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–
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.”
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