Aube Tranquille and Le Peuple des terres mêlées

Unfinished stories—unfinished business—are the very foundations upon which Jean-Claude Fignolé's Aube Tranquille is constructed. From the very beginning of the novel, we understand that this is a narrative in which time will not be keeping to its proper place. We realize within the first few phrases that this is a tale of haunting, of vengeful ghosts consumed by centuries-old grudges. We learn that the drama will play out in a series of specific, overlapping spaces and moments—at once conflated and opposed. In Aube Tranquille, Fignolé takes as his point of departure the (Bakhtinian) notion that time and space are not mere background but rather are shaped by the events that take place within them. Indeed, if there is anywhere that human action is determined by its context, it is (pre-)revolutionary colonial Saint Domingue. Fignolé's novel explores the persistence of the para-revolutionary moment by juxtaposing and integrating a present narrative with events that have taken place as many as five hundred years prior. In this, Aube Tranquille presents a striking narration of the Walcottian anxiety regarding a past that aggressively inserts itself into the lived present, an active force in that present rather than a phenomenon that one has the luxury of contemplating from a position of remove. The whole of the narrative is, then, destabilized by the constant emergence of an insistently, even violently, present past—a past that demands to be reckoned with, revisited, and even relived in order to even begin to conceive of a future.