Through various testimonies and in-depth interviews, the Quebec writer Jean-Marc Beausoleil recounts Haiti through the destinies of women and men from its diaspora. The result is an essay halfway between literary journalism and non-fiction, whose author is a pioneer in Quebec. Thus, even if some first names have changed, all the stories contained in this book are true, he specifies in his preamble, most of the texts having been written in 2020 during the confinements of the pandemic.
The author of Pornodyssée: a season in the porn industry… and of The mark of Zilon (Somme tout, 2020 et 2022) sign short portraits of personalities with a strong character from the four corners of the Pearl of the Antilles. His pen sketches through encounters and confidences the sometimes chaotic, and often resilient stories of exiles of all conditions and of all generations, today nurses, former police officers, artists or retired boxers. Boxing is also an opportunity for the author to return to the careers of a certain number of Quebecers of Haitian origin who shone in the boxing rings to get out of poverty, in particular Schiller Hyppolite, whose writer signs poignant text.
Anonymous thus rub shoulders with well-known figures from Quebec, such as Frantz Voltaire, Rodney Saint-Éloi or Stanley Péan. All of them narrate in their own way a vision of their land of origin, sometimes cruel, sometimes luminous. The choral essay wrapped in a writing that is both poetic and precise highlights the contradictions of a country full of vital forces and complexities. Several chapters touch the heart, such as the Montreal daily of Catalina, a Creole-French interpreter with social services and correctional services. The one who sometimes has to translate the words of misery or rape tries one day to bring out the painful, but necessary words, in particular of a mother and her silent child who fled their native island to come to Quebec via Brazil. , a saga haunted by abandonment and death.
With the voices of the exodus recounting the wounds of the past and the hope for a better life, the essay also pays an endearing tribute to Haiti, whose “majority of the people live in magical realism”, writes the author. . His interview with Rodney Saint-Éloi, poet and founder of the publishing house Mémoire d’encrier, is quite eloquent in this respect. When the editor wonders why Haiti, which gives flagships in a slew of sectors, “cannot manage to build itself collectively”, Jean-Marc Beausoleil quotes The tragedy of King Christopher, by Aimé Césaire, which illustrates a universal dilemma presented as a knot of paradox that operates between utopia and dystopia. “There is the carnival and after. The sun and the sea hide great misery, great pain. »