Yanick Lahens's The Colour of Dawn explores precisely this political death alongside the social, economic and gendered powerlessness of a group of women in Port-au-Prince. Lahen's novel is built around the absence of the rebellious and outspoken Fignole, 'who has never accepted the rules of any dogma, any uniform, or any doctrine'(70). Narrated alternately by Fignolé's two sisters, the sensual Joyeuse and bitter, god-fearing Angelique, the novel traverses Port-au-Prince over the course of a day, observing the violation, sexual predators, poverty and injustice that inhabit their neighbourhood. The sisters ostensibly represent opposed outlooks on the depressing reality of daily violence. Whilst  Joyeuse moves physically amongst the chaos of the city, using her faith in her youth and attractiveness as a talisman, Angelique succumbs to despair and moves in a narrow world of rancour mainly staged within claustrophobic interiors.

However, this is not simply another rehash of Haiti as 'Bloof maddened, sex maddened, god maddened' or 'the most dangerous place on earth'. Lahen's novel is a clear political critique of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide is named only as 'Prophet-President, boss of the Démunis[the poor] party'(27), damningly likened to 'the other Prophet-President, President for Life' Franç Duvalier(who is also not named)(70). The reader witnesses omnipresent violation and violence, specifically the 'insidious war' where 'armed bands[...] blended in with the forces of order[...to]liquidate the insurgents'(45) This is a narrative of Aristide as yet another Hatian despot, enlisting chimére(armed gangs) to enforce his rules(a narrative disputed in Garland's chapter on Cité Soleil). Fignolé is positioned as an ideological challenge to this tyranny: a free-thinking, astute rebel. His name recalls Lahens's contemporary, anti-Duvalier writer Jean-Claude Fignolé, and significantly, leftist Daniel Fignolé, who tantalisingly almost came to power instead of François Duvalier in 1957. However, Fignolè is always at best marginal: he never speaks, is never present, exists in the stories of others, appearing only in the very last selection in order to be definitively annihilated. Hope and resistance then are confined within the imagination-once they are spoken or enacted brutal silencing ensues. 

The defeat of Fignolè the 'artist'(musician) in some ways also reflects Lahen's dilemma as an artist in a country with low literacy, a condition she has referred to as 'internal exile', writing in French, Haiti's official language, rather than its national language of Kreyòl. It is noticeable that a deliberate internal dissonance pervades the formal structure of the novel: although certain incidents overlap in the sisters' accounts, their two voices do not unite to produce one cohesive narrative, and much of what happens to Fignolé remains mystery. For Lahens, the dissonance must also be ascribed to a society which isolates people from each other by breeding distrust and fostering exploitation. And this climate of alienation within Haiti is not simply 'internally' generated.

Tellingly, the novel sees American journalist John arrive with 'the second occupation'(60) in 1994, where the US military reinstated Aristide. John, a meld of journalist and tourist, embodies the failure of an American 'New World Imaginary', assuming a 'benevolent' superiority, exoticising and eroticising Haiti for self-affirmation. John also revealingly lends his unwavering support to the Prophet President. A functional rather than central character in the novel's events, he suggests a critique of the academic writing in Haiti and the America's, or indeed the writer of this review-a 'well meaning' outsider who is ultimately unable to understand or empathise with the reality of Haiti. The 'who' and 'how' of representing Haiti is then a key, if implicit, stake in both books, and is part of a larger ongoing debate about representing the meaning of Haiti and its politics. (This played out for example in Lyonel Trouillot's critique of Peter Hallward in Small Axe('Hallward, or the Hidden Face of Racism' 30(2009)127-36) and Andrew Leak's rejoinder in Bulletin of Latin American Research('A Vain Fascination:Writing from and about Haiti after the Earthquake' 32.4(2013) 394-406))However, Garland, quoting Said, makes a case for the relevance of the outsider's perspective, to supply 'a great deal of information, the human context and historical events that have reduced [people] to their present state'(190). Such narratives then, regardless of divergent political and ideological outlooks, counter silence and misunderstandings surrounding Haiti, prompting valuable new narratives, critical revisions and questions.