Marie-Célie Agnant’s social involvement started way before she began writing. In the 80s, she was already active in spaces such as the Disparus Tiers-Monde Association, putting her talents and convictions to good use. At that time, she was studying while working as a performer and a cultural mediator. Later on, she joined the CSDM’s Heritage Language Instruction Programme (PELO) and taught Haitian Creole and French.
In 1995, she took part in the World Conference on Women in Beijing. However, her constant interrogations about the society we live in pushed her beyond activism, so she started freelancing to have the freedom to devote herself to writing. She became a research assistant, did field research and conducted studies on aging from which she collected life stories. She draws from this experience in her first novel, La dot de Sara, published in 1995, which is “constructed from the stories of grandmothers of Haitian origin, as part of a study in sociology”. In 2022, over twenty-five years later, she translated this novel into Haitian Creole for its reissue in a bilingual Creole-French version.
From poetry to short stories, novels and children’s literature, she has been building a substantial body of work over the last thirty years, much of which has been translated into several languages. In addition, she has written a number of chronicles, opinion pieces published in magazines and been a part of countless conferences, events and public readings. Her commitment towards social justice issues such as feminism, exclusion, loneliness, racism and exile transpires through all of her work. In each and every one of her books, her words resonate with anyone who suffers deeply, no matter where they are from.
