Three writers in Haiti name a movement after the spiral

In the late 1960s, during one of the hardest stretches of the Duvalier period, Franketyen, Rene Philoctete and Jean-Claude Fignole founded Spiralism in Haiti. It took the spiral as its working figure: repetition, return, and a refusal to settle into any fixed shape. All three declined to emigrate, which set them apart from most Haitian intellectuals of their generation, and the movement rested on two commitments. The first was that the space and the culture of Haiti held enough material for any literature. The second was that a form invented there could be applied anywhere. Franketyen did not once set foot outside the country during thirty years of dictatorship. He described that confinement as the source of his writing, and said he made imaginary journeys through reading, writing and dreams instead. After Jean-Claude Duvalier was driven out, he began in 1987 to travel to the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Japan, Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Speaking in Havana in 1968, the Haitian poet Rene Depestre described the negritude of the Duvalier government as a delirious mystification. His argument was that the regime's language about race concealed an ordinary struggle for power between rival groups inside the Haitian propertied class, and that dressing it as the triumph of the black majority was a service performed for reaction. Depestre had grown up inside the intellectual world he was attacking. He had been a young radical in Port-au-Prince in 1946, expelled and exiled repeatedly, and he had argued with Aime Cesaire, for whom negritude meant something other than a state doctrine. From Cuba he broadcast two hours a day into Haiti in Kreyol. The charge carried weight because it came from the left rather than from the elite the regime liked to name as its enemy. It said that a black government could reproduce the same order under a different flag.

In June 1964 twenty five men trained across the border came ashore east of Saltrou under Captain Fred Baptiste. They fought in the pine forest and on Morne la Selle for weeks, ambushing the units sent after them, then withdrew to the Dominican Republic because the peasants around them were too hungry to feed anyone and their weapons never arrived. On 5 August thirteen young men of Jeune Haiti landed at Cap Dame-Marie. Most came from Jeremie and from families the regime called mulatto. Their leader, Gusle Villedrouin, was twenty four and the son of an officer Duvalier had killed the year before. They marched more than two hundred miles along the spine of the southern peninsula, fought at least ten engagements, brought down an aircraft and walked through a hurricane. On 26 October the last three died at Ravine Roche near l'Asile, throwing stones once the ammunition was gone. Their heads were carried to the palace and photographed for the newspapers. Duvalier then turned the militia loose on Jeremie. The Villedrouin, Drouin, Guilbaud, Laforest and Sansaricq families were marched through their own town and shot. At least a hundred people died. The government called it nationalisation.

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.