René Depestre is a Haitian poet, novelist, essayist, and political and social activist. He has been the voice of freedom for oppressed peoples of all lands, but his writings have been particularly inspirational to his fellow Haitians in their continued struggle for political and social stability.
Background
René Depestre was born on the 29th of August, 1926 in Jacmel, Haiti, the son of a pharmacist, Luc Depestre and his wife Dianira Oriol Depestre. When his father died in 1936, young René left his mother, two brothers, and two sisters to live with his maternal grandmother.
Education
René Depestre attended a Christian primary school, Lycée Pinchinat in Jacmel (now School Pinchinat De Jacmel) and Lycée Petion (now Lycee Alexandre Petion) in the capital of Port-au-Prince from 1939 to 1944. For some time he attended Institut d'Etudes Politiques and did studies in letters and political science at the Paris-Sorbonne University from 1946 to 1951.
René Depestre began his literary career very young, and when he was only nineteen years old had already published two books Étincelles, which title means Sparks in 1945 and Gerbe de sang, the title means Spurt of Blood in 1946.
Depestre was the founder, with the collaboration of colleagues, of an artistic avant-garde magazine, La Ruche (The Hive), which appeared between 1945 and 1946. Both Depestre's poetry and the content of La Ruche were critical of the corruption of Lescot's government, and the first edition of La Ruche was seized, leading to a student revolt in January 1946, in which Depestre himself participated. This event caused serious riots that paralyzed the city of Haiti, but the army restored order after several days of instability, and Depestre was sentenced to exile.
Deprestre moved to France and joined the cultural movement Negritude, begun by poets Aimé Césaire in Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas in Guiana, Léopold Senghor in Senegal, and Alioune Diop who founded the publishing house Présence Africaine. Depestre participated in decolonization movements in France, which led to his expulsion from that country, and much of his life between 1950 and 1980 was spent in traveling from one country to another-sometimes by choice, more often because his political and social ideals met with disfavor by host governments. He resided in Prague until 1952, when he was expelled, and traveled to Cuba on the invitation of writer Nicolás Guillén. Ever controversial in his writings and protests, he was expelled from Cuba by Fulgencio Batista's regime. Denied asylum by France and Italy, Depestre lived in Austria, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
After a stay in Brazil, Depestre returned to Paris in 1956, where he met with other Haitian writers, such as Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He participated in the first Pan-African Congress organized by the publishing house Présence Africaine in 1956, and he contributed articles to such French magazines as Esprit and Lettres françaises. He returned to Haiti in 1956-57 but refused to cooperate with the Duvalier regime and encouraged his countrymen to rebel. He was under constant surveillance during his sojourn in Haiti and eventually returned to Cuba at the invitation of world revolutionary Che Guevara.
Heartened by the Cuban revolution, he involved himself in the administration of the country, serving in a variety of posts including, minister of foreign relations, National Cultural Council, Radio Havana, Cuba, among others. He traveled in fulfillment of these duties to the USSR, China, and Vietnam and participated in the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969. Throughout his travels and his sojourn in Cuba, Depestre created a body of poetry of great renown.
Depestre’s best-known collection of poems, Arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien, translated as A Rainbow for the Christian West, was published in 1967. Depestre returned to Paris in 1978, where he worked as an administrator for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), where he also served as a member of the secretariat from 1979 to 1986. He was attaché to Office of the Director-General in 1979-82, and attaché to Office of Culture from 1982 to 1986. Presently, he is a special envoy of UNESCO for Haiti.
In 1979, René Depestre published his first novel, Le mât de cocagne (Festival of the Greasy Pole), and in 1980 he published the novella Alléluia pour une femme-jardin. In 1988 he published the novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves. Depestre received French nationality in 1991. Besides his poetry and fiction, Depestre has written numerous important essays on surrealism, ethnology, history, and the Negritude Movement.
Depestre has been a man committed to his ideas, so he fought against the dictatorship, and was a militant enthusiast of blackness. The influence of surrealism on Depestre’s work became an antidote against Marxist dogma and its stale, utilitarian language.
Quotations:
"I wear my roots wherever I go".
"In my childhood, my brothers and sisters listened to me, especially when we were confined within the walls of the house. I invented stories inspired by the rain, the sea, rivers, and trees. I fantasized a lot about the nature of all that struck the imagination of young Haitians. I grew up, so to speak, in a literary mold".
"Today it is not a question of affirming black cultures versus others. The colonial or racial question has been replaced by the issue of globalization. If the latter remains strictly financial, we are heading for disaster".
Connections
René Depestre was married twice. His first wife was Edith Sorel but they divorced in 1961. His second marriage was to Nelly Campano in 1964. They have two children, Paul-Alain and Stefan.
Shaping and reshaping the Caribbean: the work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre
The current drive in Caribbean literary studies stresses similarities and points of convergence between the various islands of the archipelago and their authors, the fundamental aim of which is to move closer to an all-encompassing theory of Caribbeans. Martin Munro challenges this movement, and through a study of the work of Aime Cesaire and Rene Depestre, proposes an alternative vision of the present and future of Caribbean literature.