Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Marie-Celie Agnant (Interview‪)‬

Haitian-born writer Marie-Celie Agnant has been living in Montreal for over thirty-five years. During this time, she has been recognized for her social activism and has become an important and respected figure in contemporary francophone literature. A citation from Myriam Chancy serves to frame the critical significance of Agnant's literary corpus, characterizing the works of Haitian women writers in general as "acts of intervention, metahistories, which render the lives of Haitian women visible" (Framing Silence 109). Indeed, themes of bearing witness and transmitting memory give shape to her texts, while concomitantly serving to underscore Agnant's commitment to exploring questions of individual and collective female identity involving the legacy of colonialism. Many of her works also focus on such issues related to the immigrant experience as exile, alienation, bicultural identities, hybridity, and migrant memory, as her displaced characters seek new ways to define themselves after leaving their homelands and moving to Quebec. Agnant has published widely in a variety of different genres. Her first work, a volume of poems entitled Balafres (1994), introduced many of the leitmotifs which would resonate in her later works, including the need to give voice to those who have been silenced. Her two novels, La dot de Sara (1995) and Le livre d'Emma (2001), both highlight the imperative nature of the transmission of cultural memory from one generation to the next. Although Marianna, the elderly Haitian protagonist of La dot de Sara, suffers from the loss of her homeland (she left Haiti to care for her granddaughter in Montreal), she succeeds in bequeathing her legacy to Sara, who will in turn transcribe their story for future generations. Emma, a Haitian immigrant to Montreal who has been put in a psychiatric hospital after allegedly having killed her daughter, entrusts her life story and the eventual inscription of the experiences of her ancestors to the narrator, Flore, who serves as a translator for the protagonist's doctor. While Emma insists on the fact that official representations of history need to be rewritten, taking into account the true story of slavery and colonization, she is ultimately unable to assume her own heritage and commits suicide. The short stories in Le silence comme le sang (1997), a collection nominated for the Prix du Gouverneur general du Canada, center around protagonists who are forced to choose between a life of exile in a new land and a life in which both the threat and the reality of violence is omnipresent. Agnant has also written children's stories and novels for adolescents, the latter dealing with such issues as Haitian boat people imprisoned in refugee camps in Florida (Alexis d'Haiti) and the exploitation of immigrant workers (Vingt petits pas vers Maria).