About Georges Anglade

Georges Anglade was a great bear of a man. If you stood for causes like free speech or the defence of minority cultures, he was a warm, embracing force. If you didn't, he was a formidable opponent equipped with a torrent of rich, terrifying language, a true model of the engaged writer.

He was one of the leading writers produced by the close relationship between Haiti and Canada. He was one of the founders of the University of Quebec in Montreal. But he was also an important player in the evolution of modern Haiti. In many ways, Montreal is one of the two cultural capitals of Haiti, along with Port-au-Prince. And as with the other writers in his situation, Georges's life enriched both Canada and Haiti. He was one of the proofs that Haiti is on the very short list of Canada's closest and richest relationships, often produced by large groups of initially unwilling exiles.

Georges's fiction and non-fiction came out of Haiti, but were marked by Canada. He was particularly known for his lodyan s, a Haitian literary form of short, explosive, comic stories, oral and written, to be declaimed on important occasions. One of his lodyan s describes a negotiation between the Pope and Castro over who has to pay what to whom in order to pull off a papal visit to Cuba, as compared to a visit by a Canadian prime minister.


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