The Haitian artist and writer known as Frankétienne, who published the first novel written entirely in Haitian Creole and who, as the nation’s foremost literary lion, refracted its chaos and disorder through art, died on Thursday at his home in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. He was 88.
The Haitian Culture Ministry announced the death. The cause was not specified.
“Through his writings, he illuminated the world, carried the soul of Haiti and defied silence,” Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said in a statement.
Frankétienne was a prolific novelist, poet and painter — often all three in a single work — whose art embraced and interpreted the chaos of the small, tumultuous country he came from.
“I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life,” he said in a 2011 interview with The New York Times at his rambling gallery and home, in a working-class district of Port-au-Prince. “What I don’t like is nonmanagement of chaos. The reason Haiti looks more chaotic is because of nonmanagement. ‘’
While not well known in the English-speaking world, Frankétienne was a larger-than-life figure in Haiti and was celebrated in French and Creole-speaking literary and diaspora circles around the world. He garnered an Order of Arts and Letters award in France, and his lively, unpredictable appearances drew crowds.
His output was varied and extensive, including some 50 written works in French and Haitian Creole and thousands of paintings and sketches, characterized by spirals of blacks, blues and reds, often with poems layered in.
Writing the novel “Dézafi” — published in 1975 and translated as “Cockfight” — in Haitian Creole was an important milestone for the language, derived from French colonizers and enslaved Africans, with a strong oral storytelling tradition. It is a looping, experimental work laced with poetry and elements of magical realism. The plot, involving Voodoo priests set upon by people they have put in a deathlike state, has come to be seen as an allegory of slavery and political oppression.
The novel was also a classic example of Spiralism, a Haitian literary movement, which he founded in the 1960s with the writers René Philoctète and Jean-Claude Fignolé, characterized by the idea of self-perpetuating chaos and creativity.
His play “Pelin Tet’’ also took a biting look at Jean-Claude Duvalier, the dictator known as Baby Doc who ruled Haiti in the 1970s and ’80s, told through the lives of Haitian immigrants in New York recalling their time back home.
Yet even during the tumultuous years of dictatorships and the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, Frankétienne stayed. He said he believed that his works were too baroque to attract interest from Haiti’s succession of autocratic governments, and that disaster was merely a part of life.
Besides, he said, Haiti was his muse.
“Through the enigmatic, chaotic and mysterious massif of Haiti, the Divine Intelligence of universal energy has given me everything,” Frankétienne, speaking in his usual enigmatic style, told UNESCO in 2023 when the organization designated him an Artist for Peace.
Indeed, a conversation with Frankétienne could take on flights of fancy.
Kaiama L. Glover, an African American studies professor at Yale who has translated his works, recalled moderating a discussion with him in 2009 during which he leaped to his feet, ripped open his shirt to reveal prayer beads and began singing Voodoo prayers to make a point.
“He was just bellowing and calling on the spirits to express an answer on what it means to write in French and Creole,” Professor Glover said in an interview.
He and his studio became a magnet for aspiring writers and artists of all kind. He lived there with his wife, Marie-Andrée Étienne, a son, Rudolphe, and a daughter, Stéphane, all of whom survive him. His survivors also include a number of grandchildren.
The Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, who appeared with Frankétienne at conferences in Haiti and Miami and whose parents brought her to see his plays when they were performed in Brooklyn, said his death leaves a big gap.
“But as I’m sure he would say, the spiral continues in the generation that, in part, he helped nurture and which continues in his wake,” she said in an interview.
“His novels and plays extended our vocabulary, expanding how we express love, passion, humor and rage,” she said. “His love for Haiti was so deep that sometimes he had to invent words to express it.”
Frankétienne did get wider notice after the 2010 earthquake. Two months before it struck, he had written a play, “The Trap,” depicting two men in a postapocalyptic landscape, and its themes and setting resonated with audiences far beyond Haiti. After it was first presented, at a UNESCO conference in Paris, demand for his written work and paintings soared, and his art was featured in exhibitions in New York.
Frankétienne was born Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d’Argent on April 12, 1936, in Ravine-Sèche, an impoverished rural village in northwest Haiti. He was born to a Black mother, Annette Étienne, who worked as a street vendor selling cigarettes, charcoal, candy and moonshine, while raising eight children, and a white father, Benjamin Lyles, an American businessman who abandoned the family.
“My mother was an illiterate peasant and she had me when she was 16,” Frankétienne said in 2011. “She was taken in by an American, a very rich American. The American was 63.”
He was raised in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where his fair skin and blue eyes often drew stares. He was the oldest child, and his mother struggled to finance his schooling.
The school he attended was French, and he was teased because he didn’t speak French. Angry, he set about mastering the language and developed an affinity for words and artistic expression.
He later combined two of his names as he embarked on an artistic and literary career. He began writing poetry in the early 1960s as a student at the École Nationale des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris and in 1968 published his first novel, “Mûr à Crever” (“Ready to Burst”).
He started writing plays, he said, because in Haiti, where nearly half the population is illiterate, so few could read his novels.
He had a penchant for prophecies, including, years before the coronavirus pandemic, predicting that he would die in 2020. Friends and scholars then nervously watched the pandemic unfold, wondering if Frankétienne had been on to something.
“His prediction was five years too early,” Professor Glover said, “and so we got more time.”
The post Frankétienne, Father of Haitian Letters, Is Dead at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
