Papa Loko’s Dire Poétique in Twenty-First-Century Port-au-Prince-Based Haitian Poetry

In this chapter, with enormous gratitude especially to Kyrah Malika Daniels for the time she put into reading and advising this article on its discussion of Papa Loko, as well as her advice on appropriate spellings of words related to Haitian Vodou, I take up the vexed theorization of contemporary Haitian public life, by asserting that Haitian, especially Port-au-Prince based poetry of the twenty-first century, engages what I refer to as Lokoian ethics to re-theorize healing for present-day Haitian life. Since myriad scholars have articulated the intimacy between and among knowledge-making, philosophy, literary and artistic practices, spirituality, healing, and the medicinal in Vodou thought, it is worth underscoring the fact that the twenty-first-century Haitian poetry I consider in this chapter constitutes a vital part of the conversation among experts – academics, intellectuals, creatives – about how to perceive and imagine Haitian life today. I address poet and writer James Noël’s challenge to readers of contemporary Haitian poetry to grapple with how to read and process the extremely troubling quotidian realities of present-day Haitian civil society. Further, I examine the fugacity of the Haitian lwa Papa Loko in his manifestations as the butterfly and as the wind. Papa Loko’s elusiveness is evoked in Noël’s work, as well as in that of Georges Castera and Lyonel Trouillot, to whom Noël’s writing is indebted.

Special thanks also to Kaiama L. Glover and Niall Martin for reading and editing this
article multiple times, and to Marie-José Nzegou-Tayo and Cécile Accilien for their edits,
suggestions, and expertise.