Réalisme merveilleux, Le. An artistic movement begun in the 1920s by the Surrealists, which later emerged in Latin America as the basis for an indigenous poetics. Made famous by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, ‘marvellous realism’ meant an assertion of a Caribbean and Latin American world-view which was different from Europe's. These ideas came to Haiti by way of Carpentier's visit in 1943 and Breton's visit in 1945. At the first Congress of Black Writers in 1956 the Haitian novelist Alexis presented his ‘Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens’. It was an argument for seeing Haitian culture as creolized rather than neo-African, and for creating a new narrative method that would reflect the Haitian people's ability to combine the real and the fantastic in their imagination.
— Michael Dash
