We know René Depestre poet, essayist, novelist, Renaudot Prize 1988 for his novel Hadriana in all my dreams. Coming to literature through poetry, the man was also a political activist, fellow traveler of the Castro brothers and Che Guevara. The diary of his Cuban years, found in an archive by researchers, sheds light on the commitment and ideological loyalties of this major writer of the French-speaking world (replay).
Born in 1926, in the city of Jacmel, in Haiti, and living in the south of France since the 1980s, René Depestre is the dean of Haitian letters. From the depths of his exile happy ” in L’hinterland French, the poet never ceases to recall his attachment to his native land and what he owes to this Haiti so far away and still so close. ” Once a week, Dad woke us up to take us to see the sunrise over the Gulf of Jacmel. It was the early morning cinema that I would later transfer to a sexual level by presenting the act of love as an eminently solar act. »
Jacmel, its gulf and its magical mornings are at the origin of the exceptional work of René Depestre. It is a prolific and diverse work, composed of narrative prose, poetry, essays and numerous forums in French and Haitian newspapers. At 94 years old, their author laments not having enough time in front of him to be able to format and publish all the manuscripts that gather dust in his drawers.
It was in an archive that academics Serge and Marie Bourjea, specialists in the work of the master, discovered the manuscript of the diary that the writer kept between 1964 and 1978, when he was living in Cuba. Legend has it that René Depestre completely hid him from his mind. Released this fall under the title Notebook of an art of living, the work brings together notes, portraits, analyses, personal accounts, criticisms of the stammering Cuban revolution of which the writer was a crucial witness for almost two decades. He was also a passionate actor.
All fire all flames
René Depestre was 33 when he landed in Cuba via Haiti where he had hoped to settle after long wanderings through Europe and Latin America. Placed under house arrest in Port-au-Prince because of his communist sympathies, he listened in the secrecy of his room to Radio Rebelde, the Castro brothers’ guerrilla station entrenched in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. He dreamed of joining these young people who, not far from the northwest coast of Haiti, fought and aspired to ignite the entire Latin American powder keg.
The dream came true in March 1959, when the young Depestre was able to fly to Havana very officially, having been invited by the Castro brothers’ traveling companion, Che Guevara himself. The latter had echoes of the article that the writer had published in the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, hailing the triumph of the Cuban guerrillas and emphasizing the Latin American significance of the event. Che liked the article and wanted to meet its author. ” I received a message from the poet Nicolas Guillen, remembers Depestre. He told me that Commander Che Guevara wanted to see me. So I was able to leave Haiti. Che was waiting for me at Havana airport with his escort. Then he took me home. We had an interview that lasted six hours. We talked about everything, literature, the revolution. He put Castro’s project of revolution before my eyes. And then we talked about Nazim Hikmet, Paul Éluard, Pablo Neruda, the great poets. The man I had in front of me was very complex and very complete. »
Guevara will become the friend and the mentor of the young Haitian all fired up, and he will encourage him to stay in Cuba and to get involved in the Castro movement. This is what Depestre will do, participating with enthusiasm in the revolution on the military level, but also on the political and cultural level, before distancing himself from the regime after the disappearance of Che in 1967. Become suspect in the eyes of the regime because of his positions in favor of freedom of thought and writing, he was forced to leave the island definitively in 1978.
In the diary he kept between 1964 and 1978, with two interruptions in the middle, Depestre recounted in detail his various activities in the service of the Cuban revolutionary power which led him through the communist world, in Asia and in Europe. . He worked as a journalist in the official Cuban press and as a literary adviser to the National Editions.
In the pages of Depestre’s book, there is also a lot of talk about intimate life, the joy of living and the act of love as a dazzling of the body. ” Kissing is always much more than kissing when you make love to dazzled bodies writes the militant poet. An affirmation which is reminiscent of the role of love and of women in the works of this author, imprinted with what he called his ” solar eroticism “. ” I have a solar vision of the woman, a solar vision of the act of love itself, explains René Depestre. To have a solar vision is to conceive of love as a party, not as a sport. It is a double feast for the man and the woman. That’s love to me. I am not a Casanova, nor a Don Juan, nor a disciple of Sade. I do not separate love from the joy of living. »
Disgrace
From the 1970s, a change in tone in the Notebook of an art of living. From now on, the entries of the poet’s diary are breathless, testifying to the urgency of the questions of the writer on the Stalinist excesses of the Cuban regime. At the end of the 1970s, when the affair of the poet Heberto Padilla broke out, Depestre took a public position in favor of the critical role of intellectuals and artists in the revolution. The reaction of power will not be long in coming. Havana withdraws his passport, before relegating the Haitian revolutionary to a fictitious post of professor without a chair. This is called disgrace. Depestre will leave the country on January 7, 1978 in circumstances worthy of an adventure novel to join Paris where a consultant post awaited him at Unesco, then directed by his friend, the Senegalese Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow.
What makes the value of these notebooks at the origin of the new book of the poet, it is the ethical hygiene of the revolutionary which underlies them. Their author is inhabited by a deep feeling of fidelity towards his fellow travelers in spite of the abandonment and the disenchantment, as he affirms in his entry of March 16, 1978. Whatever happens to me – even the worst – I will never be a detached, ironic or insincere witness to what I had the privilege of pushing into this island of my heart. Everything that has been preserved in me from childhood will always remain on the lookout to prevent me from being unjust or ungrateful towards the Cuban revolution. »
It is all the more difficult for René Depestre to be unjust or ungrateful because, as the chronology of his work reveals, this companionship of the revolutionaries was for him the real trigger of his own intellectual revolution and the starting point of his mature work, halfway between fiction and poetry, celebration and criticism, magic realism and realism. The Cuban experience gave a new impetus to the literary production of the writer whose work gained in thickness and depth, “ passing René Depestre from his state of chrysalis to that of a true creator “, write in their beautiful preface the editors of the Notebook of an art of living.
It is undoubtedly because he knew how to transform the failure of his militant commitment into a triumph for poetry, that the alchemist of Jacmel can hope that his memory among men will perhaps one day something to do with the fate of the stars “.
Notebook of an art of living. Cuba 1964-1978. Edition established, prefaced and annotated by Serge and Marie Marie Bourjea. Actes Sud, 320 pages, 27 euros.