform in the first relatively free election since the arrival of the marines, yet his policies were largely determined by a continued affiliation with the United States. In the heated years leading up to and including World War II, Vincent and Lescot adopted increasingly autocratic methods and worked to curb the growth of radical politics at home. At this, however, they were largely unsuccessful. Two major currents of radical opposition emerged in the period: Marxism and Noirisme. Haiti’s small but inf luential Marxist factions criticized Vincent’s policies as the reassertion of the Haitian elite’s traditional economic exploitation of the masses that had been temporarily blunted—or, more accurately, handed over to the Americans—during the Occupation. Despite Vincent’s attempts to stamp out communism in the Republic, Haitian leftists organized to force the president’s resignation in 1941. 8 The Noiristes believed the principal problem with Haitian society was the disdain that the light-skinned elite felt for the Black population and the African components of the country’s heritage.9 Drawing from and politicizing the works of Jean Price-Mars, the Noiristes believed that the disenfranchised dark-skinned majority must take charge of the nation. Members of the small, emerging Black middle class saw themselves as the natural leaders of an authentic, regenerated Haiti.10 The Noiristes won a major victory in 1946, after a coup d’état toppled Lescot’s government. The “Revolution of 1946” elicited an expansion of civil liberties that resulted in a proliferation of newspapers and political parties.11 In this new climate of openness, Noiriste rhetoric gained currency, and by August the Haitian Senate elected the first dark-skinned president since before the Occupation, Dumarsais Estimé (1946–1950). Estimé’s election signaled a major sea change in Haitian politics and was a moment of great hope for a large portion of the population. His government created new social programs and made commendable attempts to include the 8 Matthew Robertshaw masses in public life, but Estimé was unable to bring lasting improvements. The postwar economy went into decline. Factional struggles derailed reforms. Ultimately, Estimé was overthrown in another military coup, and General Paul Magloire came to power. Magloire’s presidency (1950– 1956) was characterized by a shift away from the radicalism of the 1940s and an increase in state-sanctioned violence. Nonetheless, until 1957 intellectuals and artists still enjoyed considerable freedom, and some of the most significant works of Haitian literature were published during this final chapter of the Haitian Sixties. When one considers these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Kreyòl movement grew to maturity in the Haitian Sixties. It is, perhaps, more remarkable—given the determined efforts of scholars like Comhaire-Sylvain and Faine, of literacy advocates like H. Ormonde McConnell and Frank Laubach, of programs like the UNESCO pilot project in the Marbial Valley, and of writers like Morisseau-Leroy—that the official status of Kreyòl changed so little. Significantly, all three of the Haitian constitutions produced in this period (in 1935, 1946, and 1950) maintained verbatim the clause from the Constitution of 1918 designating French as the official language. But constitutional recognition is only part of the story. Perceptions of the language began to shift rapidly in these years, a transformation that was due in no small part to the first thorough academic studies of the language itself. kreyòl goes to the aCaDemy: Comhaire-sylvain anD faine In the 1930s there was still a widely held belief that Creoles and Pidgins were not in fact proper languages but a subset that was somehow different and inferior. As Michel DeGraff has pointed out, this widespread view of “Creole exceptionalism” emerged in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the racist-colonialist world system, and it obstinately hampered both scientific research and sociocultural development in Haiti, the broader Caribbean, and numerous other contexts around the world.12 Creole genesis was understood as a process of reduction. In 1936, for example, historian Franck L. Schœll asserted that Haitian Creole was merely French with “an extremely simplified grammar, a primitive syntax, the elimination of such secondary words as: auxiliaries, relative particles, etc. . . . [and] the reduction of verbs and personal pronouns to a single form, not to mention numerous elisions, aphereses and apocopes” (i.e., truncated words).13 If Kreyòl was nothing more than a rudimentary form of French, the logical implication was that the linguistic isolation of the Haitian masses would be solved if the people would just finish learning French. Kreyòl legitimation was therefore a fool’s errand. Haitian Creole Comes of Age 9 For those seeking a linguistic revolution in Haiti, it was necessary to prove once and for all that Kreyòl was a distinct language. Two Haitian scholars answered the call simultaneously in the mid-1930s. ComhaireSylvain’s study Le Créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntaxe and Faine’s monograph Philologie créole (both published in 1936) are often cited as the first scientific treatises to deal exhaustively and exclusively with the Haitian language.14 They applied techniques of modern linguistics to show empirically that Kreyòl is a language in its own right and not merely a simplified French dialect. The two analyses differed on several key aspects: they came to (or at least seemed to come to) different conclusions on the origins and genetic composition of the language. Taken together, they provided a dialectical framework for the Kreyòl debates of the 1940s and 1950s. Faine and Comhaire-Sylvain both affirmed in no uncertain terms that Kreyòl is a full-fledged language. In Comhaire-Sylvain’s introduction, she calls Kreyòl “the popular and familiar language of the Republic of Haiti” and then summarizes the country’s linguistic dichotomy, making a neat distinction between the two languages.15 Faine was even more explicit in his pronouncement. He explains that in Haiti, “parallel to French, there exists another language, the true language of the country, used at all levels of society, spoken by three and a half million Haitians: Kreyòl.”16 One should be clear that neither author was immune to the biases of their day; neither was able to fully escape a tacit assumption of the essential inferiority of African languages and, by extension, African people.17 Nevertheless, they both delved deep into the syntax and morphology of Kreyòl and showed persuasively that it is a sophisticated linguistic system, distinct from French and capable of complex expression. Beyond this fundamental assumption, however, the two studies diverge considerably in tone, if not in substance. Specifically, the authors seemed to disagree on the language family to which Kreyòl belonged. Faine saw it as “a Neo-Romance language derived from langue d’oïl, by way of old Norman, Picard, Angevin and Poitevin dialects, and composed of words borrowed from, among others, English and Spanish, and, to a limited extent, the Carib Indian and African idioms.”18 ComhaireSylvain, conversely, explained that “we are in the presence of a form of French poured in the mold of African syntax, or, since we generally classify languages based on their syntactical ancestry, an Ewe language with a French vocabulary.”19 This debate over the genetic affiliation of Kreyòl— and of Creole languages in general—has been going on ever since. Kreyòl unquestionably contains elements both of French and of West African languages, but modern linguists are reluctant to describe it as essentially French or essentially African. It is a language, plain and simple, and its 10 Matthew Robertshaw origin and composition should be analyzed based on principles applicable to any language, not exclusive to a Creole subset.20 In the 1930s, however, the “essential” character of Kreyòl had profound cultural and political importance. Despite their seemingly incompatible positions, Comhaire-Sylvain and Faine’s studies were not as different as commonly supposed. Comhaire-Sylvain did, in fact, describe parallels between the grammars of French and Kreyòl; it has been noted that much of her data actually contradicts her conclusion about “an Ewe language with a French vocabulary.”21 For the nonspecialist public, however, the two works stood in stark contrast. Faine minimized the overall influence of African languages on Kreyòl, while Comhaire-Sylvain popularized a view of Kreyòl as essentially an African language. They thus laid the foundation for two conf licting schools of thought regarding Kreyòl. Their joint legacy proved to be paradoxical. Although both authors drew from and perpetuated a stigma against African languages (and by extension, African people), they also unquestionably brought a new degree of validation to the view of Kreyòl as a language in its own right. Their books were reviewed in popular US and European academic journals, and many Haitian and foreign linguists and anthropologists subsequently took up the study of Kreyòl.22 But their contradictory conclusions prompted something of a schism in the Kreyòl movement and, in some ways, slowed down the very process they were hoping to usher in. In the 1940s and 1950s those studying Kreyòl typically aligned themselves with one point of view or the other. Shortly after Faine and Comhaire-Sylvain published their influential works, a Haitian intellectual named Charles Fernand Pressoir turned to the study of Kreyòl. Although he was more willing than Faine to acknowledge African influences on the language, he too ultimately saw Kreyòl as a Romance language, saying, “It stems from French just as the Neo-Romance languages stem from Latin.”23 US linguist Robert A. Hall also believed that “Haitian Creole is to be classed among the Romance languages, and specifically the northern group of the Gallo-Romance branch.”24 It bears repeating that, like Faine and Comhaire-Sylvain, these scholars by no means saw Kreyòl as a French dialect. It was, in Pressoir’s words, “as much a language as English and French”; as Hall put it, “it is not a dialect of French but an independent language, about as closely related to French as (say) modern Italian is to Latin.”25 They firmly believed Kreyòl should be used in education and supported the creation of a standard orthography to aid in that goal. But their view of Kreyòl’s kindred relationship to French affected the way they approached these issues. Haitian Creole Comes of Age 11 In the late 1930s, when the US intrusion was still palpable, ComhaireSylvain’s perspective had great resonance in Haiti. By focusing on Kreyòl’s non-European linguistic heritage, she did for the language what Jean Price-Mars had done for the culture more broadly. With his classic 1928 ethnographic work Ainsi parla l’oncle, Price-Mars contested the elites’ notion that Haitian culture was essentially French and called for a greater validation of its African heritage. His followers, the Indigéniste School, took up this calling in scholarly and artistic works. Not surprisingly, those affiliated with Indigéniste and Noiriste circles tended to adhere to Comhaire-Sylvain’s perspective on the essential character of the Kreyòl language. In 1938 the founders of the Noiriste newspaper Les Griots, François Duvalier and ethnologist Lorimer Denis, made the Price-Mars/ Comhaire-Sylvain connection explicit in the Declaration that opened the newspaper’s second issue: “The thousand and one African tribes fused their respective religions and thus arrived at a religious syncretism: Vodou. But in the linguistic domain, the many dialects had to follow the same process, resulting in the elaboration of a patois: Kreyòl.”26 In 1939, novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin restated the position thus: “Despite its vocabulary, borrowed from certain French dialects, by its grammatical forms (system of conjugation and declension) and its agglutinative character [i.e., words generally do not change form, as opposed to French with its countless conjugations] Kreyòl remains an African language.”27 As the Noiristes gained political strength in the time leading up to the Revolution of 1946, the Africanist view of Kreyòl became associated with a political position, and the two views of the fundamental nature of the language grew more and more polarized. As the Kreyòl legitimation project developed throughout the Haitian Sixties, it did so in the context of these two opposing theories regarding the fundamental character of the language. Faine and Comhaire-Sylvain dealt a serious blow to the argument that Kreyòl was not a proper language, but they also unintentionally hampered the Kreyòl movement by dividing it between their incompatible theories. It is worth noting that neither Faine nor Comhaire-Sylvain was adamantly committed to an extreme position; Faine revised his thesis in his next study—Le Créole dans l’univers, published just three years after Philologie créole—and Comhaire-Sylvain later admitted that her mentor had insisted she include the definitive statement about “an Ewe language with a French vocabulary.”28 But it was too late. The schism meant that the Kreyòl movement would thenceforth face opposition from within as well as from without. 12 Matthew Robertshaw Créole or Kreyòl? the searCh for an orthography It might seem surprising that a finicky disagreement over theoretical linguistics could have practical implications for the democratization of a country, but in Haiti that was precisely what happened. The neat division of the Kreyòl movement into two camps meant that all of the as-yetunsettled aspects of the vernacular legitimation project would now be approached and evaluated from two contradictory frames of reference. This is clearly illustrated in the Kreyòl orthography debates that began in the 1940s. The seemingly straightforward task of creating an orthography became a matter of bitter controversy. Anthropologists Bambi Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet have explained that although the processes of transforming a spoken language to written form have often been viewed as scientific, arbitrary, or unproblematic . . . [in Haiti] arguments about orthography ref lect competing concerns about representations of Haitianness at the national and international level, how speakers wish to define themselves to each other, as well as to represent themselves as a nation.29 Of course, this is not unique to Haiti. Orthographic debates have been a feature of many postcolonial nation-building projects in the twentieth century. In Bangladesh, for instance, the language movement opposed the adoption of the Arabic script for the Bengali language, while the Turkish government has discriminated against the Kurdish minority by banning the use of the letters x, w, and q, which exist in Kurdish but not in Turkish. In the Haitian case, the orthography debates were complicated by the predetermined categories that resulted from the Faine/ComhaireSylvain schism. Writers had been rendering Kreyòl into print for centuries. Inevitably this meant that a makeshift writing system had emerged organically. The obvious lexical connection between French and Kreyòl, combined with the French-language education of Haiti’s literate minority, resulted in a method of transcribing Kreyòl speech based on French orthographic conventions. Kreyòl writing was thus comprehensible to those who could read French, but different writers’ relative fidelity to French etymology on the one hand and to Kreyòl phonology on the other meant there was little consistency among authors. Regional and social variations in Kreyòl complicated the matter further still. For example, the Kreyòl word zwazo, meaning bird or birds and derived from the French les oiseaux, was rendered z’oéseaux by Oswald Durand in 1896, zouèzeaux by Georges Sylvain in 1901, zouézo by Haitian Creole Comes of Age 13 Earl C. Beaulac of the US Marine Corps in 1921, and zoiseaux by Jules Faine in 1936. In view of such variability, those supporting the wider use of Kreyòl in official settings were increasingly aware of the necessity of a standardized orthography. There had been at least one attempt at standardization prior to the Haitian Sixties. In the early 1920s a Haitian engineer named Frédéric Doret published some Kreyòl-language instructional materials and proposed an orthography. Doret adhered as closely as possible to French orthographic rules since he was primarily interested in using Kreyòl as an aid in the learning of French. In the midst of the education struggles of the 1920s, his work was largely ignored.30 It was not until after Faine and Comhaire-Sylvain published their influential studies that interest in Kreyòl standardization began to flourish. For their part, Faine’s and Comhaire-Sylvain’s orthographic choices highlighted their contrasting views of the language. Faine rendered his Kreyòl text in a modified French orthography and laid out a reasoned argument for his choice.31 He anticipated the impending debates, saying that etymology and phonemics were the two typical bases for writing systems and that each had advantages and disadvantages. He pointed out many cases where French orthography would not work for Kreyòl transcription, but ultimately he decided that French etymology should be the primary determining factor in designing the writing system since Haitian schools would continue to teach French. Comhaire-Sylvain made no formal proposal of her own, but inevitably she had to represent the language in some way. She opted for an ostensibly neutral phonetic transcription. The effect, however, was a version of Kreyòl that was decidedly un-French in appearance. For sake of comparison, consider the following: for the Kreyòl phrase yon kokennchenn nonm (a giant) Faine wrote “youn coquein’ne-chienne nhomme,” while Comhaire-Sylvain rendered the same phrase “ñu kokēn-šēn-nōm.” Again, neither was trying to cause controversy. Comhaire-Sylvain made no comment on how the language should be written, and Faine was careful to present his suggestions as tentative, noting, “When it comes to orthography, only usage definitively determines the rules.”32 Regardless, subsequent commentators on the orthography question were sharply divided over the degree to which the language should resemble French. The most extreme anti-French proposal came predictably from a member of the Noiriste movement. Théodora Holly was a teacher, an intellectual, a women’s and children’s rights activist, a Pan-Africanist, and a regular contributor to Les Griots. She was affiliated with international 14 Matthew Robertshaw organizations like the United Negro Improvement Association and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. Her brother, Arthur Holly, was a racial theorist and an ethnologist who wrote on Vodou and Haiti’s African heritage. In 1938 she penned an article about the Vai syllabary—a non-Latin writing system developed in the early nineteenth century by the Vai people of West Africa—and wondered whether “an entirely original syllabic alphabet . . . created explicitly for the Haitian dialect” could help to solve the problem of illiteracy in the country.33 Nothing seems to have come from her proposal. A representative of the other major ideological current of the day, Marxism, also proposed an orthography. Christian Beaulieu was one of the founders of the Parti Communiste Haïtien along with his friend Jacques Roumain. An educator who had studied at Columbia University, he was undoubtedly influenced by John Dewey’s Progressive Education movement, which rejected classical European models and emphasized active learning. In 1939 he published an article titled “Pour écrire le créole” as a response to those who opposed Kreyòl-language education on the basis of its lack of an orthography.34 Like Faine, he weighed the pros and cons of etymological and phonemic orthographies, noting that one might be seduced by the simplicity and ease of the “one letter, one sound” system. Ultimately, though, he committed to a French-based system because in his view the preponderance of homophones that Kreyòl has inherited from French would make a phonemic system confusing. He gave the example of the phonemes /ba/ and /ka/, which each have six meanings in Kreyòl.35 He then laid out a list of forty-seven rules for adapting French spellings to Kreyòl. He admitted his system was not perfect but insisted it was superior to the “current anarchy.”36 Beaulieu’s work won some followers, but his premature death in 1943 put an end to the project. The first widely used Kreyòl orthography was developed between 1940 and 1943 under the direction of H. Ormonde McConnell, a Northern Irish Methodist missionary. In his missionary studies McConnell had learned French via the International Phonetic Alphabet before relocating to Haiti in 1933. He quickly learned that French competence alone would be inadequate for his work with Haitian peasants. He began inquiring about the use of Kreyòl in religious services but was met with a discouraging response. He later recalled: The use of Creole in church was unthinkable. When I raised the question as to the possibility of writing simple Creole and teaching adults to read Creole, considering that 85 to 90% of the population spoke only Creole and could not Haitian Creole Comes of Age 15 read, I was met with ridicule. “To begin with you could not write Creole. How would you possibly write such and such a sound? In any case, even if you could write Creole satisfactorily and if people could be taught to read and write it, the government would never allow it, since French is the official language.” Met with this rebuff, we stopped talking about it. But we didn’t stop thinking and praying about it.37 Around 1940 McConnell began working on an orthography. As a foreigner, he stood outside the Faine/Comhaire-Sylvain divide. His main concern was the efficient teaching of Kreyòl literacy for the sake of spreading the Gospel. He was aware of Faine’s orthography but believed a complicated, French-style orthography was useless for Haitian adults who would likely never learn French. Consequently, McConnell’s orthography was the first attempt to standardize a phonemic writing system for Kreyòl. Without a doubt McConnell contributed significantly to the Kreyòl legitimation project. Even Pressoir, who became one of his most vocal critics, conceded that “despite his errors . . . Pastor McConnell remains a pioneer who deserves the recognition of the Haitian people.”38 He helped to establish the first Kreyòl newspaper in 1940. He oversaw the printing of Kreyòl-language books on agriculture, arithmetic, and hygiene. He helped to break down the stigma around the use of Kreyòl in Christian religious practices. He set up several learning centers that taught thousands of adults to read and write Kreyòl, and he held public demonstrations of the method to show its effectiveness.39 He met with Vincent and Lescot and representatives of the Department of Public Instruction and supervised a state-sponsored adult literacy program beginning in 1943. His effect on the popularization of written Kreyòl can hardly be overstated. His foreignness, however, meant that a large portion of the Haitian population ultimately rejected his version of Kreyòl. McConnell based his methods on the work of Frank Laubach, a US missionary and literacy activist who had developed a method of teaching literacy in the Philippines in the 1910s. McConnell began corresponding with Laubach in 1939 and arranged for him to visit Haiti in 1943. While in Port-auPrince, Laubach suggested a few minor changes to the system, which was thenceforth known as the McConnell-Laubach orthography. Ironically, although Laubach’s suggestions were intended to facilitate subsequent French learning (replacing u and sh with the more French-like ou and ch), his contribution meant the orthography was forever associated with the United States—hardly a desirable association given the bitter legacy of the recent Occupation. Those who preferred a French-style orthography 16 Matthew Robertshaw thought the McConnell-Laubach system looked “too English” with its abundant k’s, w’s and y’s, while those with a Noiriste bent criticized the system as a Trojan Horse that would enable continued US inf luence in Haiti.40 The association between McConnell and President Lescot’s pro-US economic policies was not unwarranted. In addition to aiding US Protestant missionaries, McConnell was contracted by the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole (SHADA) to publish a Kreyòl-language-learning manual in English for Americans with agricultural interests in the country.41 The rural masses, who could have benefited most from McConnell’s work, rejected the orthography for more complicated reasons. Rural Haiti in the early 1940s was deeply affected by the so-called antisuperstition campaign of 1941–1942. Orchestrated by French members of the local Catholic clergy, the campaign resulted in the large-scale, systematic destruction of Vodou temples and sacred objects. The raids have been explained as a reaction by the Catholic Church to the loss of its privileged position in Haitian politics, and to the growth of Noirisme as a political option.42 Interestingly, Smith points out that another instigating factor for the campaign was the growth of Protestantism in rural Haiti—which was of course intimately tied to McConnell’s work.43 This “trilateral religious conflict,” to borrow a phrase from Laurent Dubois, simultaneously forced Haitian Catholic churches to begin using Kreyòl in their masses to retain their congregants.44 President Lescot gave only tacit support to the antisuperstition campaign, but his presidency was forever associated with the event. As a result, Lescot was tremendously unpopular among Haiti’s rural population by the time he launched his adult literacy campaigns and rural education reforms. Consequently, McConnell’s writing system failed to take root in rural Haiti.45 Ultimately the Haitian government abandoned the McConnellLaubach orthography altogether in 1951. The eminent Haitian linguist Yves Dejean considered it to have been a perfectly good writing system, stating in 1977 that the official rejection was due to “the pressure of a faction of an intelligentsia that is totally incompetent in the matter of inventing a writing system, and almost entirely unconcerned with the interests of the Haitian masses.”46 As we have seen, however, it was not only the traditional Francophile intelligentsia who took issue with the writing system. Associations with the United States and with President Lescot, as well as its non-French appearance, made it incompatible with Haitian identity as perceived by several different groups within the society. Regardless, by the early 1950s another orthography was quickly surpassing McConnell-Laubach as the preferred system. Haitian Creole Comes of Age 17 In 1947 Pressoir, a philologist, published his Débats sur le créole et le folklore, which summarized the problems with the McConnell-Laubach system. He said that it was a nearly perfect phonemic system, but it failed to take into account that “Kreyòl is a mixed language in a country with French traditions.”47 He took particular issue with McConnell’s treatment of nasalization and his use of the non-French grapheme w. McConnell had used a circumflex to represent nasal sounds, but Pressoir argued that Kreyòl must not use a French diacritic for a completely different purpose. To illustrate, McConnell had written the Kreyòl word konprann (understand) as “kôprân” while Pressoir preferred “konprann.” Interestingly, Pressoir had no problem with the non-French grapheme k, but he suggested that w be replaced with corresponding French multigraphs: “wa” became “oi” and “wè” became “ouè.” In the end, his proposed Kreyòl orthography was essentially McConnell’s phonemic system but with minor concessions to French that were meant to facilitate the learning of the latter language. More importantly, it was Haitian. It won support from those who opposed the foreign McConnell-Laubach system. In collaboration with the minister of education, Lélio Faublas, Pressoir finalized the Faublas-Pressoir orthography in January 1951.48 At that point it must have seemed like the orthography debates had been resolved. Indeed, the Faublas-Pressoir system was used in official contexts for the next twenty-four years. But universal consensus was a long way off. Protestant missionaries continued to use the McConnellLaubach system, while the local Catholic Church published materials in its own French-style orthography.49 Haitian authors like Emile Roumer and Jacques Stephen Alexis continued using their own invented orthographies.50 Well-intentioned foreigners like Hall, Margaret Churchill, and Paul Berry continued to suggest improvements to the writing system. This orthographic patchwork outlived the Haitian Sixties, so that by the time Duvalier came to power one could reasonably spell a word as common as the indefinite article yon at least seven different ways ( yon, youn, you, yioun, ou, oun and gnou). Clearly one cannot speak of a standardized orthography before 1957. It was another two decades before the debate finally came to a resolution.51 first-language eDuCation in the haitian sixties The lack of consensus over the orthography was a major impediment to the linguistic revolution that seemed primed to occur during the Haitian Sixties. The orthography question was intimately connected to the matter of education; in 1939 Beaulieu noted that “the supreme argument that the adversaries of Kreyòl Instruction seem desperately to cling to is the absence 18 Matthew Robertshaw of a standard orthography.”52 Until the writing system was standardized, any attempt at teaching first-language literacy in Haiti would be bogged down in the morass of linguistic controversy. Nonetheless, the period saw some small but important steps toward first-language instruction becoming a real possibility. In the years following the Occupation there were diverse voices calling for Kreyòl in the classroom. Several of the aforementioned writers made bold denunciations of the existing system and compelling arguments for first-language education. Faine, Beaulieu, Duvalier, and Denis had all made such statements during Vincent’s presidency. Vincent, like countless presidents before him, made minor attempts to reform education, but his administration does not seem to have made any effort to formally introduce Kreyòl in the classroom. When his term ended in 1941, denunciations of the state of education were as prevalent as ever. That year, US sociologist James G. Leyburn published his celebrated study The Haitian People, which made this pessimistic observation: A practically insoluble problem, given current attitudes, is that of the language to be used in rural schools. . . . Now every Haitian, high and low, knows Créole, so that the question immediately arising is: Why should not the rural teachers teach in Créole? The answer involves every sort of inward prejudice, yearning, and instilled doctrine. The teacher is almost sure to be struggling up to the élite class, and to require him to deny himself the luxury of speaking French (to him almost a patent of nobility) would be heartrending. Likewise, he would have his “good” reason for teaching school in French: the unity of the country demands a single language; all schoolbooks are in French, none in Créole; and Créole has no literature, nor even an accepted spelling. The fact remains that except in rare instances all schoolteachers use French to their pupils, and not one peasant out of a hundred can even guess what is being said in that language.53 The same year, Morisseau-Leroy, then a young writer who had just visited Cuba and observed the superior quality of education on that island, denounced the Haitian system, saying: For 90% of the Haitian population, French is a dead language whose words elicit no response. . . . Why is primary instruction not given in Kreyòl? [Critics of Kreyòl Haitian Creole Comes of Age 19 instruction] object, saying it is difficult to write in Kreyòl. Kreyòl, which stems from French with words borrowed from Spanish, English, etc. is just as difficult to write as any other language. They object, saying there are no books in Kreyòl. Young writers are offering to write them. They find other objections.54 Such arguments had been in vogue for generations. What is interesting in both excerpts, though, is that neither Leyburn nor Morisseau-Leroy laid the blame on Haiti’s conservative elites, often considered the element of society most resistant to change in order to protect their privileged status. Leyburn—whose study focused primarily on the Haitian “caste system”—saw rural teachers as the most resistant to the use of Kreyòl. Morisseau-Leroy was never one to avoid criticizing the establishment, but he too concluded that “[in regard to] opposition to teaching in Kreyòl, the reluctance of young Haitian pedagogues to experiment with Kreyòl instruction comes more from a false sense of pride than from the obscurantism of past generations.”55 In other words, even if policymakers had sanctioned the use of Kreyòl in schools, they would not be able to implement it unilaterally. It was becoming clear that the linguistic revolution would depend on the cooperation of all classes. This may help to explain the failure of Lescot’s education reforms in the early 1940s. Under the leadership of Education Minister Maurice Dartigue, Lescot’s administration made a small but significant concession to Kreyòl in the classroom. The Réforme Dartigue called for teachers to use Kreyòl for the first two to three years of schooling in order to aid monolingual students in their transition to exclusively French-language education.56 But implementation of the reform was hampered by the legacy of the Occupation. The Americans had attempted to set up a parallel education system that focused on practical instruction and made use of Kreyòl, but Haitians across the social strata were scandalized by the implication that people of African descent were seen as unfit for a liberal education and their children as little more than cogs in the occupiers’ agricultural machine.57 Lescot’s education reform in the early 1940s failed partly due to its association with his pro-US economic policies. Its use of the “too English” McConnell-Laubach orthography only served to emphasize the fact. The Lescot period is also noteworthy for the story of Kreyòl because it marks the true beginning of adult literacy programs in Haiti. We have already seen that McConnell worked with the Lescot government to launch an adult literacy campaign in the early 1940s, with meager results. It 20 Matthew Robertshaw was significant, however, because subsequent administrations carried on the work to teach Kreyòl literacy to uneducated adults.58 It came to be expected of them. For many years adult literacy programs were virtually the only uncontroversial avenue for the official use of Kreyòl. 59 Other nongovernmental groups also took up the project. Besides Christian missionaries, Marxist organizations and the emerging labor movement under its celebrated leader Daniel Fignolé provided adult literacy classes in the 1940s.60 The proliferation of adult literacy programs is an important aspect of the Kreyòl legitimation process because it provided a benign locus for discussing things like orthography and pedagogy. Even when there was no chance of Kreyòl becoming the language of instruction in Haitian primary and secondary schools, the question of adult literacy was a convenient, nonthreatening way to approach the issue. After Estimé’s election in 1946, effective education reform became a real possibility. Whereas Lescot had to contend with the memory of the US Occupation and the antisuperstition campaign, the urban and rural masses generally saw Estimé as a president who had their interests in mind. The very fact that a dark-skinned man from humble origins had become president seems to have initiated a major change in perceptions of education among the popular classes.61 For the first time in generations, rural Haitians were willing to have confidence in their government. Primary school enrollment is estimated to have risen 45 percent during Estimé’s term in office.62 He made history in 1947 when, under his leadership, Haiti became the first nation in the world to request and receive financial and technical assistance from the newly established UNESCO. It seems evident that Estimé had the will and the popular support to fundamentally reform education in Haiti, yet he ultimately failed to bring lasting change. Curiously, he seems to have made no attempt to bring Kreyòl to Haitian classrooms.63 This is all the more surprising when one considers the outcomes of UNESCO’s Pilot Project in Fundamental Education, which was carried out in the isolated Marbial Valley in southern Haiti from 1947 to 1953. The Pilot Project was an ambitious attempt to adapt modern education techniques to the particularities of Haitian culture and society. Local and foreign experts were recruited. UNESCO sent the celebrated Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux to do a field survey of the underdeveloped and overpopulated valley over the summer of 1948. The language problem quickly became apparent. “Any program for popular education in Haiti must use Creole if it is to make contact with the people,” said project assistant director Emmanuel Gabriel, a Haitian specialist in fundamental education.64 In September 1948, ten new education centers began teaching Kreyòl literacy to children and Haitian Creole Comes of Age 21 adults. The Marbial experiment quickly became a focal point for those concerned with Haitian education reform, as well as parties with a stake in first-language education elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, the UNESCO team was distracted by the orthography question. In the June 1949 edition of their monthly journal they made the following comments: Preparing books and readers in Haitian Creole poses a knotty problem. The fact is that Creole, which is a mixture of ancient French and West African tribal languages[,] has been written in at least four different ways with different alphabets. The orthography and grammar have never been satisfactorily established. This explains why one finds signs and posters, written in Creole, which spell UNESCO in different ways. “Ounesco,” “Unesco,” and even “Inesko” are thus commonly seen.65 In 1948 the Faublas-Pressoir system had yet to be finalized and Haitians were still bitterly divided on the subject, so the Pilot Project staff did what seemed natural: they hired a foreign expert to settle the matter. The linguist Hall, who worked at Cornell, was called in to do a comprehensive study of Kreyòl grammar and vocabulary and to develop a standardized alphabet. He collaborated with Métraux, Comhaire-Sylvain, and McConnell to produce his study Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary.66 However, Hall and UNESCO do not seem to have sensed the way the orthography debates were going. The McConnell-Laubach orthography had been rejected because of its association with the United States and because it looked “too English” with its liberal use of w’s and k’s. Yet UNESCO hired Hall, an American, who produced an orthography that was virtually identical to the McConnell-Laubach phonemic system. Hall’s work had little impact on the development of a standardized Kreyòl orthography, and the educational materials UNESCO produced were obsolete within a decade.67 Worse still, when the Pilot Project received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, much of it went to cover Hall’s fruitless orthography work. Despite UNESCO’s misreading of the orthography question, the positive results of its Kreyòl literacy program were an important contribution to the normalization of first-language education in Haiti. In 1949, on the basis of its findings, the United Nations published a hefty 327page report detailing its recommendations to Estimé’s government. The authors succinctly problematized Haiti’s language dichotomy in the light of modern pedagogical techniques. They acknowledged the “inestimable 22 Matthew Robertshaw value” of French, which “opens the doors to the greatest treasures of western civilization,” but went on to insist that it was not an acceptable medium for Haiti’s national education system: The undeniable fact is that at present all Haitians speak and understand Creole, but that French has very little functional use in the lives of the peasants. . . . In their formative years most Haitian children think, feel, and express themselves in their mother tongue, which is Creole. . . . Learning is based on experience. It is an elementary law that one passes from the known to the new and unknown. A language that is not spoken or used cannot serve as a vehicle for direct vicarious experience.68 By summarizing a fundamental principle of modern pedagogy, the authors delineated the futility of Haiti’s French-based education system. They made a number of recommendations, including a nationwide Kreyòl and French literacy project overseen by a “committee of interested Haitian leaders,” the formation of a new department of literacy within the Ministry of Education, and the publication of textbooks and weekly periodicals in Kreyòl.69 With such a clearly defined program, and with the will and popular support to implement it, why did Estimé fail to bring about a fundamental change in Haitian education? In one account of the period, Jamaican language rights activist Hubert Devonish maintains that Estimé and his fellows “did not see it in their own best interest to pursue a language policy which would have significantly attacked the linguistic status quo at that time.”70 While it is true that the administration was culpable of certain well-established forms of corruption, self-interest is not an adequate explanation. Estimé’s failure to institute first-language education was part of his inability to improve social conditions more generally. The radical coalition that led the Revolution of 1946 fell apart shortly after Estimé’s election. The end of WWII, in combination with Estimé’s attempts to nationalize Haitian banking and agriculture, resulted in dramatic economic decline, as exemplified by the collapse of the banana industry in 1949. Furthermore, he was unable to curb the power of the military, which ultimately forced him from office in the spring of 1950. He had received the UN’s report less than a year before. Once Magloire took power, hopes for a linguistic revolution in education seemed to slip away. Despite his decidedly authoritarian style and his initial widespread popular support, Magloire too failed to revitalize Haitian education. Amid economic collapse (though with a façade of Haitian Creole Comes of Age 23 prosperity), a cozy alliance with the traditional elites, and a gradual shift away from the radicalism of the 1940s, Magloire was unable or unwilling to implement the UN’s suggestions. During his term the voices calling for Kreyòl in the classroom were as loud and numerous as ever. In a speech for the 150th anniversary of Haitian independence, Price-Mars damned the education system as “simply odious” and “the most flagrant and the most dangerous injustice of the twentieth century.”71 The following year, Time correspondent Edith Efron wrote: In most primary schools throughout the Republic one may find ill-paid middle-class teachers proud of their relative mastery of the French tongue, conducting their classes in this language in front of a group of awestruck uncomprehending children. . . . No Creole texts are used by the Haitian school system; the language of the country is unused, untaught.72 The Magloire administration did make some minor contributions to Kreyòl education. As noted, they arranged a temporary ceasefire in the orthography debates by giving official support to the Faublas-Pressoir system. The eponymous Faublas worked tirelessly as director of the government’s adult literacy campaign and oversaw the publication of textbooks and periodicals in Kreyòl.73 But Haitian children continued learning—or failing to learn—in French. félix morisseau-leroy anD the (re)Birth of kreyòl literature The most significant contribution to the Kreyòl movement from the Magloire period had nothing to do with public policy. The early fifties witnessed a surge of creativity among Haitian authors and resulted in a corpus of Kreyòl-language literature as had never been seen before. Haiti has a strong literary tradition, but for most of the country’s history the vast majority of written works were in French. A small number of nineteenthcentury works incorporated a smattering of Kreyòl, most famously Oswald Durand’s poem “Choucoune” as well as a few works by Ignace Nau and Massillon Coicou. But just like in every other written and formal context, French was the rule. Of course, an informal Kreyòl literature—the oral storytelling tradition known as lodyans—has also always existed in Haiti. Writers like Nau sometimes adapted lodyans into their written texts, making some use of Kreyòl in works that were, nonetheless, primarily in French.74 There had long been impassioned pleas for the serious use of Kreyòl as a formal literary language. “Our national Creole deserves a place in Art, in the universal Republic of Letters,” Louis Borno had said in his 24 Matthew Robertshaw preface to Sylvain’s groundbreaking collection of Kreyòl fables, Cric? Crac! (1901).75 Sylvain inaugurated the first sustained literary use of Kreyòl. Novelists Frédéric Marcelin and Fernand Hibbert and the lodyanseur Justin Lhérisson, known collectively as the École Nationale, began incorporating the language into their writing. Once again, these works were not Kreyòllanguage literature. They were in French, but they made use of the Haitian language to conjure up realistic scenes and certain types of characters.76 For his part, in the introduction to Cric? Crac! Sylvain explicitly stated his belief that the wider acceptance of Kreyòl in literature and in schools would go a long way to solving the country’s education problems.77 The sentiment was echoed time and again throughout the early twentieth century, yet it was not until 1953 that the first foundational works of selfsufficient Kreyòl literature finally appeared. As a result, after five decades of slow progress at the hands of waffling governments, linguists, foreign missionaries, and international organizations, Haitian authors reclaimed their place as the vanguard of the Kreyòl project. Of course, the popular language had never fully disappeared from Haitian literature since Sylvain and the École Nationale had made their first experiments with Kreyòl in the first decade of the century. It is significant that the works of the École Nationale proved to have staying power. Lhérisson, the most avid user of Kreyòl, earned a particular place of esteem in the nation’s literary culture. His 1905 book La Famille des Pitite-Caille was republished in 1927 and Zoune chez sa ninnaine (1906) in 1953. A biography of Lhérisson appeared in 1941, and Pitite-Caille was adapted for the stage two years later.78 Poets and playwrights continued to dabble with Kreyòl, and novels published between 1915 and 1950 tended to include the occasional Kreyòl phrase or song. Such was the case with Jacques Romain’s acclaimed Gouverneurs de la rosée (1943). The most noteworthy linguistic feature of the novel, however, was Roumain’s use of creolized French. He devised a brilliant solution to the age-old problem of authenticity versus accessibility by applying Kreyòl rhythms and syntactical features to French dialogue.79 The international success of the novel was a boon for Haitian literature generally, but one is left to wonder whether Roumain’s innovative linguistic compromise forestalled the birth of a serious and sustained Kreyòl literature. The call to use Kreyòl as a formal literary language was finally answered in the early 1950s by Morisseau-Leroy, now a forty-year-old civil servant. Morisseau, as he was known, had taught mathematics in his hometown of Jacmel, where he had seen firsthand the inherent problems in the Haitian education system. Like Beaulieu and Faublas, Morisseau Haitian Creole Comes of Age 25 had earned his master’s degree in education at Columbia University and was thus acquainted with modern pedagogical theory including Dewey’s Progressive Education movement. Morisseau had held posts in the Ministry of Education and had been involved with UNESCO’s Pilot Project in Marbial. It is no wonder he was passionately committed to first-language education. He understood, however, that one of the major arguments against Kreyòl education was that there was virtually no Kreyòl literature on which to base it. Morisseau was himself an author; he had published a collection of poems in 1940 and a novel in 1946, both in French. Accordingly, he understood the tension Haitian writers felt between artistic authenticity and the hopes of finding an audience abroad. He came to believe, however, that it was foolish for Haitian authors to think that they would be accepted in the wider world only if they wrote in polished French. Two characters in his 1946 novel Récolte discuss this idea: “Do you think that one must try writing in Kreyòl?” “Yes, why not? Jean Rictus wrote in Argot. He said everything he wanted to say.” “Don’t you think that Kreyòl will risk further isolating the Haitian poet from the rest of the world?” “In any case, those who write little insignificant sonnets in the purest classical French are no less isolated, since, you can be sure, no serious foreign readers waste their time reading such nonsense, unless it’s for a laugh.”80 Furthermore, in his view the role of the author was primarily to bring about social change, not simply to win acclaim. As he had written in 1939: “The writer who does not feel a social mission is not worthy of our respect.”81 With all this in mind, in the early 1950s Morisseau turned resolutely to creating literature in Kreyòl. In 1953 he produced two works in Kreyòl: Dyakout, a collection of poetry, and Antigòn, a play adapted from Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone. He wanted to prove that the language was capable of infinitely complex expression and therefore a suitable medium for literature. The poems in Dyakout are considered the first to use Kreyòl as a true literary language and not merely as a tool for depicting Haitian reality. As Kreyòl-language poet Georges Castera later explained, “It is in Dyakout that we find the first attempts at non-lexicalized metaphors, which is to say metaphors that are not part of everyday conversation.”82 While his predecessors had used Kreyòl in their writings, Morisseau simply wrote in Kreyòl. Antigòn, too, 26 Matthew Robertshaw was intended to show the expressive capacity of the language. Morisseau considered Sophocles’s play to be the pinnacle of world literature, and he believed that even so complex a tragedy could be successfully adapted to the Haitian language.83 He wanted his Antigòn to be a success in order to contest the assumption that one had to write in French in order to win accolades.84 Other Haitian authors, he hoped, would then abandon their misgivings regarding Kreyòl and a robust literature in the language would take shape. These literary goals were coupled with Morisseau’s sociopolitical motivations. Many of the poems in Dyakout draw their themes from the plight of the Haitian peasantry and urban poor. Antigòn is an open criticism of the endemic corruption in Haiti’s political structure. Apart from their content, the two works were also radical in form. In conceiving Antigòn, Morisseau specifically chose to work in the oral genre of theatre so that his literature would be accessible to the illiterate masses. He famously staged the play before audiences of thousands of rural people.85 By bringing a literary masterpiece to the illiterate majority he symbolized and contributed to the major social transformation that Haiti desperately needed. His nonoral work was also explicitly connected to the wider movement to promote written Kreyòl. Dyakout was dedicated to Kreyòl-education advocate Beaulieu, and initially Morisseau used Beaulieu’s proposed orthography. After Faublas cautioned Morisseau that writing in an orthography other than the official Faublas-Pressoir system was equivalent to “writing merely for the intellectuals who do not really need Kreyòl anyway,” Morisseau took his advice.86 Years later, when the government adopted a new system, Morisseau promptly switched over once again.87 Morisseau fulfilled his artistic and sociopolitical goals. Antigòn was a major hit. One reviewer was moved to confess, “It seems that Kreyòl is able to express the sentiments of the deepest, most nuanced, and highest form.”88 Another said: “Morisseau-Leroy has successfully shown us the richness of our national language . . . proving that it can serve not only for simple folklore song, but is rich enough and deep enough to express the beauty of foreign masterpieces.”89 Yet another immediately referred to it as “the play by which he made Creole a recognized literary language.”90 It went on to play in Paris, New York City, Montreal, Accra, Dakar, Miami, and Kingston.91 Its success immediately prompted other writers to follow his lead. Franck Fouché staged a Kreyòl version of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex just three months after Antigòn’s debut.92 Others produced ambitious plays, poetry, short stories, and translations in Kreyòl with greater and greater frequency over the subsequent years. For his part, Morisseau went Haitian Creole Comes of Age 27 on to write dozens of additional works in the language, and his name is permanently linked to the Kreyòl movement. In the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of Morisseau and his fellows, literature returned to the forefront of the Kreyòl struggle. This shift turned out to be more significant than they could have anticipated. Unbeknownst to them, by the end of the decade their government would achieve an unprecedented degree of inefficiency and disregard for the interests of the Haitian people. Meaningful education reforms and processes of democratization were suspended indefinitely once François Duvalier came to power in 1957. With political channels cut off, it would now more than ever be up to Haitian authors to carry the Kreyòl movement. Many writers and intellectuals, including Morisseau-Leroy, went into exile, where they continued publishing and engaging with Haitian identity politics from abroad.93 ConClusion The Haitian Sixties were a time of great hope, important changes, and frustrating setbacks for the Kreyòl legitimation project. The intense nationalism that had emerged during the Occupation developed into productive discourses following the US withdrawal, and the relative stability and openness of the period allowed for new voices to be heard and new views to be articulated. The Kreyòl question came back into vogue, and the Kreyòl movement saw several significant developments. Kreyòl received formal academic attention and was thus scientifically established as a true language. Yet these earliest linguistic works unintentionally caused a schism in the Kreyòl movement, pitting those who considered it a Neo-Romance language against those who saw it as fundamentally African. This initial split was further complicated by divisions regarding the orthography. Kreyòl received its first exhaustive and systematic writing system in the early 1940s, but the foreign look of the phonemic orthography provoked hostile reactions. The inability to reach a consensus forestalled the coordination of the Kreyòl project. First-language education made important strides in the period, and was endorsed by an international organization, but a lack of cooperation from across the social spectrum delayed its implementation. Finally, the movement gained an invaluable asset when the first major works of formal Kreyòl literature appeared in 1953. Due to various complex factors, however, the linguistic revolution had still failed to occur by the time of the political crisis that brought François Duvalier to power. Had the election of September 1957 turned out differently, Kreyòl legitimation might have taken a more direct route. 28 Matthew Robertshaw Had, for instance, labor leader Fignolé been successful in his bid, the Haitian Sixties might have extended into the actual 1960s. Fignolé enjoyed extensive popular support. He wrote passionately about education reform and was well acquainted with the utility of Kreyòl. But of course, it is fruitless to hypothesize about alternative outcomes. One must remember that Duvalier too had promised education reforms and a massive literacy campaign. In any case, coherent platforms and ideological debates did not play much of a role in the fateful election of 1957. As we know, to the nation’s detriment, Duvalier was the victor. Like so much else in Haitian society, the Kreyòl project suffered tremendously in the subsequent years. But the advances could not be reversed. The movement may have gone underground in the darkest years of the Duvalier dynasty, but the discourses and linguistic infrastructure that had flourished in the Haitian Sixties remained a powerful resource for those who continued to champion the interests of the Haitian people. Notes 1 “I’m writing a book in my own language/The gentlemen may laugh/I know what I’m doing/I have two or three things to say/I have something to talk about/With my people.” All translations mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Despite constitutional protection for Kreyòl, in practice there are still limitations to its free use in Haiti. The court system operates mainly in French, and there are still schools where students are punished when they are caught speaking Kreyòl. Ministers and Parliament members who are caught using Kreyòlinfluenced grammatical patterns (“Creolisms”) in their French are sometimes ridiculed in the press and on social media. State institutions regularly make information available only in French on their websites and in printed materials. For more on Haiti’s “linguistic apartheid,” see DeGraff, “Haiti’s ‘Linguistic Apartheid.’” 3 See Robertshaw, “L’Ouverture.” 4 See Robertshaw, “Occupying Creole.” 5 I have chosen this admittedly problematic term to refer to the period 1934– 1957. The usual terminology—the post-Occupation period, the pre-Duvalier era, etc.—is cumbersome and based on external referents, and I was anxious to find a term that would frame the period as a distinct chapter in Haiti’s history. One of the few book-length studies that deals exclusively with this period, Matthew J. Smith’s Red and Black in Haiti, makes it clear that a defining characteristic of the era was the proliferation of ideologies like Marxism and Noirisme and the attendant political struggles, even at the grassroots level. Progressive Haitian authors, artists, and academics also broke new ground in Haitian Creole Comes of Age 29 this period, as evinced by the publication of the celebrated novels Gouverneurs de la rosée and Compère Général Soleil, as well as Morisseau-Leroy’s pioneering works in Kreyòl. Hence there are clear parallels with the so-called “Global Sixties.” The “Sixties” has historiographical problems of its own, and I know that the “Haitian Sixties” will be subject to those same pitfalls, but I believe it is worth discussing as a label for that period—to see how it does and does not fit. 6 Smith, Red and Black, 2; Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, 134. 7 Smith, Red and Black, 13. 8 Ibid., 36–37. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation, 192–193. 11 Smith, Red and Black, 83. 12 See DeGraff, “Linguists’ Most Dangerous Myth.” 13 Schœll, La Langue française dans le monde, 153. 14 Muysken and Veenstra, “Haitian,” 153; Goodman, A Comparative Study, 121, 124. 15 Comhaire-Sylvain, Le Créole haïtien, 7. 16 Faine, Philologie créole, 1. 17 For example, Comhaire-Sylvain states: “The negro has . . . conserved his old habits of expression which correspond to his manner of feeling and thinking” (Le Créole haïtien, 37), while Faine, in one of his rare allusions to African influences on the language, refers to “certain common deficiencies of pronunciation, for example with the letter R, which give its speakers their well known ‘slack’ tone” (Philologie, 3). 18 Faine, Philologie, xi. 19 Comhaire-Sylvain, Le Créole haïtien, 178. 20 In the 1990s Claire Lefebvre popularized the “relexification thesis,” developing Comhaire-Sylvain’s notion that Kreyòl possesses a West African grammar that was “relexified” with a French vocabulary. More recently, Michel DeGraff and Enoch Aboh have made a powerful case against sui generis theories of Creole genesis, arguing instead for a “null theory of Creole formation.” DeGraff and Aboh assert that Creole languages should be conceived as emerging in the same way as any other language, based on universal principles of language formation rather than on narrow models that apply only to Creoles and Pidgins. See Lefebvre, Creole Genesis; DeGraff, “Relexification”; DeGraff and Aboh, “A Null Theory of Creole Formation.” 21 DeGraff, “Linguists’ Most Dangerous Myth,” 583n22. 22 For examples of contemporaneous reviews, see Woodson, “Review of Le Créole haïtien”; Pattee, “Review of Philologie créole by Jules Faine”; Gáldi, “Review of Le Créole haïtien.” 30 Matthew Robertshaw 23 Pressoir, Débats, 10. 24 Hall, Haitian Creole, 12–13. 25 Pressoir, Débats, 10; Hall, Haitian Creole, 11. 26 Denis and Duvalier, “L’Essentiel de la doctrine des Griots.” 27 Thoby-Marcelin, “Créole ou français.” 28 Goodman, A Comparative Study, 127; Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, 37–38. 29 Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole,” 176. 30 Ibid., 184. 31 Faine, Philologie, 55–80. 32 Ibid., 79–80. 33 Holly, “L’Écriture Vay.” 34 Beaulieu, “Pour écrire.” 35 The six meanings that Beaulieu gives for /ba/ are to give, bar, stocking, low, bah (interjection), and packsaddle. Recent dictionaries give the additional definitions kiss (a variant of bo), helm, and line (drawn mark). For /ka/, Beaulieu gives at the home of, to be able to, case, since, quart/quarter, and a contraction of ki a, meaning who will. Recent dictionaries omit since, and one of them notes that the letter “r” is distinctly pronounced in this word (kar). 36 Beaulieu, “Pour écrire,” 598. 37 McConnell, Haiti Diary, 22. 38 Pressoir, Débats, 68. 39 McConnell and Swan, You Can Learn Creole, 8. 40 Pressoir, Débats, 67. 41 McConnell, Haiti Diary, 69. 42 Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 181. 43 Smith, Red and Black, 48–49. 44 Dubois, Haiti, 37; Smith, Red and Black, 50. 45 Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole,” 184; Prou, “Attempts at Reforming Haiti’s Education System,” 33. 46 Dejean, “Comment écrire,” 458. 47 Pressoir, Débats, 67. 48 Dejean, “Comment écrire,” 200. The Faublas-Pressoir orthography is also known as the ONEC (Office National d’Education Communautaire) and ONAAC (Office National d’Alphabétisation et d’Action Communautaire) orthography. Haitian Creole Comes of Age 31 49 Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole,” 185; Védrine, An Annotated Bibliography on Haitian Creole, 401. 50 Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole,” 185; Nzengou-Tayo, “Creole and French in Haitian Literature,” 156. 51 See Robertshaw, “Kreyòl anba Duvalier.” 52 Beaulieu, “Pour écrire,” 589. 53 Leyburn, The Haitian People, 279. 54 Morisseau-Leroy, Le Destin des Caraïbes, 45–46. 55 Ibid., 47. 56 Cook, Education in Haiti, 4. 57 See Pamphile, Clash of Cultures; Robertshaw, “Occupying Creole.” 58 Berry, “Literacy,” 97; Devonish, Language and Liberation, 55. 59 Dejean, “An Overview of the Language Situation in Haiti,” 79; Trouillot-Lévy, “Creole in Education in Haiti,” 227. 60 Smith, Red and Black, 123. 61 Viélot, “Primary Education in Haiti,” 113. 62 Smith, Red and Black, 112. 63 Berry, “Literacy,” 97. 64 Gabriel, “Rural Schooling Poses Problem for Haitians,” 5. 65 UNESCO, “The Story of the Haiti Pilot Project,” 8. 66 Hall, Haitian Creole. 67 Schieffelin and Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole,” 195n25; Berry, “Literacy,” 96. 68 United Nations, Mission to Haiti, 46–47. 69 Ibid., 46–50. 70 Devonish, Language and Liberation, 57. 71 Price-Mars, De Saint-Domingue à Haïti, 114. 72 Efron, “French and Creole Patois in Haiti,” 207. 73 Haiti Sun, “The Patriotic Educator.” 74 For an overview of antecedents to literature in Kreyòl, see Léger, “La Fiction littéraire.” 75 Borno, “Courte préface,” 17. 76 See Robertshaw, “L’Ouverture.” 77 Sylvain, Cric? Crac!, 8. 32 Matthew Robertshaw 78 Chrisphonte, Le Poète de “La Dessalinienne”; Gindine, “Satire and the Birth of Haitian Fiction,” 39n15. 79 Dash, “Introduction,” 19–20; Hoffmann, Essays on Haitian Literature, 45. 80 Morisseau-Leroy, Récolte, 102. 81 Morisseau-Leroy, “Préface,” 4. 82 Castera, “La Poésie de Félix Morisseau-Leroy,” 106. 83 Cantor, “The Voice of Haiti.” 84 Morisseau-Leroy, “Félix Morisseau-Leroy,” 669. 85 Morisseau-Leroy, “The Awakening of Creole Consciousness,” 18; Fradigner, “Danbala’s Daughter,” 143. 86 Haiti Sun, “The Patriotic Educator: Mr. Lélio Faublas,” 6. 87 Nzengou-Tayo, “Haitian Literature,” 156. Dyakout was, in fact, originally published as Diacoute, but in subsequent editions Morisseau revised the title to fit the accepted orthography. 88 Le Nouvelliste, “Antigone adaptation créole,” 1. 89 Haiti Sun, “‘Antigone’ Voodoo Tragedy,” 9. 90 Haiti Sun, “Bonhomme’s Soul,” 8. 91 Morisseau-Leroy, “Félix Morisseau-Leroy,” 668. 92 Haiti Sun, “Creole Adaptation,” 1. 93 See Robertshaw, “Kreyòl anba Duvalier.” Bibliography primary SourCeS Beaulieu, Christian. “Pour écrire le créole.” Les Griots, April–September 1939, 589–598. Borno, Louis. “Courte Préface.” In Cric? Crac!, by George Sylvain, 11–17. Paris: Ateliers Haïtiens, 1901. Cantor, Julie. “The Voice of Haiti.” Miami Times, May 2, 1996. Chrisphonte, Prosper. Le Poète de “La Dessalinienne” (portrait-essai-critique). Port-auPrince: Imprimerie Telhomme, 1941. Comhaire-Sylvain, Suzanne. Le Créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntaxe. Wetteren, Belgium: Imprimerie de Meester, 1936. Cook, Mercer. Education in Haiti. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1948. Haitian Creole Comes of Age 33 Denis, Lorimer, and François Duvalier. “L’Essentiel de la doctrine des Griots.” Les Griots, October–December 1938, 151. Efron, Edith. “French and Creole Patois in Haiti.” Caribbean Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1954): 199–213. Faine, Jules. Philologie créole. 1936; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1981. Gabriel, Emmanuel. “Rural Schooling Poses Problem for Haitians.” UNESCO Courier, April 1948, 5. Gáldi, Ladislas. “Review of Le Créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntaxe by Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain and Philologie créole by Jules Faine.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 63, nos. 1/2 (1940): 91–99. Haiti Sun. “‘Antigone’ Voodoo Tragedy Review in Time Magazine.” August 30, 1953, 9. ———. “Bonhomme’s Soul Enters into His Creole Acting.” September 27, 1953, 8. ———. “Creole Adaptation of the Greek ‘Œdipe-Roi’ To Have Rex Premiere.” October 25, 1953, 1. ———. “The Patriotic Educator: Mr. Lélio Faublas.” October 7, 1956, 6. Hall, Robert A. “Review of Les Origines des variations du créole haïtien by Michelson Hyppolite.” Romance Philology 4 (1950): 326–328. ———. Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Minasha, WI: American Anthropological Society, 1953. Holly, Thédora. “L’Écriture Vay.” Les Griots, July–September 1938, 94. Leyburn, James. The Haitian People. 1941; repr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966. McConnell, H. Ormonde. Haiti Diary 1933–1970: Mission Extraordinary. Cincinnati: United Methodist Committee on Relief, 1977. McConnell, H. Ormonde, and Eugene Swan. You Can Learn Creole. 2nd ed. Portau-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1953. 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Berotte Joseph, eds. The Haitian Creole Language: History, Structure, Use, and Education. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti, State against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990. Trouillot-Lévy, Jocelyne. “Creole in Education in Haiti: A Case Study.” In Spears and Joseph, The Haitian Creole Language, 217–228. Védrine, Emmanuel W. An Annotated Bibliography on Haitian Creole. Coconut Creek, FL: Educa Vision, 2004. Viélot, Kléber. “Primary Education in Haiti.” In Rubin and Schaedel, The Haitian Potential, 114–143.

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Haitian Creole Comes of Age: Philology, Orthography, Education, and Literature in the "Haitian Sixties," 1934-1957

Haitian Creole Comes of Age: Philology, Orthography, Education, and Literature in the "Haitian Sixties," 1934-1957

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