Gérard Étienne


Gérard Vergniaud Étienne was a linguist, journalist and writer of poems, novels and essays.

Biography

Haiti

Gérard Étienne wrote his first poems when only 13 and performed them on radio, but he left his paternal home at 15. Declaring that his father had been violent towards his mother because she did not share his Vodun religion, Étienne said that he had been terribly affected by his childhood.
In Port-au-Prince he took part in an uprising against the despotic regime of the U.S.-backed Paul Magloire. Arrested with Luc B. Innocent and Windsor Kléber Laferrière, he was imprisoned and tortured. Prison and torture had marked him deeply, but after Magloire was deposed in 1956, Étienne found the strength to pursue classical studies. As he was later to comment in an interview with Ghila Sroka, "The more we deny the people the right to exist, the more they express their disappointment in the arts, literature, music."
In 1958 he began a career as a journalist, teacher and writer. A follower of Haitian Marxist novelist and physician Jacques Stephen Alexis, he took part in a 1959 plot against the army-supported regime of François Duvalier, for which he was arrested and tortured a second time.
Upon his release, Étienne published in rapid succession four books of poetry and two literary essays. He founded the "Samba" cultural group. While teaching at colleges and a high school, he was simultaneously literary critic and reporter with the daily Le Nouvelliste and Panorama. Étienne has followed parallel military and artistic trajectories, especially at Syto Cavé's Société des Messagers de l'art and the Haitian Air Corps, where as an air cadet he was assigned to the meteorology department.
With the publication of his first book of poetry Au milieu des larmes in 1960, he found himself a cultural and literary leader within his country. Following a long detention in Duvalier's prisons, he fled to Quebec as a refugee in August 1964.

Quebec and New Brunswick

On his arrival in Montreal, he taught at the Lycée Da Silva and worked as a reporter for the Métro Express and Quartier Latin newspapers. While studying literature at the Université de Montréal, he worked first in a factory and then as a hospital orderly at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. He taught at the Cégep de Matane and wrote for the newspaper La Voix Gaspe — a newspaper that ceased publication in 2012. In 1965 he published "Letters to Montreal," his first Canadian book. Since then, he continued to publish poems and stories; his work is in several French and Haitian anthologies and has been translated into English, Portuguese and German.
In his early years in Canada he had converted to Orthodox Judaism. In 1967 he married Natania Feuerwerker, whom he had met at the Université de Montréal. She was a daughter of the French jurist and Haganah fighter Antoinette Gluck and the rabbi and historian David Feuerwerker. Étienne and his wife had two children, Joël and Michaëlla. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Université de Montréal and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Strasbourg.
In 1967-68 he was editor of Lettres et Écritures, a journal published by the Université de Montréal's arts faculty in 1967-68; later in 1968 he founded the Théâtre de Matane.
From 1971 till his retirement in 2001 he was a journalism professor at the Université de Moncton. From 1972 to 1987 he wrote a column for the Montreal newspaper "Le Devoir". From 1974 to 1980 he also edited a review published by the Université de Moncton. Later he wrote for the now defunct daily Le Matin and the weeklies Le Voilier and Le Moniteur acadien in Shediac, New Brunswick.

Confrontation

Despite having suffered two comas and having undergone brain surgery, he continued to write to the weekly Le Voilier. In 1993, just before he was to appear for a Radio-Canada interview on Denise Bombardier's Raison Passion television show, Gérard Étienne was the victim of a bloody gang assault, a politically motivated attack that increased his determination to resist what he characterized as Haitian feudalism. He later wrote of the event in his 1998 book L'Injustice, la désinformation, le mépris de la loi. Subsequently, to that assault, Étienne, through his columns in the Haïti-Observateur newspaper, continued his struggle for sustainable democratic change in his Haitian homeland. In this capacity, he published in 2008, through Éditions du Marais, an uncompromising play, Monsieur Le Président. The Racine actors group staged five performances of the play at the Théâtre Stanislas d'Outremont in April 2008.
Aside from his poetry and journalism, Étienne has also followed an academic career in the field of linguistics. He founded a new discipline in the humanities known as anthroposemiotics. His two essays on this subject, La Question raciale et raciste dans le roman québécois and La Femme noire dans le discours littéraire haïtien, received critical acclaim in both Quebec and the broader francophone world.

Awards and honours

Gérard Étienne in 1991 received the Medal of the Guadeloupe writers union, Association des écrivains de la Guadeloupe. In 1996, the International Council for Francophone Studies conferred upon him the prestigious Maurice-Cagnon Certificate of Honour, for his exceptional contribution to world French-language studies. In 1997 he received the Gold Medal of the La Renaissance Française organization. He was also awarded the Cator trophy for his lifetime of work. As a member of the Quebec writers union, ''Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois, he notably worked during 2005–2006 on their language and sovereignty committee.

Death

As reported by Bryan Miles in Le Devoir, Natania, the writer's widow, said: "He died in my arms" at their home in Côte Saint-Luc, "asking me to help him get dressed for writing." She added that he died "standing up totally straight, really."

Selected works

Novels