Violence and Carribbean religation: Bicentenaire by Lyonel Trouillot

Abstract

Contemporary Haitian literature offers an interior vision of a very dynamic culture, which requires a constant aesthetic elaboration capable of offering lines of meaning that allow an approach to its complexity. This work analyzes the novel by the Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot Bicentenaire (2004). This is an author who has developed all his extensive literary career, still growing, within the country, which is not a minor fact given there are colleagues from Haiti who, because they reside abroad, have had the benefit of more media circulation. The text that concerns us fictionalizes the day of protests that took place in Port-au-Prince on January 1, 2004 —the date on which the bicentennial of the declaration of Haitian independence is commemorated— against President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who finally leaves the power a few days later. However, our interest consists in examining intertextual links of a very varied discursive treatment with Caribbean texts (songs performed by Bob Marley, the novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada by Gabriel García Márquez and the drama Une tempête by Aimé Césaire as a re-asserting strategy that seeks to inscribe the problem of violence in the larger context of the culture of the Caribbean, whose heterogeneity does not prevent the verification of common dynamics that Trouillot’s text seeks to relate from the references to other texts.