Les Affres d'un défi

In a geo-social context in which there has long existed a marked distance between intellectual and popular culture, the writer of the (French-speaking) Americas has had to take particular care in negotiating the necessarily elitist world of letters. Whether through Creole terminology and proverbs woven into written texts, or extended imaginings on the lives of unsung Caribbean heroes, many of the region's most prominent writers make use of folk elements as springboards for their literary endeavors. Such borrowings from popular culture, when looked to for more than a source of colorful content, provide the foundations of these works, shaping them both formally and thematically. In the particular case of Haiti, the zombie represents one of the most useful figures to emerge from the folkloric tradition. Functioning literally and allegorically in several Haitian novels of the mid to late twentieth century, the zombie offers a valuable critical tool with which to access Haiti's literature from a decidedly local perspective. Frankétienne's reliance on this figure as the central metaphor around which coil and uncoil the various elements of Les Affres d'un défi firmly links his Spiralist aesthetic to that of the broader Haitian community. Indeed, the tensions between immobility and movement so crucial to his configuration of subjecthood in Mûr à crever and Ultravocal, are very much linked to the author's concern with the phenomena of silencing and mutism endemic to Haitian subaltern existence since 1804, and are integrally connected to the figure of the zombie at the core of his third prose fiction work.

The zombie's presence in the Haitian literary context is tied inextricably to the particulars of Haiti's history and culture as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. As has been well commented on by theorists, the United States’ occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the corresponding rise of Indigenism inspired a renewed interest in and appreciation for Haiti's traditional culture. Placing particular emphasis on the African roots of the peasantry's folk beliefs and practices as a valid source of creative inspiration, Indigenism encouraged a literary investment in the popular imagination—an imagination profoundly connected to the vodou faith.