Salon d’Ayiti: A Living Tribute to René Depestre

Haiti Cultural Exchange and The Center for Fiction collaborate to celebrate the work & living legacy of Haitian author René Depestre.

“The real conversation between spirit and flesh most likely takes place in some undefined realm, a place neither here nor there, where the soul pounds into the body—or flees the body—in a way that only some among the living can fully understand.”

—Edwidge Danticat on René Depestre

Haiti Cultural Exchange and The Center for Fiction collaborate to celebrate the work & living legacy of Haitian author René Depestre.

This afternoon at The Center for Fiction will feature select readings & panel discussion featuring the English translator of his work, Yale University professor Kaiama L. Glover, renowned author Edwidge Danticat, and special guests.

Join HCX after the program in their new space at 35 Lafayette Ave for a special post-salon gathering featuring live music.

Haitian author René Depestre is one of the most important voices of twentieth-century world literature. Depestre was born in Jacmel, Haiti, on August 29, 1926. His vast corpus includes works of poetry, prose fiction, literary criticism, and political essays. A peer of and collaborator with such influential political and literary figures as Aimé Césaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics and aesthetics of Negritude, Marxism, social realism, and Surrealism, among other major twentieth century phenomena, over the course of a career that has spanned more than half a century.

Having lived and written through significant moments in Haitian, New World, and Pan African history––from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Elie Lescot in 1946, to the first Pan African Congress in Paris 1956, to a struggle with Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 70s––René Depestre has been uniquely placed to narrate how the entirety of the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present reality.