Miracson Saint-Val's work begins with personal experience, with corporeal practice, with the lwas—the spirits of Vodou—with which he wishes to experiment. But he also needs to find the right text. According to this Haitian director, Chemin de fer, the text by the Congolese writer Julien Mabiala Bissila, lends itself perfectly to the lines of enquiry that underlie his creative imagination, namely, a language based on the body, on Black bodies caught up in war. Chemin de fer, let us be clear for the sake of truth and memory, is about the Congolese Civil War, a war that has its roots in colonialism, a war smelling of oil, where ethnic conflict is instrumentalized in the neo-colonial competition for raw materials (Yengo 2006). In fact, the starting point of Mabiala Bissila's text is “a series of bombardments on the city of Brazzaville [. . .] where bodies are...
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