La domesticité, phénomène socioculturel, représentée dans les œuvres Zoune chez sa ninnaine de Justin Lhérisson et Rêves amers de Maryse Condé

Abstract

That childhood should be everywhere at home whatever the circumstances, has been implored by poets. Their powerful voices call on the international community to mobilize to protect the rights of the child. However, there are unfair practices; child domestic work is one of them. These children are called ‘domestic children’, ‘service children’ and les ‘restavèk’. Denounced by humanitarian institutions, child domestic work unfortunately still exists today. This issue has been taken up by writers, thus becoming one of the key themes of literature in French and Creole languages. Our aim is to recall the major role that this literature has played, for more than a century, in raising the awareness of a very large readership on the harmful effects of this practice on children and adolescents. This study will focus on two authors and their works talking about this phenomenon in the context of Haiti, Justin Lhérisson (late 19th and early 20th centuries) with his lodyans Zoune chez sa ninnaine (1906) and Maryse Condé (20th and 21st centuries) with her novel Rêves amers (1987), both closely tied to Haitian culture. While using different literary frameworks, either Creolity in Maryse Condé or Social Realism in Justin Lhérisson, they chose in their fictions to tell about the condition of a child placed in domestic service. Dealing with this phenomenon is also talking about the quest for identity in Haitian literature, which at the beginning a literature of imitation. The expression of J. Lhérisson proves that this literature has become autonomous and that it represents its culture and its society. Because of the originality and the impact exerted, his work deserves to be remembered as part of the universal cultural heritage. M. Condé pleads for freedom of expression, literary cosmopolitanism, universal values, refusing any classification within the borders of a single country or a single language. Thus, the Haitian social realism represented in the expression of these two authors of the Caribbean space brings Creole literature closer to word literature.