Antoine Innocent, who put vodou in a Haitian novel, dies at eighty-seven

Antoine Innocent was born in Port-au-Prince in 1873 and died on 13 April 1960 at eighty-seven. He was a journalist and editor at the paper Le Soir, where in 1906 he serialized his only novel, Mimola ou l’histoire d’une cassette. The book treated vodou and the loas not as folklore for tourists but as an inherited African culture still alive in Haitian families. Haitian writers who came after him, the indigénistes of the 1920s, built on that ground.