The Oloffson Already Dead, He Says, His Excellency Lyonel Trouillot in His Works!

There are pens one admires and silences one dreads. Lyonel Trouillot belongs to that caliber of men whose words are so vast that he can, at will, build cathedrals or burn bridges. A masterful writer, he is, without a doubt. But he is also, in his darker hours, the prince of a kingdom of bitterness where words turn into weapons, and judgment into a sentence. Many know it, few say it. Behind the soaring rhetoric of the one reverently called “His Excellency,” sometimes hides a formidably contemptuous man, holding court in those lofty circles, even at his home where one philosophizes between two puffs of sarcasm. There, amidst glasses of red wine, Rum Coca, and poetry, he reigns like the conductor of a minor nobility of slander. Everything is said there, except the essential. People mock, judge, diminish. And always, he is at the center, like a sullen sovereign of letters. Since the École Normale Supérieure, I have carried with me the traces of this ambivalence. How many times have I told him, directly: life is also made of love, tenderness, and addition? But he always had to subtract. Always. I remember his first cruelty, directed against James Noël. It was glacial, calculated: a refusal of recognition, a refusal of wings. But James, poet of the abysses and heights, managed to break free from this contempt. He flew. High. Then came Richard Philoctète. In one of the notebooks from the Thursday Evening Workshops, Trouillot draws portraits of authors. To his niece, he grants the laurels of the University of Pennsylvania. To Richard, a single line: “son of René Philoctète.” A tragic reduction. As if being the son of a giant was enough to erase you. As if the father's shadow should gag the son's voice. But it is in his text on the fire at the Oloffson Hotel that his most terrible indifference perhaps reveals itself. The place burns. Memory falters. And he, instead of weeping, theorizes. He does not denounce the crime: he dresses it in distance. He does not sympathize: he stylizes. His mourning becomes a posture. And one senses a funereal narcissism emerging in his words: as if the real event, too painful, had to be sublimated into oblivion. Sadness kills, so he chooses irony as armor. In any case, I do not want to argue with the one who, despite everything, also taught me literature. I want to speak to him differently. To tell him this: that the country needs beauty, certainly, but above all, love. A true, humble, profound love. Because too often, we destroy ourselves with words, contempt, and silences. Because pride is sometimes more devastating than fire. Yes, the Oloffson was no longer what it once was. But it still represented a part of us. A living memory, a vestige of intensity. A place filled with shadows, music, laughter mixed with pain. It is not its role to invite writers. That is not its mission. It is. It was. It remains. And it is sad, dear Lyonel, that you did not know how to make the Literary Friday a lasting institution. That the Anne-Marie Morisset Center did not become the jewel that Haitian literature so desperately needs. Failing to restore the hotel, we could have at least erected places of soul and knowledge. Michel-Rolph Trouillot taught us how societies erase disturbing pasts (Trouillot 1995). We know how to recognize silencing when it occurs. So please, spare us that of the Oloffson. Let us mourn its loss. Let it rest. And above all, love a little more. Because yes, a little love does good, you know. Twa fèy twa rasi n O! Jete bliye, ranmase sonje! Yves Lafortune
Miami, 11/7/25