Kreyolicious Reads…Kreyolicious Reads…your very own Haitian-American Book Club…in which—in which I discuss a book about Haiti.

Today’s novel is Stella by Emeric Bergeaud.

This book is special to Kreyolicious Reads for so many reasons. Originally written in 1859, Stella is the oldest novel that has been selected for the Book Club. This translated edition of the novel is brought to us by Luis Duno-Gottberg and Adriana Umana Hossman, two language and literature professors who took it upon themselves to make this novel (written originally in French) to the English-speaking community.

Emeric Bergeaud chose to make the Haitian Revolution the background of his novel. Had to remind myself that this book was written just 55 years after the 1804 (re)founding of Haiti. Now to think of it…this would be like a modern author writing about the 1960s in our day, and recounting historical moments probably still fresh in still-living contemporaries.

So, who is Stella? She’s not exactly the heroine of Bergeaud’s story. She’s more like one of many players. There’s Romulus and Remus—two brothers who are instrumental in the revolution—the undeniable heroes who overshadow real-life figures like Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. A fictionalized version of the period that leads to the disintegration the former French colony Saint Domingue, Stella has all the sparks of the historical novels about the U.S. Civil War that you may have read.

And for this reason, and for a whole lots more, it’s a Kreyolicious Reads selection.

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Looking for books about Haiti to read? Look no further than Kreyolicious Reads…your portal to books about Haiti, and written (mostly) by folks of Haitian descent. Oh, and your portals to authors too! Today’s author of interest is Dimitry Elias Leger, author of God Loves Haiti, a novel about how the 2010 Haiti disrupts a love triangle. The author is a graduate of St. John’s University and worked as a journalist before publishing his novel. After living in several U.S. cities (mainly Miami and Brooklyn), he makes his home in Geneva, Switzerland.

Photo Credit: Jill Krementz

Kreyolicious: So, you were born in Port-au-Prince, and then moved to the USA. Do you remember what it felt like to make the move?

Well, the final move from Haiti to Brooklyn happened in February ’86, right before the fall of Duvalier. The departure felt violent—like a rupture—because I was 14 and just coming into my own as a teenager. But I’d been going back and forth between the States and Port-au-Prince since I was 3 years, spending the summer in one country while going to school in the other. I don’t even know what my first language spoken was for sure.

Kreyolicious: You were raised by your father. Do you think that has affected your writing?

Sure. The most literal way my father affected my fiction writing is that I’m fascinated by the mysterious of many of the things he loved quite passionately, like family, Haiti, and honor. He was an atypical man in the way he was naturally very maternal and wore his feelings on his sleeves.

Kreyolicious: You earned your first degree from St. John’s University. While there, did you take any creative writing classes, or any psychology classes that helped you craft your book?

I never took a creative writing course. Not at St. John’s twenty years ago—nor after. I learned to write for mass media at St. John’s, print journalism, screenwriting and radio. Writing for great magazines and newspapers for ten years was good training for crafting my book, and after leaving journalism, reading poetry and novels and watching films about people and countries dealing with war, or the Caribbean, and Latin America helped me write my novel immensely.

Kreyolicious: I noticed that you dedicated God Loves Haiti to the survivors of the earthquake, rather than in the memory of those who perished.

Sure. Much is made of our dead and how we grieve and deal with death. My novel’s about the people who live in Haiti, who live Haiti 24/7, with a special shout-out to the people who could leave or could have left for Canada, the U.S., Europe, at any point in their lives, and specially after surviving the earthquake, but chose not to. Je les félicites [I congratulate them].

Kreyolicious: As you wrote the novel, were you a bit apprehensive about whether your readers would try to match up the characters with real-life counterparts?

Nah. I worried about telling a good story in an original voice. I wanted to entertain readers, surprise them over and over, literarily and intellectually. The novel has so many layers, there’s something for every reader who digs it to obsess over.

Kreyolicious: From the moment when we first meet her in the first chapter, Natasha Robert practically takes over the book. How did you come to create her?

She came to me—like all the other characters—as I began writing about the internal life of a very sensitive character experiencing the earthquake and trying to get on with life. I love music, jazz and hip-hop in particular. Natasha could be seen as my falsetto voice.

Kreyolicious: Whenever a guy writes a novel where his main character is a woman, people might think he was able to create her so well, because he drew on the women in his family, or women he’s known.

Those people would be right. My mother, my sister, my sister-in-law, my nine older cousins, my wife, my daughter, my lovers, like my father, my brothers, my male cousins, my son, my self, they’re all in the novel, and they always will be in my novels. I like writing about strong feelings, so every passion I’ve felt and received will be in my characters and stories too.

Kreyolicious: I think it’s interesting that you’ve lived in Port-au-Prince, Brooklyn, then moved to Paris, and currently make your home in Switzerland. If you could only live in one of these places for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

I’ll probably settle down in Port-au-Prince eventually. Or Miami. Depends on my health and wealth.

Kreyolicious: Is the writer and author Dany Laferriere one of your heroes. Your novel is preceded by a quote from one of his books, and later on in the text, there’s a reference to Librarie Sidney-Nina, a bookstore owned by a family of one of your characters—Alain Destiné—that stocks all of his books.

I love Dany’s books, his entire bibliography. He’s our funniest novelist ever. Along with Junot Diaz, Dany’s writing and success gave me permission to write humorously and affectionately about us, our humor and lust for affection.

Kreyolicious: At any point during the writing of God Loves Haiti, were you like, “This earthquake thing is too recent. Maybe I should wait a few years to let it simmer, and make it part of the plot.”

Nah. Part of literature’s job is to entertain. But literature, like art and film, plays an even more important role as the means to honor and commemorate a people, a place, a time. The earthquake’s the most important event in Haitian history since the Duvalier dictatorship and the terror of Tonton Macoutes. Like World War II for Jews and Europeans, and 9/11 and its wars for Americans, I expect goudou-goudou [the Haiti earthquake] to be a part of Haitian culture for centuries. After all, death tends to be the number one theme of serious books. There’s beauty to be found in the things that make us most uncomfortable, both as a writer and a reader. I had a blast writing about god and the earthquake. I’d wanted to write novels about Haitians for years and couldn’t come up with a good one—one that worked—until I confronted the horrors of the earthquake. I had no choice but to write it.

Kreyolicious: You started writing your book one late winter in the 2010s. How long did it take you to complete it?

Eleven months.

Kreyolicious: Were there moments when the writing was difficult…like writer’s block.

No. The way I write controls for blocks. In other words, I spend a lot of time doing nothing but driving around or laying around and flipping through novels, songs, and TV shows, and movies, magazines, and essays for the sounds and ideas for a novel section, a chapter, and a character’s conflict and journey. And then the music and joke comes to me, and I lock myself in a room and write it down furiously, like a torrent of words. It feels like I’m transcribing the words from another source. I smile the whole time when it’s happening.

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Welcome dear reader to Kreyolicious Reads…the place to discuss books about Haiti and to have conversations with the authors who wrote them. Today, I am continuing the convo with Dimitry Elias Leger, the author of God Loves Haiti, published recently by the good folks at HarperCollins. If you missed PART ONE of this stimulating conversation, be sure to CLICK HERE.

Above: The author at a book signing event in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo Courtesy of Author.

Kreyolicious: Do you think of yourself as a nomad?

Nope. I think of myself as a cosmopolitan Haitian. I’m familiar with and at ease with many corners of the planet, but home is where my parents and their parents, and I, was born. I’ve been an expat since I was 14 only for pragmatic reasons. Haiti was falling apart in early ’86 when I left. For the last and next decade, Lake Geneva has been and will be a terrific place for my wife and I to raise our children. Once you have kids, their well-being dictate where you should live.

Kreyolicious: I really like the book’s cover. Because the yellow-black is the theme for my other website.

Cool that you like the cover!

Kreyolicious: Did you have a say in its design?

A Swiss art director at the ad agency did it for me when I was thinking about self-publishing. It was too beautiful and the novel to dear to me to risk wasting in self-publishing. After HarperCollins bought the novel, I asked them to consider using it. And they did!

Kreyolicious: Oh, wow. He’s good.

Yeah, he’s dope. My only instructions to him were the words of the title had to be big on there, because in America that connotes serious literature. And no palm trees!

Kreyolicious: Will the book be translated in other languages soon?

Translations in other languages will happen soon as new publishers in other countries buy the novel. We’re pursuing them across the globe.

Kreyolicious: What if you had never come to the USA, or lived in any of those places…those other places…what sort of book would God Loves Haiti be? What if you were still that little boy from Port-au-Prince and had remained there.

Interesting question. That little boy in College Bird was a pretty good writer. My guess is if he’d never left Haiti he’d still grow up to become a novelist who wrote a novel called God Loves Haiti. If this alternative reality does not include the earthquake, then it would be a different novel in some ways, but not in the essential questions I explore—like where does resilience come from? Or love? Or optimism in the face of Haiti’s everyday failings. I’ve wondered why my father loved Haiti so much since I was a child, and exploring how the place is actually loveable despite its difficulties is a timeless quest. The big difference if I’d never left Haiti is that the novel would be written and published in French first—not English—even though in my head it’s in French.

Kreyolicious: What advice would you say to those people out there who are constantly fantasizing about writing a book, but just can’t seem to get down to actually doing it?

Any book? I can talk only about novels. For me, it helped that I felt great urgency. I felt like I had no choice in my life, but to write and publish at least one good novel before I died. My father was old enough to be my grandfather. He was 49 when I was born. He was obsessed with his legacy, and I inherited that obsession at a young age. I loved books, and I was a good writer. I liked the challenge of writing about new subjects for new audiences, and I did so for different magazines and newspapers for a long time. Writing and publishing a good literary fiction novel was my ultimate challenge, my Moby Dick, probably since the first teacher noted my talents as a writer, probably when I was around 10 years-old at College Bird in Port-au-Prince. It took a long time to get one done and out in the world. For people fantasizing about writing and publishing good books, the good news is that time is on your side. Literature may be the only artistic field where you can get started in your 40s. You can try your luck at it at any time, as long as you do the homework of reading the best in your genre, culture, and style before you set out to find your voice. The world will always want funny yet important books.

Kreyolicious: Speaking of your father, what did he think of your career leanings?

Well, he got to see become a pretty successful magazine and newspaper writer before he passed away in 2004. He was proud. He knew I was going to become a professional writer when I was a kid. It was going to be that or architecture. Everyone in our neighborhood and College Bird knew that. When I was 18 and in college, my dad was [concerned] with my dreadlocks. He worried they would stall my career. I told him that as long as I can write well, white people would forgive my dreadlocks. I was proven right. Too bad he didn’t live another ten years to see how well received a novel I wrote called God Loves Haiti has been. He’s one of those people who never doubted that God loved Haiti. He’d have gotten an incredible kick out of the novel. When I did my book signing in Haiti, I felt his presence among all the elders at the reading who kept asking questions about the novel’s title.

Kreyolicious: Did you ever consider any other titles for the book?

I’m very attached to every single word in that book from cover to the last sentence. I wrote them in 2011 and held on to them no matter how many publishers rejected the manuscript. You could say the novel is my version of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.”

Kreyolicious: After reading your God Loves Haiti, Gary Shteyngart said that he wished you could produce a tome every month. Is there another novel lurking in the fingers of Dimitry Elias Leger? What should we expect from you next?

Yes, you can look forward to more novels from me in the future. I’m enjoying the process of finding new ways to tell new stories in my particular style. There are so many Haitian lives to explore. One thing I know, I’m sure my future novels won’t come out at the frequency Gary suggests though!

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