This book should be read by all. The first time I read this book, I thought it was taking place in the 1980s or 1990s. And then midway through the book, the author hits us with the fact that the story is taking place in the 1950s. The more the years pass, the more they remain the same.

So many aspects of New World Slavery is presented in this book. Jean-Robert, or Bobby, as he is called, is a chore boy in the house of Florence Cadet, passed on to her by Phillipe Sebastien, her white Frenchman lover. Bobby is not acknowledged by his white father, who sees him as disgraceful nuisance, and that has a toll on him for much of his life.

There’s so many echelons of slavery in this autobiography. Florence is kept in sexual slavery by her many lovers, which includes a priest. Bobby is in child slavery because he is not the legitimate son of Phillipe, and because his mother was an illiterate, low-class Haitian. Bobby’s mother Henriette was kept in social slavery because she was born into the wrong class. And for a long time, Bobby kept himself in mental slavery, unable to exterminate all the years of mental and physical abuse he suffered at the hands of Florence and her entourage.

I think that there may be people who might argue that Bobby’s survival has a lot to do with his immigration to the United States, a move that may not have been possible, had it not been for his biological father, the very source of his miseries. That his transition, as the subtitled states, from Haitian slave child to middle-class has more to do with his father, than his own assertion. To me, that wouldn’t be too good of an argument.

Once in New York, Bobby didn’t have to succeed. He could have subjected himself to drug abuse. He could have prostituted himself when Denis, Florence’s son and Lise wanted him out of the Brooklyn apartment, and he had to fend for himself. But instead, he chose to make it through life through hard work and perseverance. He could have been one of those people who blame their dysfunctional upbringing on how dismally their lives turned out, but he chose to take responsibility for himself.

It’s true that his father gave him a big boost by using his connections to get him a visa to the USA, but without Bobby’s own determination to find himself, to make his past oppressors proud, that passage into the USA and all the opportunities that the Land of the Free provides could have gone by Bobby. Once in the USA, Bobby is able to assert himself, to rid himself of his programmed inferiority complex little by little. But he’s faced head to head with racism. And he did move to the United States, pre-Civil Rights era, and as someone who is black and an immigrant, the path wasn’t exactly smooth.

And, oh, if you’ve read the book, please share your thoughts on it. Restavek deserves a sequel truly. Since I’ve read the book, I’ve wondered how Bobby is doing. If his father is still alive. As a matter of fact, we’re going to try to track down Mr. Jean-Robert Cadet. Surely you have some questions for him too. We’ll assemble them all, and make it part of a Q&A.

Aside from the serpent and the tarantula, no animal exudes more fear than the scorpion. It’s the creature whose infamous claws prolongs and—puts a dead stop—to life. The claw is the primary instrument used by the animal to gather food necessary for survival. With it, the scorpion kills, sometimes its very own.

Dr. Myriam J.A. Chancy’s literary outing, the fittingly-titled The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press), is a poetic prose-rich novel, recounting nearly four generations of valiant Haitian women and men from the early years of the U.S. Occupation to post-Duvalier days.

Within the novel’s sanguine and restless pages, one becomes acquainted—and subsequently fully engrossed—in the life of the long-suffering matriarch Carmel, whose determination to make sense of the 75 years she’s lived, is the catalyst for such-like, indisposed self-examination of offspring to come. In Carmel’s world and that of her daughters Jacqueline and Maude, self-denial and hypocritically shutting the eye to the unpleasant is the norm. Reads the text: “The girls like me, lived their lives behind their husbands, denying that anything was wrong when their men did not come home for whole weeks at a time, denying any resemblance between their children and those who they saw playing in the streets in the next town or village. Perhaps they thought they were the lucky ones since they had rings on their fingers and their men presented themselves at their sides in church every Sunday.”

One such child ‘in the next town or village’ is Alphonse, the spawn of the coupling of the middle class Monsieur Leo and a poor peasant. Alphonse’s lowly birth is such that he is the servant in his own father’s house, the invisible child, whose existence will not be swiftly forgiven by a society who’s not so particularly merciful when it comes to trespassing unwritten class laws. Alphonse’s persistent need for vengeance realized through the shutting out his half-brother Delphi leads to a lifetime of emotional haunting and another wrong in the vicious cycle of man-orchestrated retribution.

In The Scorpion’s Claw, one also sorts through the emotional baggage of Josèphe, whose remedy for the trauma suffered through the rape at the hands of a family acquaintance, is total absorption—or rather obsession—with her academic studies. Her cousin Désirée, does not necessarily have a better lot. Through a conscience awakening, she abandons the elite lifestyle to join the lowly masses. But there is no burning bush or miraculous, glorious deliverance after her Moses-like abandoning of Egyptian riches in return for the disfranchised life of the people.

Chancy, a past nominee of Canada’s prestigious Commonwealth Literary Prize and whose more accustomed to analyzing other writers’ works (e.g. 1997’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women in Exile) than crafting her own—has written quite a novel. With its contemplative text, The Scorpion’s Claw attempts to pull the veil shielding the ugly and spiteful past and open the passage way to redress newly open scabs. It succeeds considerably in tackling both areas.

Have you read this selection of the Haitian Book Club? If not, be sure to let us know your thoughts after you’ve read it.

Author Photo via:

The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States is a special tome in more ways than one. It’s the first story anthology of Haitian and Haitian-American writers, for one, assembled and curated in the English language. Sectioned off in four little stages (Childhood, Migration, First Generation, and Return), the non-fiction narratives, essays and poems touch on everything from self-imposed exile, to identity, to colorism.

In “Exiled”, Sandy Alexandre writes of being sent to Haiti by her parents for rehabilitation, a parental practice among Haitian parents, who sent their unruly kids to Haiti to condition them to appreciate the luxuries and perks of privileged, “developed” world living. Gary Pierre-Pierre’s “The White Wife”, chronicles the story of a black man who feels no need to apologize for his choice. The indignant “Do Something for You Soul, Go to Haiti”, denounces patronizing and exploitation disguised as goodwill.

Some of the most color-filled stories about the ones where individuals like Francie Latour in “Made Outside” and Joanne Hyppolite straddle across two cultures. “At your communion and birthday parties,” Hyppolite writes, “all of Boston Haiti seems to gather in your house to eat griyo and sip kremas.” In Marc Christophe’s poem “Present Past Future” (no commas in the title, therefore signifying that all three are interconnected and inseparable, and perhaps part of an ongoing cycle, he declares: “I would love to recite for you/The history of my people/Their daily struggles for food and drink/Whose lives are a struggle with no end.”

This collection is so varied that it will bring out a plethora of emotions out in you, a tear, a chuckle, and in some cases, a nod of the head.

Today’s Haitian Book Club selection is Vale of Tears by Paulette Poujol-Oriol, a most gifted novelist. Vale of Tears is the English translation of her novel Le Passage (hats off to translator Dolores A. Schaefer for a job well-done…no clumsy, stilted English, just a smooth translation), and it’s understandable why Ibex Publishers, the publisher for the English edition didn’t title it The Passage, but chose the more descriptive Vale of Tears, for The Passage would have been an understatement, as the life of Coralie Santeuil is everything except a crystal stair. As one begins to read about her origins, and follow her into adolescence, it’s clear that it will take a miracle to salvage her from the horrendous deck of cards, she’s been dealt. Only there’s no miracle.

Born into a wealthy, upper-class mulatto family in Haiti in the year 1901, the red-headed, silver-eyed, and physically fragile Coralie is the victim of Aline, a self-serving, manipulative woman who marries her father. Aline’s cruelty makes Cinderella’s stepmother look like Mary Magdalene post-redemption. The thing about Coralie is that she never recovers from the emotional abuse inflicted by her during those pre-teen and post-adolescent years.

At this point in Haitian society, it was probably rather scandalous for an unmarried girl to get away from her wicked stepmother by going off to her own apartment, so Coralie is somewhat of a helpless victim. When she does leave home, though, at the start of Word War II, she uses her freedom to liberate her body, not her mind. She’s still the same frightened little Coralie that Aline used to lock up in dark closets, and deprive of her loving doll—the mother Aline can never be, who gives her the affection that her absentee, backbone-lacking father Félix has wholly surrendered to his second wife.

Vale of Tears is truly brilliantly written; the narrator goes from one stage to another of Coralie Santeuil’s life, with each chapter a back and forth of sort between her past and her present. It’s been said that dwelling on the past is destructive, but for a woman like Coralie, looking at the past is an absolute must. Flipping over the previous pages of her life, allows her to reflect, to see where she went wrong, even if her decisions and lack of self-will are irreversible.

Poujol-Oriol captures the essence of human nature so well, that the novel might as well have been a contemporary one. This passage from the novel for example describes a scene at a funeral:

“Well, it is not the dead that people give wreaths and sheaves of flowers at funerals. They could not care less. It is to those who stay behind, to the living, especially if they are rich, that the super floral arrangements are given. It is a way of saying to acquaintances, “See we are your friends. Do not forget us at your parties and in your business ventures.”

By the time I had read the last sentence of the book, I felt this immeasurable sadness, this melancholy for Coralie’s life, and this regret over the fact that I would never meet this agile novelist Paulette Poujol Oriol, who died in March 2011. Her novel has been one of the most engrossing, at times difficult to take, works I’ve ever read. Her heroine is so real, you can almost feel her pain when she gets cut, feel her mortification every time she’s humiliated. Coralie is, as Poujol-Oriol puts it, “engrossed in her private hurricane”, and judging from the direction her life took, it must have been a Category 6.

Author Photo: Eddy Aubourg/Le Nouvelliste

To read other selections of our Haitian Book Club, click here.

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.

The 1940s-1960s are often regarded by some who lived in that period, as the Golden Age of Haiti. And in reading Stars Over Haiti, Anthony Hattenbach’s adventure-filled account of life in Haiti at that time, it leaves no doubt in a reader’s mind, that that period indeed glittered. It glittered and it was gold.

In the early summer of 1958, Hattenbach left Westchester, NY along with his interior designer mother Muriel, sister Jody and his stepfather Ben sister in running Haiti’s famed El Rancho Hotel in Haiti. Hattenbach’s unusual and colorful life would include managing the hotel, and eventually a band, and that’s just the cream of the soup joumou.

Hattenbach’s accounts of life in Haiti during that period are things that most mystery and romance novelists could not fathom, even if they had three muses. There’s the story of James Dent, an American masquerading as a German noble who takes his wife to La Citadelle Lafèrrière and murders her, and attempts to bury her on the island, before her New York blue blood relatives go on an international chase to pin him down. And the intrigue doesn’t stop there. There’s the harassment when Hattenbach unwittingly dances with the girl of one of the most powerful military henchmen of the time, the murder of his loyal friend Lionel Fouchard as he drives a friend’s pregnant wife to the hospital.

On the more jovial side, there are stories of Haiti’s rich and famous: Ti Roro, a world-renowned drummer, who according to Hattenbach knew only four English words, Miami, Chicago, New York, Texas and crafted his drumming lessons for international tourists accordingly. We also meet Pierre D’Adesky, a resort developer, Albert Silvera, the owner of El Rancho, Clifford Brandt, Haiti’s richest man of that era, and an assortment of Haitian beauties Micheline Succard, Claudinette Fouchard, Madeleine Marcel, Lena Assad, Olga Silvera, the Haitian-Palestinian-Haitian entrepreneurs David and Wally Talamas, and debonair bachelors and ladies’ man Gaston Baussan, Jean-Claude Armand, Jean-Claude Appolon, manufacturing mogul Tony Acra, and luminaries of the Haitian cultural scene Odette Wiener, Ti Paris, Herby Widmaier, Ansy Derose, Joe Archer, Gerard Dorsainville and teen sensation Yanique Coupette.

And the international celebrities: Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner, Aristotle and Jackie Kennedy O’nassis, Harry Belafonte, Walter Cronkite, Richard Burton, Italian and Roman royalty, heck you name it…er them, they were there.

This was a time when three ship loads of cruise passengers would visit Haiti a week, not counting private plane and commercial flight passengers; a time when men like Hattenbach got tans to pass off as Haitian to international female tourists who landed in Haiti in search of wild adventures, when the Dominican Republic tourism board next door would be grateful if they only had 1% of Haiti’s tourists come on over.

Once the Shindlers (Hattenbach went by Tony Shindler to avoid name confusions in Haiti) made their mark on El Rancho, they moved on to if not bigger, than at least a fish in which they had a more personal stake in. They acquired Kyona Beach Hotel, which they built into one of Haiti’s finest beach resorts (Muriel Shindler’s ashes were scattered at Kyona when she died in 2001). They weren’t always about business, as Muriel Shindler had an orphanage called La Maison des Enfants, an orphanage that raised 23 street children, and had a nurse and physician on staff.

Hattenbach would leave Haiti for the last time after his mother’s death, his brain sockets filled with marvelous memories, of the Haiti that was, and that perhaps will be again…someday.

Special thanks to Hilary Hattenbach for making this book available to Kreyolicious.com.

Renowned and acclaimed fiction writer Julia Alvarez, the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is probably the last person one would think would devote an entire semi-memoir to Haiti. But maybe not. Alvarez’s roots are in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s twin sister, and she and her husband Bill are the owners of Alta Gracia an organic coffee form that also doubles as a literacy arts center.

The title of the book A Wedding in Haiti, refers to Piti’s nuptials. Piti, is a lanky fellow, Alvarez met while he was still in his teens, who she and her husband Bill kept in touch with over the years, supporting him with thoughtful gifts. Despite the fact that they are worlds apart: Julia Alvarez is a member of the literary elite back in America, and is the granddaughter of members of the Dominican oligarchy, whereas Piti is the son of a hut-living family, the friendship forments to almost son-mother pro.

Alvarez nonchalantly promised to come to his wedding someday, not realizing that Piti would jump the broom and hold her on his promise. What follows is a brand new genre perhaps: travelmoirlogue. The book is about a wedding in Haiti in the town of Moustique, but it’s also about the aging of The Pitouses, the nickname of Alvarez’s Alzheimer-affected parents. The book is about the close and touching friendship between the nationals of two countries, who traditionally do not always get along. It’s also about immigration and border escapades, as one of the book’s most fast-paced passages regarding Dominican checkpoints show.

And how a U.S.-born raised Dominican views the lack of autonomy of young, mountain-dweelling Haitian countryside wives. An exchange between Alvarez and Piti concerning his post-marital travel plans with his new wife Eseline and their daughter Ludy:

But what about Eseline? “Shouldn’t you talk this over with her first? I say, sticking up for the female’s right to decide. “Tomorrow she is my wife and must do what I say,” Piti explains, matter-of-factly…”You must talk it over with Eseline,” I insist. Piti gives me a perfunctory yes-mom nod. I have a feeling the talk will not be the kind of conversation I am thinking of.”

And inevitably, the earthquake that struck Haiti becomes part of the story; it’s the moment of personal reflection for Bill, Eli, Homero—others who are part of Alvarez’s journey. It’s a wedding in Haiti, but the feast is in Hispaniola.