Marie-Hélène Laforest, author of the short story collection Foreign Shores, grew up between New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She currently makes her home in Italy where she is a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Naples. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. She holds an MA in creative writing, has won a James Michener Fellowship, and was a semifinalist for the 1993 Iowa John Simmons Short Fiction Award.
Paulette Poujol Oriol (1926–2011) was a teacher, actress, author, and feminist activist. She founded Haiti’s Piccolo Teatro, a theater company dedicated to teaching theater arts to children. From 1997 until 2011, she served as the president of the Women’s League for Social Action in Haiti. She received the Prix Henri Deschamps 1980 for her first novel, Le creuset, and in 2001 she was awarded the Prix Gouverneur de la Rosée du Livre et de la Littérature.
Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a poet, painter, and short story writer. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation and at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Her collection Crossroads and Unholy Water won the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize; and her collection The Company of Heaven won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is the editor of the Library of America’s Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems.
Emmelie Prophète was born in Port-au-Prince. She is a poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is currently the head of Haiti’s copyright bureau and has been the editor of the culture section of one of the most important newspapers in the country. Her poetry collections include Des marges à remplir and Sur parure d’ombre. In 2007, she was awarded the Association of French Language Writers’ Prize for her novel Le testament des solitudes. Her most recent novel is Impasse dignité.
Jacques Roumain (1907–1944) was an author and political activist. His opposition to the United States’ occupation of Haiti, combined with his role in founding the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, led to his exile. He attended Columbia University and worked with many African American poets, including Langston Hughes. He returned to Haiti in 1941 and founded the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology. His most well-known work was his groundbreaking novel Masters of the Dew.
Nick Stone was born in Cambridge, England, in 1966, to a Haitian mother. He spent the next three and a half years of his life in Haiti, where he learned to walk and talk. His first novel, Mr. Clarinet, set in Haiti in 1996, won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, an International Thriller Writers Award, a Macavity Award, and the French SNCF Prix du Polar. Stone’s other novels include King of Swords and 90 Miles. His new novel, The Verdict, will be published in 2014.
Lyonel Trouillot writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He cofounded the journal Lakansyèl, Tèm et Langaj, and is a member of the collective of the journal Cahiers du Vendredi, as well as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His novel Yanvalou pour Charlie received the 2009 Prix Wepler, and his 2011 novel La belle amour humaine received the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix du Salon du livre de Genève, and the Prix Gitanjali.
Michèle Voltaire Marcelin is a writer, actress, and painter. She was born in Port-au-Prince and has lived in Haiti, Chile, and the US. Voltaire Marcelin writes in three languages; she is the author of La Désenchantée, Amours et Bagatelles, and Lost and Found. Her work is included in the poetry anthologies Terre de Femmes, RAL’M’s Cahier Haiti, Revue Intranqu’îllités, and Anthologie secrète Magloire St. Aude.
Please enjoy the following excerpts from
Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat (2011)
The following is editor Edwidge Danticat's introduction to Haiti Noir (2011).
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NOIR INDEED
I began working on this anthology about a year before January 12, 2010, when Haiti was struck by its worst natural disaster in over two hundred years. The world knows now that more than two hundred thousand people died and over a million lost their homes in Haiti’s capital and the surrounding cities of Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, and Jacmel. As I am writing these words, survivors remain huddled by the thousands in displacement camps, most shielding themselves from intermittent rain with nothing but wooden posts and bedsheets.
Even before the earthquake, life was not easy in Haiti. There was always the risk of dying from hunger, an infectious disease, a natural disaster, or a crime. But there was also hope, laughter, and boundless creativity. Haitian creativity has always been one of the country’s most identifiable survival traits. Whether expressed in vibrant and colorful paintings, double entendre–filled spiritual or party music, or the poignant, humorous, erotic, lyrical (and yes, also dark) short stories and novels of its writers, Haiti’s more nuanced and complex face often comes across in its arts.
When I began seeking submissions for this book, many of the writers I contacted, both inside and outside of Haiti, would comment on the suitability of the title Haiti Noir.
“I know you inherited it from the series,” one of them said, “but it certainly is fitting.”
Noir of course means—among other things—black, and Haiti became the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere when it was established by former slaves in 1804. Noir (nwa in Creole), as the scholar Jana Evans Braziel points out in her book Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora, also refers to any Haitian citizen, regardless of race. The founders of the republic designated it that way so that even the Polish soldiers who deserted the French to fight alongside Haitians during their battle for independence were considered “noirs,” while all other foreigners, of whatever race, were considered “blancs” (blan in Creole).
The irony of these designations struck me recently as I was rereading what I consider the most historically “noir” stories that link Haiti and the United States. The stories I am thinking of are those self-designated “dark tales” written by United States Marines who were stationed in the country during the American occupation that began in 1915 and ended in 1934. Over those nineteen years, Haiti was fertile ground for cannibal-and zombie-filled soldier memoirs and fear-provoking Hollywood B movies. Claiming to recount firsthand tales of “woolly-headed cannibals,” books such as Captain John Houston Craige’s Black Bagdad and Cannibal Cousins, along with William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and Richard Loederer’s Voodoo Fire in Haiti, shrouded Haiti in a kind of mystery that aimed to stereotype and dehumanize its people. I am certainly not one to censor any writer, but sentences like this one from Voodoo Fire in Haiti, send chills down my back:
Laugh at the negroes! You understand them as little as they understand you. The black race is far closer to the earth than the white, and for that reason they are happier than all the white men put together. A negro believes without asking why; he submits to nature.
This is as understanding as it gets, folks.
What these narratives prove, however, is something that the Haitian scholar and intellectual Jean Price-Mars—a peer of those men—had been trying to convince his fellow Haitian writers for some time, that Haiti’s own stories were worth telling.
“Through a disconcerting paradox,” he wrote in his seminal work, Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle),
these people who have had, if not the finest, at least the most binding, the most moving history of the world—that of the transplantation of a human race to a foreign soil under the worst biological conditions—these people feel an embarrassment barely concealed, indeed shame, in hearing of their distant past. It is those who during four centuries were the architects of black slavery because they had force and science at their service that magnified the enterprise by spreading the idea that Negroes were the scum of society, without history, without morality, without religion, who had to be infused by any manner whatsoever with new moral values, to be humanized anew.
Forget trying to rewrite the great works of French literature on which you had been raised, he exhorted the Haitian writers of his time. Turn to Haitian life and history and folklore and find your inspiration there.
Some of his contemporaries, and many among
the generation that followed, took Price-Mars’s advice to heart. Ida Salomon Faubert, one of Haiti’s first published female writers, wrote of the country’s tropical nights from both Haiti and France, where she eventually made her home. The ethnologist/ poet/novelist Jacques Roumain placed his Langston Hughes– translated masterpiece Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew) in a peasant setting. Jacques Stephen Alexis, Haiti’s doctor/revolutionary/novelist, wrote about a massacre of cane workers in the Dominican Republic. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin’s The Beast of the Haitian Hills took a satirical look at peasant life and Vodou through the eyes of a grieving urban shopkeeper who moves to the countryside. One of the grande dames of Haitian letters, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, wrote her world-renowned novels and plays about, among other things, rural and urban oppression. And Haitian literature has continued to thrive ever since.
Many of the writers you will read here are part of the flourishing contemporary scene in Haitian literature, both in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora, including France, Canada, and the United States. Migration is such an integral part of the Haitian experience that those living outside of the country were once designated as part of a “tenth department,” an ideological auxiliary to Haiti’s first geographical nine. That’s why this anthology includes writers from both inside and outside of Haiti, with two Haitiphile blan as well.
The writers range in age from early twenties to late sixties. Some are at the very beginning of their careers and are being published in book form for the first time. Others have been publishing in several genres for decades. However, only a handful might have considered themselves writers of noir (the mystery/detective kind) before this experience.
I can honestly say that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in Haiti right now, I have never felt a greater sense of joy working on any collective project than I have on this book. I don’t want to summarize all the stories here because I want you, my dear reader, to experience the same sense of discovery I felt each time I picked one up and delved in. Seeing a book emerge before my eyes was truly a thrill and I have organized it here so that your experience somehow mirrors mine as the stories unfold. Each story is of course its own single treasure, but together they create a nuanced and complex view of Haiti and many of its neighborhoods and people.
I was nearly done with the collection when the earthquake happened on January 12, 2010, so I was afraid to reread the stories we had already selected, fearing that such a cataclysmic event, which has so reshaped Haiti’s physical and psychological landscape, would somehow render them all irrelevant. I was very glad to discover, upon reading them again, that this was not at all true. If anything, each story is now, on top of everything else, a kind of preservation corner, a snapshot of places that in some cases have been irreparably altered. (The fictional places, however, remain unchanged.)
The stories that frame the collection, and one story in the middle, do deal with the earthquake. (A portion of the profits will be donated to the Lambi Fund of Haiti, a grassroots organization working to strengthen civil society in Haiti.) The book opens with Patrick Sylvain’s “Odette,” which explores a community’s surprising reaction to an elder in the aftermath of the earthquake. In the middle we find Ibi Aanu Zoboi’s “The Harem,” which details an unusual arrangement for a man and his lovers. The book closes with Rodney SaintÉloi’s hallucinatory “The Blue Hill,” which ends at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010. The interesting thing is that many of the other bone-chilling, mind-blowing, and masterful stories in between could still take place in the Haiti of today. Noir indeed.
Edwidge Danticat
Miami, FL
October 2010
The following is Katia D. Ulysse's contribution to
Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat (2011).
___________________
THE LAST DEPARTMENT
BY KATIA D. ULYSSE
Puits Blain
The languorous drone in Foufoune’s ear meant that her international call had gone through. She’d been on the phone with relatives for hours, explaining through scalding tears how she came home after work and found her elderly mother dead. Her message was met with perfunctory sympathy. Foufoune and her mother had lived together for years. She would miss her more than most. Wedged between everyone’s words of condolence, however, was relief. And blame. Dona “Gwo Manman” Malbranche had been as happy as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Every morning after Foufoune left for work, Gwo Manman would take her place before the television to chat with the strangers who lived inside.
“I wish I could sprout wings and fly back home,” she often confided to Bob Barker, host of The Price Is Right. When the Showcase Showdown ended and the last prizes were distributed, Gwo Manman would turn off the television and sit for hours in silence. Until four o’clock. Her most trusted friend and confidante, Oprah, would nod knowingly each time Gwo Manman explained how Foufoune had kidnapped her from her home and was forcing her to live in the worst kind of exile.
When all her television friends were gone for the day, Gwo Manman would sit and stare at the wallpaper, imagining the distant place that used to be home and the freedom that was hers to do whatever and go wherever she pleased. A map of Puits Blain’s nameless alleyways was imprinted in her memory as clearly as the lines in the palms of her hands. Sitting in a chair thousands of miles from home, she went for long walks along Route des Frères, visiting with friends for hours. Being trapped inside an apartment day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year was torture. She missed the roosters announcing the dawn, the ominous lights flickering from Boutilier and Morne Calvaire.
“You’re hardly a prisoner in exile,” Foufoune would tell her mother when she complained. Sure, Gwo Manman got to dress up once in a while for a wedding or a funeral, but being taken out of the apartment only for special occasions made her feel like a clown, a madigra mal maske.
When Foufoune came home from work at night, she was always too tired to do anything but sleep. Too tired to ask Gwo Manman how she had spent the day. Gwo Manman would want to talk about her garden back home, her house, her friends who sold lwil maskreti behind the cemetery and fried food to the taxi drivers waiting to ferry passengers to the end of the road just beyond Hotel Flamboyant. In the States she had rain, sleet, illnesses she’d never even heard of—she didn’t want to talk about those. She had changed, and hated the person into whom America had turned her. Once, while Foufoune was at work, Gwo Manman unlocked the door and escaped. She wandered into the unfamiliar streets, improperly dressed for the snow that reached her ankles. She turned a corner, then another, then another; soon she could not find her way back. Hours later, a good Samaritan found her shivering and dazed.
“What’s your name?” and “Where do you live?” the good Samaritan had asked. But all that was more English than Gwo Manman understood. He took her to a nearby hospital. Foufoune spent an entire day trying to locate her mother that time. She prevented a reoccurrence by having a sturdier lock installed. Gwo Manman tried but could not get out of the apartment without a key, forcing her to retreat further into the wallpaper and the television world. But even that had changed. Bob Barker was no longer a resident. Just when she had gotten used to him, a stranger came and took his place. Even Oprah was not the same. She spoke only in tongues now. She’d become distant and unfriendly, prompting Gwo Manman to try and smash the screen with a mop, spraining her frail wrists. When Foufoune came home and found her mother hitting the television screen, she covered it like a corpse, saying, “The TV people won’t be able to bother you anymore.”
Dona Malbranche died the day after she turned seventy— a gift from God, as far as the old woman was concerned. The frown on her face was a perfectly inverted grin. “Ki te mele m.” She had drawn her lips tight on the “m” to intercept her final breath. “Ki te mele m,” she used to tell Bob Barker and Oprah—her companions and life’s witnesses. She no longer cared.
When Foufoune returned from another doub
le shift and found Gwo Manman slumped over the chair, her instincts as a nurse rose up like a tsunami. She lunged toward her mother, determined to pry her loose from Death’s stubborn grip, but her limbs had as much life left in them as dried gourds. Foufoune dialed emergency, saying, “Hurry, please hurry.” The bottle of lwil maskreti clutched in her mother’s hand had spilled on her good rug. “Please, please hurry!” Within minutes the apartment was flooded with strangers in uniforms. Everyone shook their heads sympathetically. Foufoune sniffled and sobbed as she unclasped the gold necklace which Gwo Manman never would have parted with while she was alive. It had been a Mother’s Day present from her other daughter, Miriam, who still lived in Puits Blain. Foufoune continued to sob as her mother’s lifeless body was carted away; suddenly stung was she by the realization that if Gwo Manman had had a choice, she would have been savoring breadfruit grown on her own little patch of land in Puits Blain, instead of dying alone abroad.
* * *
Foufoune put off calling her sister for last, hoping someone would do her the favor of forwarding the news. No one did, of course; the call was hers to make. She adjusted her earpiece with trembling fingers. Her sister would answer momentarily, and sever the sliver that was her last nerve. Miriam had always sided with Gwo Manman: The woman is old enough to know where she should live. She’s not a child. If she doesn’t want to live in the States, you must respect that.
Foufoune had considered sending her mother back, but after just a few weeks in the States it was already too late. America did not agree with Gwo Manman. She had an allergic reaction to the very air. She changed as soon as she left the island. At first Foufoune thought her mother was just homesick and would overcome it soon, but Gwo Manman’s condition steadily worsened. When after several months Gwo Manman grew even more despondent and sickly, Foufoune had her seen by the best physicians she knew. And out came the diagnosis she dreaded: onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. She knew all too well how those diseases ravaged the mind.