Book contents
4 - Haiti Unbound?
from Part III - Space-Time of the Spiral
Summary
Mûr à crever and Les Possédés de la pleine lune
The spiral has precisely that power that enables it to inscribe in the text at once a decisive articulation of the history of a particular being and the non-history of a nation.
—Yves ChemlaSpatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life.
—Michel de CerteauAlthough, again, more straightforward in many ways than others of the Spiralist prose works, Frankétienne's Mûr à crever proposes striking destabilizations of time and space. The text functions primarily through the maintenance of certain tensions (between the public and the private; among the real, the remembered, and the imagined; among the insular, the regional, and the global; etc.), and so problematizes spatial boundaries and undermines chronological progression. On the one hand, Mûr à crever is very precisely situated in time and space: multiple references to the war in Vietnam suffice to establish the time of the present and set the tone for Frankétienne's critique of US imperialism; the city of Port-au-Prince is named, and its geography presented in almost excessive detail. Yet while the prevalence of specific spatio-temporal markers establishes a realist frame for Mûr à crever, the narrative's present-oriented backdrop is consistently disrupted by the first person narrator's recounting of his childhood memories—seminal moments from a presumably distant past. The porousness of the boundaries separating the various narrative “positions” in Mûr à crever thus sets the stage for a corresponding spatio-temporal unpredictability and obliges the reader to engage with the narrative from various and at times seemingly unrelated points of view. Looping constantly from Raynand's and Paulin's stagnant and claustrophobic urban present to the first person narrator's immersion in the space-time of a nostalgic rural past, Mûr à crever tells a series of “little” stories that, in their combination, aspire to tell a world.
Raynand's trajectory, for example, is one such “little” story, a fact that he himself acknowledges at several points in the narrative, telling himself, for example, that “[h]e isn't needed anywhere. He passes unnoticed. The world functions just as well without him” (143). Lacking both purpose and opportunity, Raynand is a being in perpetual but largely futile motion. He walks in order to maintain an illusion of progress, but is increasingly unable to delude himself into believing that (his) movement will necessarily bring about change.
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- Haiti UnboundA Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, pp. 106 - 127Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010