Ida Faubert was a complex literary figure: bicultural, biracial, and privileged, she neither fitted easily into socially-prescribed categories for women of color in France or Haiti nor conformed to them.
18 Facts About Ida Faubert
Ida Faubert was born on 14 February 1882, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Ida Faubert was the daughter of Haitian president Lysius Salomon and a French mother, Florentine Potiez.
When Faubert was six years old, political events forced her father out of office and her family to expatriate to France.
Ida Faubert, placed in the care of her mother's family, was sent to a convent boarding school like many elite girls of her time.
Ida Faubert grew up in France's Belle Epoque, a period of flourishing arts in a stable Europe, and as a young woman entered Paris's artistic and cultural circles.
Ida Faubert went on to marry and quickly divorce Leonce Laraque.
The couple had a daughter, Jacqueline, who died as an infant and to whom Ida Faubert would dedicate elegiac poems.
In 1903, while in her early 20s, Ida Faubert returned to Haiti, where she made an impression on members of Port-au-Prince's cultural elite and privileged classes with her charm, verse, and lineage.
The country's elite class produced, through resources, venues, and social connections, the published writers of her day, and Ida Faubert was well situated as an emerging poet in Haiti.
Ida Faubert was among the rare Haitian women writers whose work appeared under her own name in Haiti.
In 1914, Ida Faubert separated from her husband and settled with her son in Paris.
Ida Faubert's son enlisted in the French military at the start of the war.
Ida Faubert continued to write poems and the short stories that would become the book Sous le soleil caraibe, histoires d'Haiti et d'ailleurs.
Ida Faubert quietly supported causes on behalf of the homeless and those wounded in the war.
Ida Faubert was a devoted mother and grandmother, according to grandson Jean Faubert.
Ida Faubert died on 23 July 1969 in Joinville-le-Pont, Ile-de-France, France.
Ida Faubert is considered one of Haiti's great women poets.