Reading Subjects Amidst Subjection in Jean D’Amérique’s <i>Soleil à Coudre</i> (2021) and Emmelie Prophète’s <i>Les Villages de Dieu</i> (2020)

In this article, we examine the construction of subjectivity amid social violence in Emmelie Prophète's Les Villages de Dieu (2020) and Jean D’Amérique's Soleil à coudre (2021). We ask, specifically, how the novels frame the abject violence of life in contemporary Haiti through the social awakening of two young Haitian protagonists: Célia Jérôme and Tête Fêlée. The events and images they relay are at times visceral in their violence. Theorists from Susan Sontag to Saidiya Hartman engage with the ethics, affect, and effect of representing violence and the in/capacities of empathy. Both Prophète's and D’Amérique's novels incorporate metatextual elements, expanding the generic mode of the social novel to meditate on globalizing means of communication. Les Villages de Dieu approaches the social media-driven obsession with violence-laden images, and considers the powers and pitfalls of the hyper circulation of spectacle. Soleil à coudre sits at the intersection of verse and prose, incorporating epistolary fragments that disrupt the stream of violent scenes of life in 21st century Port-au-Prince.