René Depestre

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René Depestre (born 29 August 1926) is a Haitian poet and communist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana in all my dreams (1988). He did his primary studies in the Breton Brothers of the Christian instruction. His father died in 1936 and Rene Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go to live in his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-with-Prince.

Sparks, his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand, the fact of knowing quickly. He is only nineteen years old when the work is published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends: Baker, Alexis, and Gerald Bloncourt: The Hive (1945-46). “One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renovate the historical bases of their identity”.

Depestre takes an active part in the movements of decolonization in France, and he is expelled from French territory. He leaves for Prague, from where he is driven out in 1952. He goes to Cuba, invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén, where again he is stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista. He is denied entry by France and Italy. He leaves for Austria, then Chile, Argentina and Brazil. He remained in Chile sufficiently long enough to organize, with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado the Continental Congress of Culture.

After Brazil, Depestre returns to Paris in 1956 where he meets other Haitians, one of which was Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He takes part in the first Panafrican congress organized by Présence Africaine in September 1956. He writes in African Présence and other journals of the time like Esprit and Lettres Francaises. He returns to Haiti in (1956-57). Refusing to collaborate with the Duvalierist regime, he calls for Haitian resistance and is placed under house arrest. Depestre leaves for Cuba in 1959, at the invitation of Che Guevara. Convinced of the aims of the Cuban Revolution, he is invested in the management of the country (Ministry for the Foreign Relations, national Éditions, National Conseil of the Culture, Radio Havana-Cuba, Las Put of mow Américas, Comité of preparation of the cultural congress of Havana in 1967). Depestre travels, taking part in official activities much parallel to (the USSR, China, Viêt-nam, inter alia) and takes part in the Panafrican festival of Algiers in 1969 (where it meets the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, that it will find later in the offices of UNESCO).

During his various peregrinations and of his stay in Cuba, Rene Depestre continues an important poetic work. Its collection of the most famous poetry is undoubtedly a rainbow for the Christian Occident (1967) where mix political, erotism, and voodoo, of the topics which crosses all its work. Poet in Cuba (1973) is a kind of glance reflected on the evolution of the cuban revolution.

Drawn aside by the capacity castrist since 1971, Depestre breaks with the cuban experiment in 1978 and goes back to Paris where it works with the Secretariat of UNESCO. It publishes the Greasy pole, its first novel, in Paris, in 1979. In 1980, it publishes Alléluia for a woman-garden, which receives the Goncourt Price of the News in 1982.

Depestre leaves UNESCO in 1986 and is withdrawn in the Aude. In 1988, it publishes Hadriana in all my dreams, which receives many literary prices of which the price Théophraste Renaudot, the price of the Company of the Men of letters, the Antigone Price of the town of Montpellier and the price of the Novel of the royal Academy of language and literature Frenchwomen of Belgium. It obtains French nationality in 1991. It continues to accumulate the honors, in particular the Apollinaire price of poetry for his personal Anthology (1993) and the Italian price Grisane for the adaptation of the Greasy pole to the theatre in 1995, as well as the purses (Stock Exchange of the National Center of the Book in 1994 and Guggenheim in 1995). It is the subject of documentary film of Jean-Daniel Lafond carried out in Montreal, Haiti in all our dreams (1996).

Depestre also published important tests. Hello and good-bye with the négritude presents a reflexion on its ambivalent position with respect to the movement of the négritude conceived by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon-Gontran Damas. Impressed by Aime Césaire come to speak about surrealism and the négritude in Haiti, fascinated by the creolity, or the créolo-francophonie, it does not question of it less the concept of négritude. Rebel with the concept in his youth, which it associates ethnic essentialism, it measures the historical range and locates of it the movement in the world history of the ideas. He reconsiders this subject (critical and Re-situation of the movement) in his two Ainsi collections speaks the black river (1998) and the trade with métisser (1998). He pays homage to Césaire and his work visionary in the current context of the movement of the creolity in Martinique: “Césaire sliced of only one word this vain debate: at the beginning of the history décoloniale, on a world and Haiti scale, there is the genius of All Saints' day Louverture” (the trade with métisser 25). Its experiment in Cuba - its fascination and its désamour for the ideological “castrofidelism” and all constraints - is also examined in these two texts, as well as marvelous realism, the role of the erotism, the Haitian history and the very contemporary topic of universalization.

Far from regarding itself as in exile, Depestre is seen rather like a nomad with the multiple roots, a “man-banian” - to refer to this tree which it so often quotes and to its rhizomic roots - even like a “géo-libertine”. Rene Depestre lives today in a small village of the Aude, Lézignan-Corbières, with his second wife, cuban. He writes every morning, by looking at the vineyards, as formerly he enivrait sight of the bay jacmélienne on the gallery of his grandmother.

His work has been published in the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, Italy, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Argentina, and Mexico. His first volume of poetry; Sparks (Eincelles) was published in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Other publications include Gerbe de sang (Port-au-Prince, 1946), Vegetation de clartés, preface by Aimé Cé saire, (Paris, 1951), Traduit du grand large, poeme de ma patrie enchainée, (Paris, 1952), Minerai noir, (Paris, 1957), Journal d'un animal marin (Paris, 1964), Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chretien poeme mystere vaudou, (Paris, 1966). His poetry has appeared in many French and Spanish anthologies and collections. More current works include Anthologie personnelle (1993) and Actes sud, which received the Prix Apollinaire. He lived several years in France, and was awarded a French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, in 1988 for his work Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves. He is the uncle of Michaëlle Jean, the current Governor General of Canada.

[edit] Selected works

• Etincelles (1945)
• Gerbes de Sang (1946)
• Végétations de Clarté (1951)
• Traduit du Grand Large (1952)
• Bonjour et Adieu à la Négritude
• Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves

[edit] References

• Schutt-Ainé, Patricia; Staff of Librairie Au Service de la Culture (1994). Haiti: A Basic Reference Book. Miami, Florida: Librairie Au Service de la Culture, p. 102. ISBN 0-9638599-0-0.