Bilingual Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry from 1986 to the Present

"Today, many authors come from working-class backgrounds, who grew up in the underprivileged neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince or another city, who have lived the dirty life of the streets that never sleep, of overcrowded houses, and come across the abandoned corpses of anonymous murdered people. They bring to literature, to poetry, another feeling. The feeling of those who did not grow up in libraries, who did not know the time when benevolent and conservative parents said to their sons: "But why waste your time writing in Creole?" They bring to literature loves that were not born in books, anger and despair, hopes too, which are their very womb, their raw wounds and their intimate bets. They also bring another relationship to language. [...]

Since 1986, Creole has collectively achieved through poetry a gesture of re-creation of the Haitian Being, of reappropriation of the deep, living word, by creating a language, by creating the vulgar language, in the sense of this Italian vulgar language that Dante created, by seizing it and thereby creating its literary language: becoming like one of the lighthouses , it shows the horizon that each literary language will have to conquer. Mehdi Chalmers Lyonel Trouillot (extract from the preface)