Honoring Frankétienne (1936-2025)
Frankétienne was an artist in the fullest sense of the word, one whose innovation, spiritual worldview, and resolute sense of justice could not be contained. Widely considered the “father of Haitian letters,” his novels, poems, plays, and paintings responded to the political turbulence and censorship of his country with breathtaking imagination and color. Frankétienne died on Thursday, February 20 in Port-au-Prince, where he lived his entire life. He was 88 years old and had completed over 60 novels and five thousand paintings. We are deeply saddened to say goodbye.
When Aimé Césaire welcomed him to Fort-de-France in 1994, Frankétienne joyfully recalled the famed Martinician poet exclaiming, “At last, I receive Mister Haiti!” For many, Frankétienne embodied the spirit of the nation itself. His novel Dézafi (meaning “challenge”) was the first modern novel written in Haitian Creole, and his poetry, first published in the 1960s, continues to influence the Haitian canon. Frankétienne also served as Haiti’s first Minister of Culture in 1988 and founded a school in Port-au-Prince, where he taught mathematics, philosophy, Haitian literature, French literature, and physics. Alongside authors René Philoctète and Jean-Claude Fignolé, Frankétienne founded the literary movement of spiralism, which he defined as “the entanglement of diversity within a miraculous unity.”
For his artistic and cultural accomplishments, Frankétienne was named Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor for artists, in 2010–the same year he was designated a UNESCO Artist for Peace. “His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble,” remarked Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. “It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.”
In 2014, Archipelago published an English translation of Frankétienne’s debut novel, Ready to Burst (French: Mûr à crever) by Kaima L. Glover, a book which laid the foundations for spiralism. A sensitive critique of François Duvalier’s suffocating regime and its consequences for a generation of young people in Haiti, the novel offers an exquisite verbal painting of life within a specific context of terror and a vivid exploration of love, hope, and the delicate membrane between reality and dream. We also published an excerpt from Ready to Burst in Imagine Africa: Volume II, alongside several of Frankétienne’s vibrant, explosive works of art. Archipelago has a forthcoming Frankétienne novel, Ultravocal, with another translation by Kaima L. Glover in the works.
A self-proclaimed poet-prophet and “original madman,” Frankétienne was constantly pushing his creative forces to new capacities, not so much breaking rules as completely disregarding them. After publishing Dézafi, he realized that the high Haitian illiteracy rate prevented widespread reception of his political critique, and thus began writing plays. He switched between mediums as easily as he slipped between French and Creole. “Frankétienne had ‘a language’—his own,” wrote Haitian novelist Emmelie Prophète in Le Nouvelliste. “It defined his originality. The author opened doors, offering a true journey of the senses, leaving his words within us like an echo, like fierce pincers extracting both soul and guts.”
In a 2023 interview with UNESCO, less than two years before his passing, Frankétienne explained his spiritual and artistic project: “Innovation remains a gamble, a challenge, a folly involving the leap of risk, the leap of faith. With my eyes closed, I continue to leap on a journey full of uncertainties, without questioning whether there is a mat or a cushion ready to receive me and soften my fall. I’ll jump until my last breath.”
Join a virtual rasanblaj on March 7, 2025 at 1:30 PM EST, to celebrate Frankétienne. The gathering will unfold in three movements: an opening invocation and grounding in the spiritual; reading from Frankétienne’s work; and storytelling – shared stories of the personal, professional, or creative impact of Frankétienne’s work in all of our lives. Register here.