Paulette poujol oriol biography templates full

According to MsMagazne:. Paulette Poujol-Oriol, who died March 11 at age 84, left her birth country, Haiti, a legacy that is immeasurable. The family migrated to France when she was eight months old. Poujol-Oriol spent six formative years in Paris, where her parents were engaged in the worlds of commerce, education and theater.

She credited this time in Paris as instrumental to her development as a renaissance woman. With additional studies in education, she dedicated herself to teaching, but never stopped her own learning. In addition to being fluent in French, Kreyol and Spanish, she eventually learned and mastered English, Italian and German.

But aside from teaching, Poujol-Oriol was writing.

She was one of Haiti's most ardent feminist leaders, as well as an unmatched cultural producer and worker.

She published her first novel, Le Creuset The Crucible in , winning the Prix Henri Deschamps—just the second woman to have ever received that prestigious Haitian literary award. At a very young age, she defied gendered and classed restrictions, possessing a hunger for knowledge—encouraged by her parents—that surpassed social expectations of young women of her class.

These made her a recognizable intellectual force. The sense that less is expected of women and that they should be invisible motivated many of her undertakings. In many ways, Poujol-Oriol was both a product of her privileged socio-economic background as well as a challenge to its strictures. Highly visible and engaged in the world, she insisted on keeping her name when she married, bore two children, divorced and remarried—at a time when such practices keeping your own name, divorcing, remarrying were frowned upon in Haiti.

All the while, she continued to pursue her art and social interests.