An Interview with Frankétienne
"I am the man of the resurrection."
Last autumn, when I was in Port-au-Prince to write an article about the situation there, I visited with the great Haitian writer Frankétienne.
In fact, “writer” barely begins to encompass the anarchic creative fire that burned within the man, who had been born Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d'Argent in the town of of Ravine-Sèche in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley in 1936, only two years after the nearly 20 year-occupation of Haiti by the United States had ended. The son of a white American father and a black Haitian mother, in his decades on the earth, Frankétienne had functioned as a novelist, a poet, a playwright, the visionary behind swirling, talismanic paintings, a plangent singer of Haitian Creole songs and an all-around cultural totem for a country whose artistic output is as vibrant as its political and economic miseries manifold.
In the mid 1960s, along with writers Jean-Claude Fignolé and René Philoctète, Frankétienne founded the spiraliste philosophical and aesthetic concept, birthing a kind of Caribbean surrealist aesthetic that would heavily influence writers such as Martinque’s Édouard Glissant. In 1975, he would publish Dézafi, perhaps the first novel to be written in Haitian Creole. Having produced a dizzying variety of literary and visual work of surpassingly high quality, he now ranged around a home full of books that he shared with his wife, his paintings radiant from their hanging places on the walls
Sitting on the second floor of his home, studio and gallery in the capital’s Delmas neighborhood, as noisy moto taxies and trucks rumbled past outside the gate, I spoke with Frankétienne about his life and work and the state of Haiti today. Last night, I received word that Frankétienne, aged 88, continued his journey to join the ancestors and the lwa. He was a shining star. May his transition be a smooth one. What follows is my translation of his remarks during our interview.
On His Youth and His Background
I was born in the Artibonite, in Ravine-Sèche, on 12 April 1936. It was an Easter Sunday and I believe that having internalized the importance of this date - linked to the resurrection of Jesus Christ - had an influence on my life. I am the man of the renaissance. I am the man of the resurrection. And in fact, my life has been a succession of trials overcome. I will not list them all, but I will cite a few of these trials.
I escaped several arrests under the dictatorial regime of Duvalier. I was operated on, 24 years ago, in New York, in a hospital called Long Island College Hospital, right next to the Brooklyn Bridge, for prostate cancer that was in an advanced stage. I escaped the earthquake that shook this house in 2010. The house almost collapsed, my wife and I got out, miraculously. If you see this architecture, it is from the earthquake, the pillars were shaken…I escaped a robbery: Four bandits surrounded me in Pétionville and almost killed me. Thanks to the crowd that was there, who recognized me, they shouted "Thief! Thief!" and the bandits fled. The Delta variant of Covid 19 that almost took me away in 2021. So I am the man of resurrection, of rebirth, I am a miracle.
My mother was a little 16-year-old peasant girl, adopted by an American, well it was Franketienne who came out of the adoption. And what I call God, this universal divine energy, did not want me to bear the name of this white American, but I tell you, it is Benjamin Rice, an American of Jewish-Dutch origin. He didn't give me his name, he didn't give me his money, he didn't give me a material inheritance, but it's very good for me. I lived with my mother and she went to Port-au-Prince with me, and we lived for more than 50 years in Bel-Air, which was a working-class neighborhood.
I owe a lot to Bel-Air. I owe everything to Haiti, and I say thank you to this eternity, which is not a man - God cannot be a person! - to this mysterious energy that is everywhere... I say thank you, I give it glory, I magnify this energy - which is in you too! - but with variations according to the individual. I have been blessed by this mysterious force. I lived more than 50 years in Bel-Air, before coming to this house.
On His Creative Process and the Advent of Spiralisme
I didn't not create the spiral, just as Hegel did not create the dialectic. The dialectic is in nature! The spiral is the most frequent mode of operation of all beings, of the infinite universe. The galaxy in terms of permanence in a spiral. In our body, what we call DNA, the genetic code, DNA is a double helix structure, is a bi-helical structure, it is the spiral.
When we take the history of humanity, it is a spiral, from primitive society to today, current society, it is not the circle, because the circle is closed, the circle refers to death. The spiral is the movement of all life, it is diversity, it is multi-dimensionality, it is multi-polarity. That is why there are no straight lines in my works. I reject the already-there, the already-seen, the already-heard, and that makes me a writer, a creator, considered by readers, in quotation marks, I say it, but without pride, without arrogance, imbeciles.
I am considered crazy to write books that cannot be read. But that is life! It is predictable, it is the spiral. Life is made of mysteries. But four days ago I did not know that we would be here, neither did you! Sitting at a table, in the Delmas neighborhood. And you do not know what will happen to you - I hope it is the best - when you are at your hotel or where you are staying in Port-au-Prince. Everything is unpredictable. We do not choose our parents. You did not choose your father, you did not choose your mother, you did not choose your place of birth, you did not choose the era either. You could have been born in the Middle Ages, you could have been born before Christ! Everything is unpredictable. It is the unpredictable, it is the unexpected. And this is in contradiction with the linearity of the anecdotes, of the little stories that are told in the most widely read books, because the public likes to read easy things.
I am not in transparency in the first degree, because life is not transparent. We are in opacity, we are in mystery and we are in the ephemeral. We are always in a series of mutations that never cease. In life, we do not leave A to go to B, to C, to D! It is A, D, B, Z, X, O, A. That is life. And that is what I try - I do not know if I succeeded, but I tried - I tried to sniff out the other side of the visible. Because what we are looking at there is monotonous. And yet, it is rich. It is monotonous, that we see it, the eye of the human being, but even if it is only this pair of glasses, there is a whole set of movements, of atoms, that we do not see. What is invisible is more important than the visible. And, succinctly, that's what it's called, the spiral, that is to say, I don't need a subject, I don't need a story to write a book. My works are always improvisation in writing. And I attach a lot of importance to language, to writing.
Many writers - well-known, of course - have a style, but they have no language, they have no writing. Writing is a space reserved for madmen! You have to be mad to innovate, to create….This energy that creates everything, it is also in madness. You only have to look at the diversity of this little landscape of Delmas…So that is what I try, that is what I have tried, during my 60 years of writing, that is what I have tried to do. I know that I have displeased, I have not pleased many people. “Frankétienne is mad, Frankétienne writes backwards.” Well, I don't care. It took a mad entity to create the universe, too. If the universe was created! Because first the universe is. It has always been, it is and it will always be. The mutation, it is us who will disappear one day! It is not the earth that will disappear, it is human civilization that will disappear. And at that moment, there will be no more people, no more Michael, no more Frankétienne, no more Goethe, no more Shakespeare, no more Jesus. This is what is being prepared for us. With the Kim Jong-un of North Korea, with the Putins, with the Americans, with NATO, with the people of the Middle East, this deadly and destructive cocktail.
About the Situation of Haiti
You came to a destroyed country. It is a totally destroyed country. Of course, this does not date from today. It does not date from yesterday. It goes back several centuries, it is a descent into hell caused by the anti-patriots, the anti-nationals, the Haitians who do not like this country, who do not like this land, but with the complicity of a good part of the international community. Because we have not been forgiven for having made 1804, for having first broken the chains of slavery and then for having created the first black republic: Haiti.
It was unbearable, and I think it was this conjunction of hostile forces, first the bad leaders we had here, and then, first the hostility of certain colonial slave powers who did not forgive us for having ruined their trade, ruined their economy, ruined their business. No need to describe to you what there is here: Insecurity, ruined people, schools that do not work. Imagine, the difference, in my time in the 1960s, I was able to produce more than 70 works, I was a professor for 50 or 60 years, I gave conferences. And I don't forget the paintings, the plays.
Currently, there are no theaters, there are no conferences, there are no painting exhibitions, there are no literary clubs, there are no youth clubs, there is nothing left. We are destroyed. We talk about Dessalines' legacy, the legacy of our ancestors, but it has been wasted, thrown away, destroyed. There you go. And I don't know, I can't predict, I don't have a crystal ball, I'm not a prophet, but it will take time, it will take time... If it happens! It will take time for us to get back on our feet.