Against Silence

“ Rivers. Storms. Lightning. Mountains. Trees. Lights. Rains. Savage oceans. Take me to the frenzied core of your articulation. Take me!“

A spiral never starts, never ends — it swirls, it rotates. So let’s begin in the middle.

In the 1970s, Haitian writer and painter Frankétienne released Ultravocal — a novel that wasn't really a novel. It broke apart language, form, and meaning. Then came L’Oiseau Schizophone, where typography fractured, collages invaded the text, and narrative scattered.

But this didn’t happen in isolation.

Back in the 1960s, in Haiti — a land battered by dictatorship and oppression— three writers gave birth to something radically new:

The Spirale Movement.

Frankétienne. René Philoctète. Jean-Claude Fignolé.

Together, they rejected the straight line. They chose the spiral.

Why a spiral? Because reality wasn’t linear. Not in Haiti. Not in the universe.

It twisted, looped, cracked, collapsed, and returned.

Spiralism mirrored this chaos, refused to tame it.

It wasn’t a style. It was a storm.

A total language, as Frankétienne called it.

It mixed poetry, theatre, science, painting, philosophy.

French and Haitian Creole collided — not to explain, but to vibrate.

To feel.

Spiralism wasn’t about understanding. It was a rebellion.

Against linearity. Against simplicity.

Against colonized, fragmented minds.

Against silence.

Frankétienne — born Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d’Argent — passed away in February 2025.

You might not have heard of Spiralism before. But now you have. So what are you going to do with it?

© Corentin Fohlen / Divergence for UNESCO