Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien

René Depestre's most ambitious poetic work, subtitled 'poème-mystère vaudou,' organized as a ceremonial invocation of the lwa directed against the Christian West. Each major section is named for a lwa and enacts that spirit's energy — Ogou-Badagris, Guédé-Nibo, Azaka-Médé — staging Vodou not as private religious practice but as a complete counter-theology capable of naming and opposing the forces that structured Atlantic slavery and its afterlives. Written from exile during the Duvalier period, the poem refuses Duvalier's authoritarian appropriation of Vodou by insisting on its diasporic and insurgent dimensions, connecting Haitian peasants to enslaved people across the Atlantic world.