Scope and arrangement
The Étienne and Ghislaine Charlier collection is comprised of letters, political treatises, and printed matter, all useful for a study of the Haitian left in Haiti and abroad. There is very little in the way of the biographical or personal, especially for Étienne, and the majority of the collection's letters are incoming to Rey Charlier. Despite this, the collection still offers a sense of the Charliers' political thinking and development, particularly through four documents written by Étienne Charlier. These are Aperçu sur la formation historique de la nation haïtienne; the 1947 one year anniversary report of the Parti Socialiste Populaire, "Fascisme et Nazisme ou Socialisme Scientifique"; and a copy of the Comité Central du Parti Communiste Haïtien's Analyse Schematique, 1932-1934, co-written with Jacques Roumain.
In addition to the 1947 report on the party, the PSP folder also contains a 1979 letter from Gesner Prudent to poet Paul Laraque and an undated interview between unidentified subjects, both of which discuss the PSP, its influential actors, and the contemporary political milieu in which they operated. Rey Ghislaine's "Introduction à L'Histoire du Parti Socialiste Populaire D'Haiti P.S.P. (1946-1950)" ("Introduction to the History of the PSP") and "Réponses Aux Questions D'Un Jeune Camrade" ("Responses to Questions from a Young Comrade"), and the folder on Max Hudicourt, complete the documentation on the PSP, its activities, and personalities. The Hudicourt folder contains biographical material, including an account of the moments shortly after his death which was controversially ruled a suicide; typescripts of a 1940 issue of Combat, a magazine he founded while in exile in the U.S.; and an essay, "Haiti, Face a la Paix de demain" and its printed English translation, Haiti Faces the Peace of Tomorrow.
Rey Charlier's letters offer a glimpse into both her creative and political activities. The correspondents read like a who's who of the crème of Haiti's political opposition and include the doyen of Haitian noirisme, Jean Price-Mars. In general, the letters from Price Mars to Rey Charlier, all written in the year before his death in 1969, demonstrate a tender friendship between the writer and the Haitian intellectual. Another friend, Herman L. Désir, was the Secretary-General of La Ligue des Patriotes Haitien and a Board Director of the American Haitian Committee. In addition to his letters to Rey Charlier, Désir's folder contains several letters and statements in defense of Haiti and Haitians. Along with his correspondence to Rey Charlier in which he discusses her work, the folder for scholar and translator Carrol F. Coates also contains the translated chapter from Rey Charlier's "Memoires d'une affranchie", published in a special edition of the journal Callaloo.
Materials such as the statement of the Support Committee for the Haitian People reveal Rey Charlier's continuing activism in exile. The committee was set up to give concrete form to the solidarity between various organizations working in the Haitian diaspora. Other documents contained in the collection include a 1927 interview in La Revue Indigene with poet Emile Roumer; a manifesto of the Parti D'Entente Populaire D'Haiti (P.E.P); letters and statements from the Coordination de la resistance haïtiennne au Quebec, a group formed in response to the September 30, 1991, coup in Haiti which deposed the country's first democratically elected president; and materials dealing with Rey Charlier's Anthologie du Roman Haïtien.