The forced departure of Depestre in 1959 and Alexis's violent demise two years later were two of the most high-profile manifestations of François Duvalier's growing intolerance of any kind of opposition. Even if his early addresses promised national unity and reconciliation, Duvalier was quick to repress the business community, opposition newspapers, the army, the communists, the trade unions, the church, even the Boy Scouts. Any semblance of democratic government was finally abandoned on 22 October 1961, when elections took place for Haiti's single legislative chamber, and only Duvalier supporters were permitted to stand. Duvalier had his own name inscribed on the top of each ballot paper, and when the results came in it was declared that he had been elected unanimously to his second term of office. Having drastically weakened the opposition – many of his adversaries were by now dead or in exile – Duvalier was able to consolidate his autocratic rule, and in 1964, following another mock election, he declared himself “president for life.” It was in this tense and restrictive political context that Émile Ollivier, whose 1991 novel Passages is the focus of this chapter, was to emerge as a promising young writer.

Haïti littéraire

In contrast to Duvalierism's closed nationalist and racial ideology, the most prominent literary group of this period, Haïti littéraire, was uncompromisingly universalist, and refused to limit itself to the narrow set of themes dictated by indigenism. Haïti littéraire was less of a movement than a loose collective founded in 1960 by young poets, including Anthony Phelps, René Philoctète, Roland Morisseau, Serge Legagneur, and Davertige (Villard Denis). The outward-looking humanism of the group is expressed in Phelps's contention that “Our writers have not understood that literature must not be made exclusively for local consumption. The literary work must be able to travel, to impose itself on and find a worthy place among others. Local color is of little importance, what counts is the human color of the work.”