LA SALINE
By La Rédaction · Port-au-Prince
· 3 min read · Updated 24 April 2026
Translated from French — AI-assisted and reviewed by the editorial team. The French version is authoritative. Read the original · About our translation policy
The devil is in her eyes
And God
In her smile
With all my Cartesian being
Between the devil and good God
To hell with my reason
Before my passion
To give flesh to my land. Wherever I hide
Her voice is my dwelling
Wherever I exile myself
In my heart beats my island. When my country weeps
My senses flood my science
My soul is saint-soleil
No matter where it snows. In 𝐋𝐀 𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄, an excerpt from 𝐶’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑑’𝑢𝑛𝑒 𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑖̂𝑡 𝑙’𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑢𝑟 (2024), Jean Venel Casséus offers a poem brief in scope but ample in symbolic density. The text is part of an Antillean tradition where poetic language reconstructs an inner territory from memory, loss, and displacement. Here, exile never appears as an administrative or geographical fact; it corresponds to an existential condition. The lyrical subject does not leave a place: he is divided between reason and passion, between gaze and smile, between God and the devil, in other words, between order and vitality. “The devil is in her eyes / And God / In her smile.” From the outset, Casséus establishes a Creole anthropology of the world. Duality does not belong to Western Manichaeism. It evokes the coexistence of forces in Afro-Caribbean cosmologies where light contains shadow. The beloved person or the beloved land, for the ambiguity remains intentional, takes the form of a sacred space where opposites reconcile. This tension runs through the entire poem: Cartesian rationality admits defeat to an embodied, almost telluric knowledge. “To hell with my reason / Before my passion / To give flesh to my land.” The phrase marks a shift: the land leaves geography to enter the body. The text then moves towards continuous internalization. The external space fades in favor of an affective space. “Wherever I hide / Her voice is my dwelling.” Habitat loses its materiality and becomes auditory. The voice replaces the house. This substitution corresponds to the diasporic experience: cultural continuity survives spatial discontinuity. The mention “My soul is saint-soleil” introduces the aesthetic key of the poem. Casséus implicitly invokes the Haitian pictorial movement Saint-Soleil, founded in the 1970s by Tiga (Jean-Claude Garoute), Levoy Exil, and their companions. This movement rejected Western perspective and favored visionary spontaneity, painting as an inner emergence rather than mimetic representation. Figures there obeyed the pulsations of the invisible world. To say “my soul is saint-soleil” is to inscribe identity in appearance rather than in biography. The soul takes the form of a surface traversed by collective memory, inheritances, and the invisible presences of the country. Nostalgia then serves as creative energy. “When my country weeps / My senses flood my science.” Intellectual knowledge yields to sensation. The poet adopts the same epistemology as Saint-Soleil painting: truth emerges before explanation. The last line “No matter where it snows” operates the symbolic closure of the text. Snow, an image of the Nordic elsewhere, does not erase the island; it accentuates its inner presence. Climatic distance confirms belonging. La Saline ceases to be a neighborhood or a memory: it becomes a principle of intimate organization. The poem thus offers itself as an indirect self-portrait: not the story of a life, but the description of an inner structure shaped by Haiti. Casséus joins the tradition of Caribbean literature where the subject exists through the relationship to the native place, from Césaire to Glissant, and reformulates it through a plastic aesthetic. Memory here corresponds to a Saint-Soleil canvas: saturated, vibrant, undisciplined, inhabited. In La Saline, exile does not erase the land; it displaces it towards man. The country moves from outside to inside. The island takes the rank of a vital organ. It beats. And because it beats, the poem breathes.
February 17, 2026
And God
In her smile
With all my Cartesian being
Between the devil and good God
To hell with my reason
Before my passion
To give flesh to my land. Wherever I hide
Her voice is my dwelling
Wherever I exile myself
In my heart beats my island. When my country weeps
My senses flood my science
My soul is saint-soleil
No matter where it snows. In 𝐋𝐀 𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄, an excerpt from 𝐶’𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑑’𝑢𝑛𝑒 𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑖̂𝑡 𝑙’𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑢𝑟 (2024), Jean Venel Casséus offers a poem brief in scope but ample in symbolic density. The text is part of an Antillean tradition where poetic language reconstructs an inner territory from memory, loss, and displacement. Here, exile never appears as an administrative or geographical fact; it corresponds to an existential condition. The lyrical subject does not leave a place: he is divided between reason and passion, between gaze and smile, between God and the devil, in other words, between order and vitality. “The devil is in her eyes / And God / In her smile.” From the outset, Casséus establishes a Creole anthropology of the world. Duality does not belong to Western Manichaeism. It evokes the coexistence of forces in Afro-Caribbean cosmologies where light contains shadow. The beloved person or the beloved land, for the ambiguity remains intentional, takes the form of a sacred space where opposites reconcile. This tension runs through the entire poem: Cartesian rationality admits defeat to an embodied, almost telluric knowledge. “To hell with my reason / Before my passion / To give flesh to my land.” The phrase marks a shift: the land leaves geography to enter the body. The text then moves towards continuous internalization. The external space fades in favor of an affective space. “Wherever I hide / Her voice is my dwelling.” Habitat loses its materiality and becomes auditory. The voice replaces the house. This substitution corresponds to the diasporic experience: cultural continuity survives spatial discontinuity. The mention “My soul is saint-soleil” introduces the aesthetic key of the poem. Casséus implicitly invokes the Haitian pictorial movement Saint-Soleil, founded in the 1970s by Tiga (Jean-Claude Garoute), Levoy Exil, and their companions. This movement rejected Western perspective and favored visionary spontaneity, painting as an inner emergence rather than mimetic representation. Figures there obeyed the pulsations of the invisible world. To say “my soul is saint-soleil” is to inscribe identity in appearance rather than in biography. The soul takes the form of a surface traversed by collective memory, inheritances, and the invisible presences of the country. Nostalgia then serves as creative energy. “When my country weeps / My senses flood my science.” Intellectual knowledge yields to sensation. The poet adopts the same epistemology as Saint-Soleil painting: truth emerges before explanation. The last line “No matter where it snows” operates the symbolic closure of the text. Snow, an image of the Nordic elsewhere, does not erase the island; it accentuates its inner presence. Climatic distance confirms belonging. La Saline ceases to be a neighborhood or a memory: it becomes a principle of intimate organization. The poem thus offers itself as an indirect self-portrait: not the story of a life, but the description of an inner structure shaped by Haiti. Casséus joins the tradition of Caribbean literature where the subject exists through the relationship to the native place, from Césaire to Glissant, and reformulates it through a plastic aesthetic. Memory here corresponds to a Saint-Soleil canvas: saturated, vibrant, undisciplined, inhabited. In La Saline, exile does not erase the land; it displaces it towards man. The country moves from outside to inside. The island takes the rank of a vital organ. It beats. And because it beats, the poem breathes.
February 17, 2026
