The birth of a giant. An immense cry of revolt and suffering, capable of bringing down walls, that sweeps away everything in its fury, shaking up language, reinventing it, taking words to their point of incandescence. In a Haiti of nightmares, under the yoke of Duvalier, where men at the end of their tether of despair would rather throw themselves into a sea teeming with sharks than return to their daily hell, while the “Yankee” invaders multiply their atrocities, as if echoing those perpetrated in Vietnam under the napalm, two men cross paths, save themselves, find each other again after having lost each other: Raynand the activist, in a mad race against death, misery and exile, condemned to failure, and Paulin the writer, locked up in his creation, whom circumstances will bring to the forefront, transformed into a tribune - Raynand and Paulin, the two faces of Frankétienne, until then known as a poet who, with this novel published in 1968, suddenly asserts himself as a novelist of genius.