The Affect and Aesthetics of Fear in Évelyne Trouillot’s Novels

Abstract

The Haitian proverb “pè pa preche de fwa” instructs that fear does not have to strike twice for a lesson to be learned. Yet for the characters in Évelyne Trouillot’s fiction, fear is a recurrent emotion that surfaces time and time again, often before she or he acts in any way. As an affective register, fear is a reminder of a character’s vulnerability, which in turn helps to destabilize the notion of Haitian resilience. The resilience trope is one of the prevailing narratives that emerges in stories of Haitian suffering. While it is often used to produce a hopeful story about the indomitability of the Haitian spirit, the resilience trope also has the effect of denying what is ordinary, mundane, and, ultimately, human. As Edwidge Danticat has put it, “Haitians are very resilient, but it doesn’t mean they can suffer more than other people.”1 Tracing the aesthetics of fear—how Trouillot describes the emotion and how it figures in her work—establishes it as a productive emotion that arises in response to political predicaments, social tensions, historic moments, and personal traumas. In what follows, I consider fear as affect and aesthetics through examples from four novels: Rosalie l ’ infâme, L’Œil-totem, Absences sans frontières, and Le Rond-point.2 Fear has myriad sources in these novels. It emerges from the terror of slavery causing enslaved people to flee into the forest and become maroons, to provide sexual favors for their masters, to maintain deadly silences, or to kill newborn children as a way to free them from a life of slavery. It is the response of the young child living under occupied Haiti unable to walk freely in her neighborhood. It reflects the torment of an undocumented person who might be subject to deportation at any moment. It is the panic faced by the upper classes during waves of kidnapping as well as the anticipation of hunger for the poor. As these characters experience it, fear is a multilayered, manifold emotion with far-reaching results.