Joël des Rosiers was born in Caye (Haïti) in his childhood, moved to Quebec. He loves architecture and modern painters.

  

He have published his first collection of poems in 1987 'Metropolis Opera' ( Triptyque, la Vague à l’âme publishers).

  

Other writings : 'Métropolis Opéra', poems, éditions Triptyque, Montréal, 1987 ; 'Tribu', poesy, éditions Triptyque, Montréal, 1990, Prix du Gouverneur Général ; 'Savanes', poems, 1993, Prix d'excellence de Laval ; 'Théories Caraïbes, Poétique du déracinement', essay, éditions Triptyque, 1996, new edition 2009, Prix de la Société des Écrivains Canadiens ; 'Vétiver', poems, éd. Triptyque, Montréal, 1999 ; 'Résurgences baroques', collective writings, essay, editors Walter Moser et Nicolas Goyer, Baroque des Caraïbes, Éditions La lettre Volée, Bruxelles, 2001 ; 'Vetiver', french translation by Hugh Hazelton, Signature Éditions, Winnipeg, 2005, Prix du Gouverneur Général du Canada ; 'Un autre soleil', short stories, writing with Patricia Léry, Plume et Encre, 2006 and éditions Triptyque, 2007 ; 'Caïques, poèmes', éditions Triptyque, 2007, Prix Casa de las Americas ; 'Lettres à l'Indigène', letters, éditions Triptyque, Montréal, 2009 ; 'Gaïac', poesy, éditions Triptyque, 2010 ; 'Métaspora. Essai sur les patries intimes', éditions Triptyque, 2013 ; 'Chaux' , poesy, éditions Triptyque, 2015

  

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Painting

  

A lament for Basquiat

[published in RN 06 in September 1992, original text written in French translated by John Taylor]

  

You painted rattlesnakes on the subway walls

New York City

grows wild inside your spinning mind

a drawing constantly

in need of a fix

of Black music

of Brooklyn Bridge rumbling on its African Foundations

and you sleep Pharaoh admist the masks of Akomé

the fetishes with their ivory grimaces

the anonymous image on the back-side of doors

on the rubbish heaps

the scrap iron searches for your eyes

to ascend into the dream child how you played with spray paint on the sad city blocks

the traces of the meaning just as quickly beneath the oxide the tidal wave of silence lurks above our heads

way down there in the prophetic distance young kings are still dying

so that the story can be told so that the nostalgia can call itself modern

  

Joël Des Rosiers

extract from ’Tribu’, 1990

  
  

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