Haitian Odysseys

This chapter examines the depictions of perilous crossings of Haitian boat people in the writings of Emile Ollivier and Jean-Claude Charles. In the first section, the chapter takes up Ollivier’s novel Passages, alongside his non-fictional writing on migration and exile. The second section treats Charles’s essay De si jolies petites plages, together with the novels Manhattan Blues and Ferdinand je suis à Paris. The chapter puts the fictional and non-fictional texts of each writer in dialogue to bring out their critiques of international policies of immigration and detention. While Ollivier deplores the dispossession of Haitian coastal environments, Charles reveals the dehumanizing spaces of carceral control around the Caribbean and the United States. Along with Philoctète, they inscribe in their texts an ecological politics that takes up the cause of refugees and takes apart the grand narrative of Western modernity as a vision of progress. Ollivier and Charles shed light on the shadows of globalizing political economies and, in particular, on the unwelcoming shores of the United States.