Author and storyteller Olivier Marboeuf pays tribute to Haitian poet Frankétienne with a reading, followed by a musical performance and a discussion with the audience. He will be accompanied by musicians Grégoire Chéry and Léonard Jean-Baptiste. An evening designed as a journey between literary heritage and contemporary creation.
A major figure in Haitian literature, Frankétienne, born in 1936 and deceased in 2025, leaves behind a considerable body of work at the crossroads of poetry, novels, theater, and painting. Co-founder of spiralism in the 1960s, he developed a torrential style of writing, marked by the political and existential upheavals of his country. His dense and vibrant language plays on excess, fragmentation, and immoderation to express both the violence of the world and its indomitable vitality. It is this formal power and radical freedom that Olivier Marboeuf chooses to celebrate today by opening the evening with a tribute reading.
Author, storyteller, and independent exhibition curator, Marboeuf published his first play, La Nuit juste avant le feu(The Night Just Before the Fire), with Atlantiques Déchaînés in 2025. The text received Artcena's National Aid for the Creation of Dramatic Texts in 2025. Conceived as a long, tense monologue, it explicitly dialogues with Bernard-Marie Koltès' La nuit juste avant les forêts (The Night Just Before the Forests), created in 1977 and published by Éditions de Minuit. It features the continuous, almost breathless flow that was Koltès's trademark, but transposed to other intimate geographies. In Marboeuf's work, the language is nourished by Caribbean rhythms and nocturnal conversations that stretch until dawn, mixing anger, desire, and irony.
The second part of the evening will bring this text to life in a musical reading performed by Grégoire Chéry and Léonard Jean-Baptiste. A singer, composer, and actor born in Haiti and based in France since 2001, Grégoire Chéry's work combines music and theater, focusing on social divisions and the power of words. Léonard Jean-Baptiste, known as léO, is a multidisciplinary artist and member of the collective The Living and The Dead Ensemble, with whom he has produced the film Ouvertures and the installation and performance The Wake. In 2025, he released his first musical project, Nosono.
Together, they will open up a space where words flow between memory and invention. The evening will end with a discussion with the audience, continuing the reflection on heritage, influences, and exchanges between Haiti, Guadeloupe, and metropolitan France.
