René Depestre

René Depestre born 29 August 1926 Jacmel Haiti is a Haitian poet and former communist activist He is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Américas publishing house He is best known for his poetry He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction His father died in 1936 and René Depestre left his mother his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother From 1940 to 1944 he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in PortauPrince His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels in particular Hadriana in All My Dreams 1988 Étincelles Sparks his first collection of poetry appeared in 1945 prefaced by Edris SaintAmand He was only nineteen years old when the work was published The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942 Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends Baker Alexis and Gérald Bloncourt The Hive 194546 One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renew the historical foundations of their identity quote from Le métier à métisser The Haitian government at the time seized the 1945 edition which was published in honor of André Breton which led to the insurrection of 1946 Depestre met with all his Haitian intellectual contemporaries including Jean PriceMars Léon Laleau and René Bélance who wrote the preface to his second collection Gerbe de sang in 1946 He also met with foreign intellectuals He took part in and directed the revolutionary student movements of January 1946 which led to the overthrow of President Élie Lescot The Army very quickly seized power and Depestre was arrested and imprisoned before being exiled He pursued his studies in letters and political science at the Sorbonne from 1946 1950 In Paris he met French surrealist poets as well as foreign artists and intellectuals of the négritude Black movement who coalesced around Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine Depestre took an active part in the decolonization movements in France and he was expelled from French territory He left for Prague from where he was driven out in 1952 He went to Cuba invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén where again he was stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista He was denied entry by France and Italy He left for Austria then Chile Argentina and Brazil He remained in Chile long enough to organize with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado the Continental Congress of Culture Source Article René Depestre from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30