Yanick Lahens

Yanick Lahens (born 22 December 1953, Port-au-Prince) is a Haitian Francophone writer, novelist, teacher, and lecturer. She became a Prix Femina laureate in 2014.

Interview (2021)

 * Like the Haitian poet Georges Castera, I believe that “words choose us because we are alone”. Words become a way of communicating with our own mystery, our intimate knowledge, and of communicating with those who, by reading us, explore their own mystery and the intimate knowledge that is theirs. Writing involves accepting solitude, and, at the same time paradoxically, trying to escape it. To be a writer is to feel the need to make sense of reality, to put it into perspective in order to fill a fundamental void with words, as others might do through music, or through drawing and colours.


 * (What role have women played in the literature of Haiti?) I think their role has become much more obvious since the late 1980s. This is thanks to the work of feminist groups that have highlighted the historical and political role of women in Haiti. This has enabled us to revisit our literary heritage – especially the work of the novelist and playwright Marie Chauvet, who truly introduced the modern novel to Haiti with her trilogy Amour, Colère et Folie. Since then, two generations of female writers have emerged. It is interesting to note that they also write in Creole.


 * We were born in Haiti during an emergency that has never left us. The Haitian revolution [1791-1804], the third revolution in modern times after the United States and France, pushed the Enlightenment project further with its radicalism. It is anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-slavery. We are the mould and the matrix of the North-South relations established by this modernity. If our elites tried to reproduce the model of the old metropolis, an anti-plantation culture developed in parallel – with a religion, voodoo; a language, Creole; but also a way of occupying space, matrimonial relations, etc. The first writers who came from the elite, wrote in French to say that we exist as Blacks and as human beings. For over a century, an oral literature has been developed in Creole, and is now appearing in the written word. We are leaning on these two pillars of support. Today, we are still in this state of emergency because, as far as I am aware, North-South relations have not fundamentally changed. Also, the complicity of the elites in maintaining these relations is still just as obvious for countries in the South. Writers, and artists in general, have created against a backdrop of distress and anger, but with the will to write “in a state of poetry”. As the Haitian poet René Depestre says: “The state of poetry is flourishing, light years away from the states of siege and alarm”.


 * We are both a product of this modernity, and a response to it. We are a recent civilization born from the mixing and meeting of the Atlantic and the Caribbean seas. We question modernity because we see its contradictions and limitations. From the very beginning, our existence has been a way of rethinking the universality of the Enlightenment.