Spiralisme gives Haitian writers a form built at home

Spiralisme appeared in Haiti in the early 1970s as a method rather than a school with a manifesto and a membership list. Its writers refused the straight line of the realist novel and built texts that circled back on themselves, mixing poetry, prose, theatre and reportage inside one work and moving between French and Kreyol without apology. The point was to make a form out of Haitian material instead of importing one from Paris. That mattered under a government that treated French models as the measure of respectability. The approach also gave its writers cover. A book that refuses ordinary narrative can carry judgments about a dictatorship that a plain sentence would not survive, and the criticisms of the government installed in 1971 arrived in exactly that oblique shape. Franketienne, Jean-Claude Fignole and Rene Philoctete are the names usually attached to the movement.

In 1976 Port-au-Prince held about 638 thousand people, fourteen per cent of all Haitians and fifty eight per cent of everyone living in a Haitian town. Around the same period New York held about 300 thousand Haitians, while Cap-Haitien, the second city of the country, held 54,691. The same was true of the neighbours. Miami held more Cubans than Santiago de Cuba and New York more Dominicans than Santiago de los Caballeros. Across the Caribbean the capital swallowed the country: in the early 1970s a fifth of Cubans lived in Havana, a third of Puerto Ricans in San Juan, a sixth of Dominicans in Santo Domingo and a quarter of Jamaicans in Kingston. Two consequences followed for Haiti. Remittances from abroad became a support of the capital's economy, and the strongest opposition to Jean Claude Duvalier organised itself in New York and Miami rather than at home.

Near midnight on 8 June 1967 the head of the Haitian armed forces, General Gerard Constant, was woken and called to the palace with eighteen other senior officers. Duvalier kept them waiting two hours, then appeared with an escort of militiamen carrying submachine guns. The officers were put into a truck and driven to Fort Dimanche. At the rifle range they found nineteen of their own colleagues tied to stakes, ten of them from the presidential guard and most of them close to Colonel Max Dominique. Each senior officer was handed a rifle loaded with a single round and made to stand in a firing squad with a gun at his own back. The president, dressed in black, watched from the side. After the volley he had the executioners walk slowly past the bodies and look at them, then sent them home. By sunrise Haitians were climbing the walls of the Latin American embassies. Nearly two hundred had taken asylum before the month ended.

The photograph taken on 1 July 1969 shows Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, smiling with his arm around Francois Duvalier. What it does not show is that Rockefeller was largely holding the Haitian president up. Duvalier had not been seen in public since early May, not even on his own balcony. On May Day he could not get through his own speech and passed the pages to Paul Blanchet. His hands were swollen, his ankles too, and his face had puffed up. Nine days later he complained that he could barely breathe and that something heavy was lying across his chest. He was a physician and recognised congestive heart failure without help. Digitalis, diuretics and an enormous will to stay in office carried him through. On 20 May he underwent prostate surgery in secret at the old French hospital where he had trained as a young man. He was sixty three. The visit that held him up was also the visit that ended American disapproval.