The history of Haiti, if it were not so poignant, would be a real adventure novel! Located off the coast of Cuba, the island bears the name Ayiti inspired by its first settlement, the Taino Amerindians, before the arrival of the Conquistadors. Its entry into History is shattering: the men of Columbus, dazzled by the gold that it abounds in its natural state, shamelessly plunder the region. Is it from this period that dates this immoderate taste for wealth that will never cease to undermine its leaders? After the buccaneers and the privateers, the French colonists settle there: the voluptuous Saint-Domingue will be for three centuries the richest colony of the kingdom of France. Its elites become mixed and the Age of Enlightenment nourishes the dreams of freedom of Haitian slaves. Led by Toussaint-Louverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they rose up in the French Revolution, threw Bonaparte's armies into the sea and obtained the island's independence in 1804. The world's first black republic was born. Sulphurous Haiti... The island would pay a high price for its freedom, and its learning of democracy involved the worst political instability. While foreign powers pulled the strings like the United States, bloody dictatorships regularly overthrew the country: the Duvaliers, Papa and Baby Doc, then the military juntas, supported by the cruel militias of the tontons macoutes. Even Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who became president, turned into a tyrant, as if contaminated by this endemic violence.

Will the island, drained of blood after the terrible earthquake and then the cholera epidemic, still find the strength to rise again? In exile, it resists like those Haitians who do not forget their motherland and fly its flag high: René Depestre (Renaudot Prize, 1988), Frankétienne (tipped for the Nobel Prize), Dany Laferrière (Médicis Prize 2009) and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a world-famous painter.