Children – Kalepwa Magazine

Haitian Book Club, The Children of Injustice by Ruth Auguste

K St. Fort — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 01:05:46 +0000

Haitian Book Club, The Children of Injustice by Ruth Auguste

The Children of Injustice by Ruth Auguste tackles something that is often hushed in Haitian culture and is not discussed even in the most intimate settings: domestic violence and sexual abuse of women and children.

Auguste, who currently resides in Canada, was born in Haiti in the late 1970s at a time when premarital pregnancies resulted in societal disgrace for young girls, so when her mother Marie-Micheline Danticat’s clandestine adventures with her secret boyfriend produces a child, a child he disclaims, she is sent off elsewhere to have her child.

The boyfriend’s staunch denial of little Ruth leads the young Marie-Micheline to seek another father for her baby and redeem herself out of disgrace at all costs. The high price she pays is an abrupt marriage with a man who from the start displays dangerously possessive traits. But desperate and alienated as an unwed mother, and wishing to walk down the aisle the way her former boyfriend walked down the aisle with another woman, Marie-Micheline jumps head-on in a marriage with Pressoir, a man who turns out to be a Tonton Macoutes, a soldier in the feared militia of Haitian late-president François Duvalier’s army (his son Jean-Claude is the successor and president at the beginning of Auguste’s book). From then on, Pressoir terrorizes the entire family, and uses his clout as a Tonton Macoute to evade justice, and Marie-Micheline becomes bathed in guilt as her little one becomes emotionally and physically abused and sexually exploited right under her nose.

The Children of Injustice is a must-read. Auguste is rather bold to have written her memoir, sparing no detail about her ordeal and her road to healing (As an adult, Auguste founded the World Gifters Society, an organization whose mission is to help the abused in Haiti). She’s a great model to victims everywhere, who in lieu of becoming emotional prisoners of their abusive past, choose to wiggle out of it, and help others do the same.

Haitian Book Club: Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot

K St. Fort — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:55:40 +0000

Lyonel Trouillot’s novel about two slum-dwelling children Marièla and Colin, two children who murder their abusive father is curiously titled Children of Heroes, and that is the least intriguing thing about the work.

Colin and Mariéla Pamphile are the precocious children and progeny of their grossly misnamed father Corazón, a failed boxer and his long-suffering wife Josephine.

Their mother Josephine, is as Trouillot puts it, and Linda Coverdale translates it: “…is a consenting adult. The only thing you can do for her is help her suffer, and that’s all the asks. If anyone told her to leave she’d simply say mind your own business.”

We all have one of those types of people in our lives. Those who are more than content to be someone else’s victim. Josephine may have resigned herself to being hard on her luck for the rest of her life. Not so her defiant daughter Mariéla who may tolerate her father pounding on the face of her mother, but will not allow him to pound nor stomp on her dreams.

Trouillot’s undestated prose, his way of putting a lush sentence together make Children of Heroes a novel worthy of examination and multiple reads.Take this colorful passage from the novel for example:

“I remember Soeur Lucienne, Fat Mayard’s great-aunt. She’d open her mouth, you’d see a big black hole, but no trace of a tooth. She didn’t do a thing for herself. You had to hold her spoon, and force her to bathe. As soon as she saw the bucket, the old woman started shrieking and would crawl naked as an earthworm all the way to the shortcut leading to the furniture factory. You had to run after her, wrestle her back, and wash her down long-distance by emptying the bucket at her.”

Now back to the title. Children of Heroes? Corazón…a hero? Mariéla, the pathetic victim a hero? But they are heroes, in the very way they lived.

Francie Latour’s Children Book Auntie Luce’s Talking Paintings

K St. Fort — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 14:00:07 +0000

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Writer and journalist Francie Latour took her Haitian-American heritage, the legacy of one of Haiti’s most well-known women of the arts to create Auntie Luce’s Talking Paintings, a stunning children’s book about the US-born daughter of Haitians who discovers Haiti through her independent, and tradition-shunning aunt.

Kreyolicious: Luce Turnier, one of Haiti’s famed women painters plays a huge part in this book. At the time did you know how phenomenal it was that you were meeting her?
Francie Latour: Yes, Luce Turnier was a huge, huge inspiration for this book. I met Luce when I was 21 and living in Paris. My mother, who was visiting me, and I were invited to meet Luce by a good friend of my mother’s, the late Mimi Barthélémy — the storyteller, actress, and amazing Haitian artist in her own right. Luce was living in a suburb just outside of Paris. We met her, and then I went back a second time on my own. It was when I went back that she painted my portrait. This was about two years before her death.

I knew that I was meeting one of Haiti’s greatest artists, and I was awestruck by her: the way she walked, her voice, her hands, the objects she had on her shelves. Everything. At the same time, growing up I had lived an extremely sheltered life. Like a good Haitian daughter, I followed all the rules and I tried hard to please others. So I had no real understanding of what it meant for Luce to be who she was, as a woman, as a Haitian woman, as a Haitian woman painter. I didn’t understand all the courageous choices she had to make, at many different points in her life, to live as authentically as she did.

In the end, the character Auntie Luce ended up being kind of an combination of lots of Haitian women I’ve known — aunts, great-aunts, friends of my mother, etc — as well as Luce Turnier herself.

Kreyolicious: I thought the Caribbean background of the illustrator Ken Daley was very interesting. How did the collaboration originate?
Francie Latour: Ken was brought into the project by the publisher, Groundwood Books. Groundwood is based in Canada; Ken is also Canadian and his family is from Dominica. He is truly an AMAZING artist. It’s a unique kind of challenge as a painter and illustrator to illustrate a book about painting, where the colors themselves are a big part of telling the story. I was and am so grateful for the chance to collaborate with him.

I had initially asked as a condition of the contract that the illustrator be a person of color, ideally with a Caribbean background. So I was excited when Ken came on board, and my natural instinct was to connect with him so we could dive into this together. What I didn’t know is that, with children’s books, publishers work with authors and illustrators separately, and keep them separated through the process. As a first-time author, that felt strange. The story was so personal to me and so I felt like I was putting my life in a stranger’s hands. But as soon as I started to see the sketches come in, I was bowled over. They were just so great. And then seeing them in color – amazing.

Kreyolicious: I thought the story and overall execution of the book was so well-done. Now, I’m staring at the final product. What was the process like?
Francie Latour: From what I can tell — and I say this as a novice to the children’s book world — this was kind of an unusual process. In January 2010, I had written an essay following the earthquake for the Boston Globe, where I worked for a number of years. It was written in the form of short diary entries; it was fragmented and reflected a lot about the very common immigrant experience of feeling “in-between.”

A children’s book agent read the essay and asked to meet with me. He asked me if I would try writing a children’s book. As a parent, I was a really intentional consumer and reader of children’s books, as my kids were young at the time. But I didn’t actually think I was capable of writing a children’s book, or any kind of fiction. As a journalist trained to write about what has already happened in reality, it was hard to think about creating something purely fictional. I think that’s a big reason why so much of this book draws on things that happened to me in real life. And even then it was such a challenge! But interestingly, like the original story in the Globe, the book incorporates fragments of memory and feelings of cultural pride but also outsider-ness that are a big part of who I am.

I didn’t think the book would get sold, and it took a number of years for the book to actually get picked up by a publisher. So I feel extremely lucky. All of this is really unexpected.

Be on the lookout for PART II of the interview with the author! Don’t forget to get it from Amazon or from the publisher.

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