Trained in Modern Letters at the Sorbonne, before returning to teach in Haiti where she was born in 1953, Yanick Lahens, very involved in the social and cultural development of her country, began her literary career with short stories in the early 1990s. Essay balloons, in more ways than one, these texts – most of which have been collected in Parker Bird at night and other news, published like all his books by Sabine Wespieser (306 pages, 22 euros) – form the contours of a work in perpetual tension. Between land and asphalt, between rural and urban world, between violence and sensuality, harshness and gentleness, the writer searches his memory as much as his country, as one thinks of The Color of Dawn (2008) flaws (2010) Moon bath (Prix Fémina, 2014) or at Sweet rout. In March, at the invitation of the Collège de France, Yanick Lahens inaugurated the first Francophone Worlds chair. For this first part, she evokes the earthquake that hit her island in January 2010. But also the "angels of devouring" which have only accentuated, in particular, climate change, poverty, migration.
Tribune. "On January 12, 2010 at 4:53 pm, in a twilight that sought its end and beginning colors, Port-au-Prince was ridden for less than forty seconds by one of these gods who are said to feed on flesh and blood. Riding wildly before collapsing shaggy hair, rolled eyes, dislocated legs, yawning sex, showing his entrails of scrap and dust, his viscera and his blood " (faults, ed. Sabine Wespieser, 2010).
At the dawn of this decade, this earthquake hit me hard. I lost my foot, wobbled, a few hours, a few days, stumbling towards landmarks that had left me in the air, paused for my heart to take its place there, between my lungs, and restrained a trepidation, without respite. , of my thoughts. I never fully recovered from this shock and so much the better. Because I don't want to heal from the love of this place, the love of people, or the love of the world. I write only to try to make the impossible tour of this place, people, the world. Writing the earthquake was an act of love for me.
The world's metabolism remains silent and distant until events like this remind us that the Earth is alive. That she is old, that she goes through cycles. Once it sprang up from a strange biochemical soup, life spread. Time began its slow work of devouring.
