Gérard Vergniaud Étienne (born 28 May 1936 in Cap Haïtien,érardÉ Haiti; died 14 December 2008 in Montreal, Quebec) was a linguist, journalist and writer of poems, novels and essays.
Biography
Haiti
Gérard Étienne wrote his first poems when only 13 and performed them on radio, but he left his paternal home at 15. Declaring that his father had been violent towards his mother because she did not share his Vodun religion, Étienne said that he had been terribly affected by his childhood.
In Port-au-Prince he took part in an uprising against the despotic regime of the U.S.-backed Paul Magloire. Arrested with Luc B. Innocent and Windsor Kléber Laferrière, he was imprisoned and tortured. Prison and torture had marked him deeply, but after Magloire was deposed in 1956, Étienne found the strength to pursue classical studies. As he was later to comment in an interview with Ghila Sroka, "The more we deny the people the right to exist, the more they express their disappointment in the arts, literature, music."
In 1958 he began a career as a journalist, teacher and writer. A follower of Haitian Marxist novelist and physician Jacques Stephen Alexis (himself murdered by the Tonton Macoute in 1961), he took part in a 1959 plot against the army-supported regime of François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, for which he was arrested and tortured a second time.
Upon his release, Étienne published in rapid succession four books of poetry and two literary essays. He founded the "Samba" cultural group (later to become Haïti-littéraire). While teaching at colleges and a high school, he was simultaneously literary critic and reporter with the daily Le Nouvelliste (1961-1962) and Panorama (1962-1964). Étienne has followed parallel military and artistic trajectories, especially at Syto Cavé's Société des Messagers de l'art (1963) and the Haitian Air Corps, where as an air cadet he was assigned to the meteorology department (1955–1957).
With the publication of his first book of poetry Au milieu des larmes ("Amidst the tears") in 1960, he found himself a cultural and literary leader within his country. Following a long detention in Duvalier's prisons, he fled to Quebec as a refugee in August 1964.
Quebec and New Brunswick
On his arrival in Montreal, he taught at the Lycée Da Silva (1964-1965) and worked as a reporter for the Métro Express and Quartier Latin newspapers. While studying literature at the Université de Montréal (1964–1970), he worked first in a factory and then as a hospital orderly at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. He taught at the Cégep de Matane (1968-1970) and wrote for the newspaper La Voix Gaspe — a newspaper that ceased publication in 2012. In 1965 he published "Letters to Montreal," his first Canadian book. Since then, he continued to publish poems and stories; his work is in several French and Haitian anthologies and has been translated into English, Portuguese and German.
In his early years in Canada he had converted to Orthodox Judaism. In 1967 he married Natania Feuerwerker, whom he had met at the Université de Montréal. She was a daughter of the French jurist and Haganah fighter Antoinette Gluck (1912-2003) and the rabbi and historian David Feuerwerker (1912–1980). Étienne and his wife had two children, Joël and Michaëlla. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Université de Montréal (1968) and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Strasbourg (1974).
In 1967-68 he was editor of Lettres et Écritures, a journal published by the Université de Montréal's arts faculty in 1967-68; later in 1968 he founded the Théâtre de Matane.
From 1971 till his retirement in 2001 he was a journalism professor at the Université de Moncton. From 1972 to 1987 he wrote a column for the Montreal newspaper "Le Devoir". From 1974 to 1980 he also edited a review published by the Université de Moncton. Later he wrote for the now defunct daily Le Matin and the weeklies Le Voilier and Le Moniteur acadien in Shediac, New Brunswick (1986-1987).