Haitian cuisine would have made it to California, but it wouldn’t have made as big of a splash had it not been for Georges Laguerre, better known as Tigeorges. Laguerre is the owner of TiGeorges Restaurant, one of the few Haitian restaurants in California, and one of the most celebrated restaurants serving international cuisine in California. After decades of owning the landmark restaurant, running his own non-profit organization and selling his branded Haitian coffee, Tigeorges is telling his story in No Man Is An Island: A Memoir of Family and Haitian Cuisine, co-written with Jeremy Rosenberg.

Above: Chef Tigeorges! Photo Credit: Tor Johansen/TorPhoto

TiGeorges nearly died at birth and had to be revived. His restaurant got burned down at the height of success, only to be moved elsewhere and be more popular than ever. Can this book be categorized? No Man Is An Island is a foodie memoir, it’s an autobiography, and it’s a cookbook. It’s a love letter from a man who loves Haiti, Haitian cuisine, and the kitchen.

Above: Chef Tigeorges and co-writer Jeremy Rosenberg inside Tigeorges Chicken in California. Photo Credit: Fabrice Cazeau.

Kreyolicious: When you were little, did you ever imagine you’d get this far in life?
Yes…My dream was to become a camera man in Hollywood…So far, that dream has not been materialized.
[But] for sure I knew from the education that I had received from my parents I will play a very important role in society.

Kreyolicious: No Man Is An Island. I think this title is so appropriate for your book. So many ways you could interpret it. Did you consider other titles?
Tigeorges in the kitchen…Because cooking was always my passion.

Kreyolicious: So you worked with Professor Jeremy Rosenberg on the book. What was the collaboration process like?
It took us seven years to make this book. Always have been fun to work with Jeremy.

Kreyolicious: How did you ever get the courage to make the move to California, when you had been living in New York for so long?
Never did like the cold…I remember during winter time, I always had the blues. Could not see myself back in NewYork again—although my entire family is in New York.

Kreyolicious: Do you see yourself writing another book after this one?
The answer is yes…Because I have so much more to say about my life experience in Los Angeles.

Above: Tigeorges Laguerre (left) and co-author Jeremy Rosenberg at an event promoting the book No Man Is An Island. Photo Credit: Gary Leonard.

Kreyolicious: At one point, you were really into filmmaking. Do you ever think about having a cooking TV show about Haitian cuisine?
A TV show is a great idea. That will give me a chance to show to the youth interested in Haitian cuisine how much
passion exists in the Haitian culinary [arts].

Kreyolicious: I have heard that some Walmarts around the country are selling “griyo” in their deli. Only, they don’t call it griyo. Do you think that as the decades go by, Haitian cooking will become more mainstream…like griyo will become the new taco, and diri sòs pwa will become the new chow mein?
Anything coming out of Haiti is hard to sell. Somehow, the rest of the world feel the originality of our cuisine should change so that Haitianty can be accepted and I refuse to sell Haiti on that level. No deformation if you come to patronage my business. I am going to say that Haiti[‘s] cuisine is among the ten best cuisines on this planet. And us Haitian restaurateurs have great responsibility not to combine the name of our restaurant with the name of other countries—that is Caribbean Haitian, French Kreyol etc.

Kreyolicious: What else can we look forward to from you?
Soon to open up a TiGeorges Kafe in my home town Port-De-Paix.

CLICK HERE to purchase his book on Amazon.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE TIGEORGES RESTAURANT WEBSITE.

Welcome to another edition of the Haitian Book Club. Today’s selection is Memoir of an Amnesiac by Jan J. Dominique (Caribbean Studies Press, 277pp), translated by Irline François.

Memoir of an Amnesiac is intriguing just for its title. For the first thing that comes to mind is: how exactly will the pages of the memoir of amnesiac look like. Will there be some blank pages? Some paragraphs that read like they’re missing a preceding one?

The text of Memoir of an Amnesiac reads rather smoothly. The narrative goes back and forth between the hacked memories of Paul (called Lili) and her present life. It’s also the story of a little girl, who longs for the guidance and presence of a father, a father whose absenteeism is not wholly purposeful but is provoked by a repressive time in their homeland. Of the fear and paranoia that is her life, Lili writes: “The man in black was someone whom everybody knew, but who was not be named.”

When Lili goes to live in Canada, all the years of being afraid, of censoring even one’s own inner thoughts are behind her, but her paranoia isn’t. She throws herself into activism, into the nurturing of her daughter Maya, and begins the long-delayed process of healing past wounds inflicted by exile.

The fact that the author of Memoir of an Amnesiac is the daughter of Jean-Léopold Dominique, the renowned radio broadcaster who was gunned down in 2000, lends this special context to the book.

The cover art for the book, conceptualized by Ralph Allen, is very striking. It almost looks like a Salvador Dali painting, and is fragmented, has partial deletions just like the memory of an amnesiac.

MJ Fievre’s novel A Sky the Color of Chaos, is a memoir so real, and so horror-novel-scary that when you look at the photo of the smiley author, you have a hard time associating her with the events mentioned in her life story. She’s a survivor of late 1990s and early 2000s Haiti, when the country was going through radical changes.

Digging through newspaper archives will give you the national story, but reading A Sky the Color of Chaos will give you the human story—close-up.

Let’s talk things over with the author and learn more about her book, and what led her to write her memoir at this stage of her life.

Kreyolicious: The title of your memoir is rather imaginative. A Sky the Color of Chaos… You sit there, and you imagine a sky the color of gunpowder. Was this the first title that occurred to you?
It can be a challenge to find the perfect title for a book…something both smart and intriguing that truly captures the essence of the work. People will happily tell you that a title idea stinks, that it’s a cliché, yet they won’t necessarily offer a better alternative. Titles are hard because they can kill a book. In the course of writing A Sky the Color of Chaos, I adopted at least fifteen working titles—from Inheritance to A Girl from Port-au-Prince to Child of My Father. They were all awful. In the end, the title came to me during my semester in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.

Downtown Santa Cruz carries a surprising resemblance to old Port-au-Prince, with its colonial architecture, its wooden porches, its balconies. Just like on Rue Pavée or Rue du Magasin de l’État, in Haiti, there was loud music emanating from car stereos and folks yelling at each other (albeit in Spanish) from across the street or down to the street from 19th Century windows, and streets were sometimes impassibly thick with throngs of people just milling about without regard for cars or buses. It was eerie. While on a taxi on Calle Sucre, I was transported back to Port-au-Prince and I pondered the contrast between the striking beauty of my birth city and the “pop up” violence there.

There is this scene in my memoir where I find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m in the middle of a crowd and there’s a shooting. I take cover behind a trash can and keep my eyes on the gorgeous blue of the sky. An excerpt from the book reads, “I gagged at the stench from the waste; the ground was puke green. As I lay in the mud, I heard more screaming. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my calves. My entire body trembled. But in the midst of this, the sky remained a beautiful blue.”

Thinking about that scene, many strong titles occurred to me. The next day, my writing students at the International University helped me narrow down the list.

Kreyolicious: That’s such a lovely, poetically-described scene…In the book, you write about your father, in particular his flaws…Was that hard to do?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how much of my father always slips into my fiction. If I look back on any of my novels—there he is. I’m yearning for his love in Le Feu de la Vengeance (The Fire of Vengeance). I resent his anger in La Bête (The Beast). I wish to run away from him in Les Hommes en Rouge (The Men in Red). I don’t do this on purpose and usually I don’t even recognize it until the writing is complete and there is distance between myself and the work. My father has always fascinated me. He was such an interesting, complex, larger-than-life character.

In nonfiction, the portrayal of such a multi-faceted individual was challenging. I had a love-hate relationship with Papa. It would have been so easy to play the victim and turn the memoir into a pity party, but after my father died, I wanted A Sky the Color of Chaos to have the ring of testament, the sound and feel and grip of a book that was born from truth. I wanted the reader to understand the intricacies of daughterly love.

I don’t think that I overly focused on Papa’s flaws. Yes, my father had many shortcomings, but I also shared with the reader everything that made him a delightful human being: his loyalty to his friends, his sense of humor, his hard work. Getting the essence of an individual and putting it on paper, that’s never easy. I had to grow both as a writer and as an individual to write this story. Rise above the violence and the hurt and the acrimony to find the humanity in my father. He was just a man, after all.

Kreyolicious: There aren’t many books in English written by someone from Haiti about the period you write about (the 1990’s and early 2000’s). Did you feel like a pioneer of sorts?
While fact-checking A Sky the Color of Chaos and conducting some research for my footnotes, I discovered a plethora of news articles about Haiti in the 1990s. Journalists Kathie Klarreich and Michael Tarr were instrumental in directing me towards useful reports. There aren’t many literary pieces in English about this time period, however, and certainly no memoir that I know of, which is unfortunate because the Nineties constitute such an important chapter in Haitian history. The Duvalier era is over. The people get a shot at building a democracy, but the country, once again, falls apart. During the late 1980s and 90s, from when I was eight-years-old to eighteen, Haiti’s government changed forms eight times. The Haitian people endured fraudulent elections, three military coups, a crippling embargo, and a United Nations occupation. I do feel like a pioneer. I consider A Sky the Color of Chaos the first historical memoir about this era. I wrote the book not only to tell my own story, but also to document the story of my time. I was very careful with factual accuracy and chronology, using quotes from newspapers, letters and other verifiable, external records in my footnotes to make this memoir authentic.

Because of their unemotional nature, news articles do not fully capture the impact of political instability and the 1990’s embargo on the every day life of people in Haiti. Children are reported dying but no one describes the piles of bodies at the morgue. (“They were in such a state of decay, they were barely recognizable as humans. Masses of rotting flesh, greenish black.”) News articles might mention the many days when students couldn’t go to school because of tires burning downtown or a new gas shortage, but they are silent as to what these children are up to when left unsupervised. The journalist writes about the many hours spent in lines at gas stations; the memoirist describes the sun toasting the drivers’ bodies, the tempers flaring, the gas station attendant being knifed by an impatient customer. I remember so many nights spent studying in candlelight. I remember many friends fleeing to the United States for a better life. The son of a neighbor boarded a boat that sank at sea. Another became a gang member and robbed his girlfriend’s house. Those stories are more real to me than what was reported in the news. And people need to know those stories.

Kreyolicious: Once the book was printed, you probably read it all over again. In doing so, did you wish you could take some of it back? Whenever a writer gets personal, doesn’t the vulnerability factor kick in?

Throughout the years, I’ve shared many excerpts of the book online, on the Nervous Breakdown and other literary magazines, including Tupelo Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, and The Southeast Review. Fictionalized chapters appeared in Haiti Noir (edited by Edwidge Danticat) and The Mom Egg. The process of letting go was therefore very progressive. Before the release of the memoir, my personal life was already “out there” for anyone to put under the microscope and judge. I did many nonfiction readings in South Florida (at the NSU Art Museum, at Books & Books, at the Miami Book Fair, and so on) so that I practiced getting over my vulnerability.

My publisher (Matt Peters) and I worked on a series of six formatted proofs before I signed the final consent for the publication of A Sky the Color of Chaos. A month or so before the book came out, I decided to change almost all the names (to “protect the innocent”). At the last minute, I wanted to get rid of the only sex scene in the book (which I did). Then there was my week-long crusade against all curse words, so that the book could be adopted by the public school system. Matt (who is a very patient man and trusts my judgment) had to say, ENOUGH. When I finally signed the release, I felt relieved. I’d been holding on to this book for way too long—eight years!

I haven’t read the book since it’s been available in print. I double-checked the format and page numbers to make sure there were no obvious misprints, but that’s it. I’m ready for the next project. The memoir is done.

Kreyolicious: You were part of the Miami International Book Fair [last year]. How did you enjoy that experience?
I made many appearances at the book fair. I had a blast!

On the Saturday [of the fair], I was part of a Haiti-focused panel titled “Land of Upheaval: A Literary Journey through Haiti’s Modern History.” With moderator Hector Duarte Jr., Fabienne Josaphat, Katia D. Ulysse, and I discussed Haiti’s recent history, viewed through the prism of literature — from the days of Papa Doc Duvalier, to the tumultuous reign of President Aristide, to the earthquake that displaced more than 1.5 million people. (In March of next year, Hector, Fabienne, Katia, and I are traveling to Los Angeles, California, to present this panel at AWP!)

In the afternoon, I was invited by Wordier Than Thou to share at The Swamp a poem about what drew me to South Florida. Later on, I joined Mutsuki Mockett, Nikki Moustaki, and Suki Kim for “The World Over: Memoirs of Place.” All day, I was surrounded by greatness. It’s exhilarating!

On Sunday, I was one of the authors featured at Sunday Salon with Orange Island Art Foundation. I also had the honor of moderating “EXPATS! Haitian Women Poets in Exile: A Trilingual Reading in English, French, and Haitian Creole.” Three women from Haiti read and discussed poems that examine the physical, sociopolitical, canonical, and psychological kinds of exile endured by women writers of Haitian Descent. Poets Rebecca N. Carmant, Angie Bell, and Naomiel (in conversation with me) probed the complex issues of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class that limit (or enrich!) their lives as expats.

Kreyolicious: Are you already tackling a novel?
I am! It’s a collaborative work with two awesome individuals: a talented fiction writer from Chile and a gifted Irish-American artist. That’s all I’ll say for now. Details later. I don’t want to jinx it.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE MJ FIEVRE’S BOOK ON AMAZON!

Hey book lovers! This will surely make your day! Your first look at The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat’s first memoir since Brother, I’m Dying and her first non-fiction book since Creating Dangerously.

The Art of Dying…that’s an intriguing title. It’s going to be as personal as memoirs come. Danticat’s mother was dying of terminal cancer as she was revising her young adult novel Untwine. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is her chronicle of those painful days and how she dealt with them, and the aftermath of the passing of her mother.

Photo Credit: Getty

The author has had so many losses…her beloved uncle and her father, but she still has a beautiful family, including two daughters to cherish, as well as the love of her fans and readers.

Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death is set to be released on July 11, 2017….

It’s not on Amazon yet, but be sure to check her author page in few more days, and you’ll be able to pre-order it. CLICK HERE to visit the author’s page on AMAZON.

CLICK HERE to read previous interviews/articles with/about her!