Philoctète

With absolute specificity, fearlessness, and humor, Philoctète ventures to write the unspeakable (that is, disgusting and unbelievable) hours of the Dominican Vespers. The events of these two days—so known and so denied, so unfathomable and yet so emblematic of a contemporary, worldwide ethical failure with respect to blackness and difference—are mired in trauma and shame. Stunned silence might well seem an appropriate response. How, though, to write the fiction of such real horror? Whose story to tell? In what language? Philoctète seems to find some answers in the schizophonic offerings of the spiral. In Le Peuple des terres mêlées, he looks at terror's impact on self-expression, and at the ways in which language is implicated in and articulates that terror. His narrative reads as a personal chronicling of this at once intimate and collective experience of state violence. Although the story is related from the perspective of a third-person narrator, this narrating voice might be that of a survivor—shell-shocked but determined. Indeed, the narrator of Le Peuple des terres mêlées takes advantage of the ambiguity of the French third-person-singular pronouns “on” and “personne” to maintain a position at once implicated in and removed from the drama s/he recounts; his/her attitude oscillates between confidential and clinical. This insider-outsider posture of less-than-total omniscience is established in the novel-spiral's first sentence: “Since five in the morning, a bird (to be honest, no one really knows what) turns in the sky above Elias Piña, a tiny village on the Dominican border” (9). The narrator then goes on to describe the reactions of the villagers according to age group (“The children believe … The teenagers would like … The elderly, men and women … ”), and leaves it at that.