Mourning the loss of valued PEN members in Haiti
We are very sad to learn that Haitian PEN President Georges Anglade and his wife Mireille Neptune have been killed in the earthquake in Haiti.
The Haitian Centre is one of the newest in PEN and we were delighted that a centre had been formed in one of the world’s poorest and harshest countries.
Both Georges Anglade and Mireille Neptune were important to the social and cultural development of Haiti.
The following is from The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2010, by Stephen Miller:
‘Mr. Anglade, 65, was born in Haiti and emigrated in the 1960s to France, where he studied geography. Active in the exile Haitian democracy movement that opposed the government of François Duvalier, he was imprisoned when he returned to Haiti in 1974, his daughter, Pascale Anglade, said.
Mr. Anglade lived in Montreal and was a professor of geography at the University of Quebec’s Montreal campus. He stayed active in the Haitian exile community.
‘If we can just move Haiti from misery to poverty, we’ll have done a lot,’ Mr. Anglade told the Guardian of London when Jean Bertrand Aristide was first elected president of Haiti, in 1991. A close advisor to the president, Mr. Anglade was appointed Minister of Public Works, Transport and Communication in 1995. He returned to Canada a year later.
Mr. Anglade was author of several books, most recently Haitian Laughter, a book of short stories told in lodyans, an oral narrative genre native to Haiti.
His wife, Mireille Anglade, was a retired economist who had worked for the United Nations.
In 2008, Mr. Anglade founded the Haitian chapter of PEN, the international organization that seeks freedom for writers. Mireille attended the Women Writers’ meetings at the Linz congress, so we got to know her a little. She wrote, among other books, L’Autre Moitié du Developpement, which shed light on the contribution of women to Haitian society.