Workshop of Silence

Workshop of Silence, a book of poems by the Haitian writer Jean D’Amérique, was published in France by Cheyne éditeur in 2020. Across all of D’Amérique’s work, and especially in this third collection, he bridges the political and the personal, the aggrieved and the hopeful, the local and the global. The first three poems of Workshop offer a helpful overture. The first describes where the speaker’s poems come from (“gnaw[ed] nights sprung from guts”); the second imagines a world where tenderness alone can pay for groceries; and the third laments the inattention of “developed nations” toward places like Aleppo and Gaza, which are “married by force to the evening of bones.” Hope and horror, impatience and dreamy languor trade places throughout the book, as D’Amérique asks how poetry can be made of and resist silence, and how poems can be products of and inspirations toward hope and resistance even in the face of overwhelming, and sometimes violent, indifference.

Though D’Amérique’s poems grow out of soils strewn with stones and splotched with blood, they also grow out of play, one of the more daring and dangerous modes there is (“being happy is worth the price” he says in “worth the price”). Produced in a bilingual edition, with a side-by-side translation by Conor Bracken as well as a critical introduction, Workshop of Silence preserves and approximates this spirit of play and scrutiny so that the sound of the translation bears as much semantic heft as the signifying content of the words. This leads, oftentimes, to choices that may seem odd or tangential, but ultimately highlight D’Amérique’s experimentation with the French language in and on poetic form—the puns, the intricate play of assonance and consonance, the rhymes and kennings, the lineation and inversions. These all serve to recalibrate a reader’s relationship with the language he is writing in, one that has been used for centuries to subjugate people throughout the Global South. The more we recognize language as a mighty and strange substance that can be manipulated to do weird things and to effect arbitrary outcomes, the more we can both revel in its potential and question what it has led us to take for granted.