Until now, the 38-year-old novelist had not explicitly responded to the accusations of plagiarism and use of AI brought against him. His French publishing house, Grasset, assured him of its support, when his Quebec publisher showed more reserve. Three weeks after the start of this affair which shook the Republic of Letters, forced to face the dangers of artificial intelligence, Thélyson Orélien recognizes the multiple borrowings of which he was accused, but not the use of the magic of AI in the writing of It Was That or Die.
Here is the text transmitted by Thélyson Orélien to AFP, via its French publisher Grasset, in its complete and unedited version. It’s called This Novel I Wrote.
“Since September 21, a lot of things have been said about me. “Experts” attack my novel by attributing it to non-human intelligence and others, under this pretext or by returning to old texts, simply attack me.
A writer speaks through his writings and his writings speak for him. But silence has its price: by remaining silent, I let others tell my story for me.
I started writing It Was That or Die in the fall of 2017, on a corner of a table in Laval (in Quebec, Editor’s note). I finished a first draft of this text in 2019, more than 300 pages, when I learned of the death of my mother, on Easter Wednesday.
Then I deleted scenes, reworked passages, moved elements, changed characters. Jonas Dorléon existed in my head long before readers knew his name. Haiti, the biological mother, has inhabited this novel since day one, as has adopted Quebec, migration, exile: stories that I have experienced myself and others that I have heard over the years. And then the fiction unfolded, a universe that I invented so that a man, Jonas Dorléon, existed on the page with his own words - when he thought, when he spoke.
No sentence in this book was created by a machine
It is said that It Was That or To Die was written by artificial intelligence. This is slander and heresy. I used research tools here and there, particularly regarding foreign idioms. But no sentence in this book was created by a machine, any more than the meaning or order of a story comes from my gut.
The experience I am experiencing is cruel. By attributing to a machine a text which is mine, which is that of all mine, we have not only come to challenge my quality as a writer but my humanity.
Then there is the past and my youthful mistakes. In 2010, I left Haiti after the terrible earthquake, passing through the Dominican Republic, just like Jonas Dorléon. I was a little over twenty years old, I was probably in a little too much of a hurry, without really realizing how much I still had to learn. I wanted to write, I read a lot. Sometimes I discovered a writer and immediately wanted to read everything he had written. Depestre, Glissant, Césaire, Chamoiseau, Alexis, Char, Péguy, Hemingway, Márquez, Dostoyevsky, etc. I admired rhythms, ways of telling sentences that stayed in my head for days. The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, for example, blew me away. But admiring does not authorize taking or attributing to me texts that are not mine. I made unacceptable mistakes, despite my youth and inexperience. I deeply regret this and apologize unreservedly.
Journalists can do their investigative work, readers can reread old publications and criticize them, some may find the novel bad or decide not to read it at all. Criticism is always legitimate, but the threats, media lynching and racist harassment that I have suffered for weeks are unbearable.
This novel, I wrote it myself
What I am asking can now be summed up in one sentence: let us judge the novel It Was That or Die for what it is. I know that the past is capable of raising legitimate questions and I am not asking that they be dismissed. But a youthful error cannot serve as proof against a novel begun in 2017 and which will finally be published in 2026.
I don't want to erase my past or pretend to be a man without faults. But this novel, I wrote it myself. It comes from my injuries and those of other migrants. This wound of exile from which we cannot heal. This novel is the fruit of it, it is the fruit of my work, it is my creation.
I didn’t write this book to win awards or become famous. I have nothing to prove to the people who accuse me. I simply hope that we will read Jonas Dorléon's story for what it tells, that it will allow its readers to open their eyes and their hearts to the world, to those who populate it. Whatever their origin.”
