Elsie Augustave’s novel The Roving Tree has a surreal opening. Its narrator Iris Odys is giving birth to her daughter Zati and—hanging between life and death—she drifts into a deep sleep and receives a visit from a Vodun goddess. Her bed seems to be floating as the daughter she’s given birth to lies in an incubator. Little by little her story is sown together for the reader.
Premye kout zegwi…the first strike of the needle, transports the reader to the early 1960s. A little girl of five in Monn Nèg—a remote hamlet in Haiti—is adopted by Margaret and John Winston two American intellectuals and boards a plane to the United States. A life of privilege begins but it’s marred by confusion. The United States is in the throes of outright segregation and ugly words like nigger lover gets hurled at the Winstons. A parishioner at the church where the Winstons attends religious services runs her hands through Iris’s hair to satisfy her curiosity about “these people’s hair.” Dr. Connelly, the psychologist the Winston family has Iris consult, only has a book about Vodou to guide him in treating his young patient through her cultural identity crisis.
As Iris grows into a woman, she gravitates towards the black power movement of the late 1970s, and just like Life in Haitian Valley was her parent’s Bible on Haitian culture, tomes like The Soul of Black Folk are her reading companions to black heritage. Her yearning to have some sort of purpose takes her to Zaire (though she had intended to return to Haiti) and she falls into the same traps as her mother. But like Lamercie, and Acéfi, the strong women of her family, she holds herself together like a tree with solid foundation.
A fulfilling, exciting and ultra-lyrical read, The Roving Tree is really a novel about a lost soul’s identity quest. At the same time, it also has much to do with Haiti’s color cold wars. Most importantly, it’s about Haiti’s women: Iris whose gold-tinted life has stripped her of some of the strength that sustained her mother Hagathe; Darah, the daughter of the mulatto elite who has to resort to the roots of the looked-down-upon peasants to be able to give life. Oh, and the men too: Latham, Brahami, Dieudonné, and Valrius the Tonton Macoute.
Augustave’s novel has a rather curious title. It isn’t until one has absorbed the entire book that one sees the connection between title and the protagonist. A tree that roves adapts to whatever soil it’s planted on. It bears fruit wherever it lands. Iris Odys is that roving tree; her journey takes her from Haiti to the United States, and to Africa (specifically Kinshasa), and back to Haiti where her bones will someday rest in a grave in Haiti.
And to paraphrase Toussaint Louverture, even if its branches are cut off, it will continue to grow, because it’s based on roots that are deep.
You can get The Roving Tree here.
