In the novels of Jean-Claude Fignolé and Fabienne Pasquet, the proso popoeias of Toussaint Louverture highlight a double process of mythification and humanization of this historical figure. Relying on a tension between orality and writing, which is nevertheless characteristic of West Indian lite rature, Toussaint Louverture’s speech literally gives voice to a rereading of history, and thus also seeks to respond to a duty of memory on the part of Haitian writers. Ultimately, prosopopoeia, as a genre, gives voice to a dead or absent person, and therefore combines the genres of the historical novel and the fantastic, in order to reveal, paradoxically thanks to its recourse to the supernatural, some of the silences of History.