Frankétienne dies at Delmas, the last giant of Haitian letters

Frankétienne died at his home in Delmas on 20 February 2025, aged 88. He was born at Ravine Sèche near Saint-Marc in 1936, the child of a girl of fourteen raped by an American during the occupation years. With René Philoctète and Jean-Claude Fignolé he invented Spiralism, and in 1975 he published Dézafi, the first novel written in Haitian Creole. When most writers of his generation ran from Duvalier, he stayed and wrote Pelin Tèt, a play that mocked the dictatorship to its face. He painted thousands of canvases in the same rooms where he wrote. One man, and he was a national library.