Tag: Haiti

Fiction, Review Copy, Translation

Memory At Bay by Evelyne Trouillot, tr. Paul Curtis Daw

Title:  Memory At Bay Author:  Evelyne Trouillot Translator:  Paul Curtis Daw Publisher: University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville & London (2015) ISBN:  978 0 8139 3809 7 Extensive reading is not necessary to understand that Haiti has a complicated and troubling history.  The brutal sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue, a nation formed out of the world’s first successful slave revolt, decades of precarious and corrupt governments, a devastating … Continue reading Memory At Bay by Evelyne Trouillot, tr. Paul Curtis Daw

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Fiction, Translation

Alphabet of the Night by Jean-Euphèle Milcé (translated from the original French by Christopher Moncrieff)

There’s a passage in Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazaar where he compares expatriate Haitian writers to “hunted birds”. I wondered why Haitians are either brilliant writers or taxi drivers for life in New York and Miami.  And when they’re writers they are in exile.  Do writers always have to live in another country, and preferably be forced to live there so that they’ve got things to … Continue reading Alphabet of the Night by Jean-Euphèle Milcé (translated from the original French by Christopher Moncrieff)

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History, Non-Fiction

Learning about Haiti – The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James

Years ago, reading Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones left me wanting to learn more about the history of Haiti.  An island nation with so dramatic and bloody a story – you’d think there would be more books devoted to it.  Not so.  I finally discovered The Black Jacobins:  Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James thanks to my local indie bookstore … Continue reading Learning about Haiti – The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James

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