A Reading List for Haitian Heritage Month
We close out this year's Haitian Heritage Month with a list of reader recommended books on the Caribbean nation.
All of the below descriptions were sourced directly from either the publisher’s website or a third party review of the book.
Fiction
Haiti Noir edited by Edwidge Danticat
A wide-ranging collection from the beloved but besieged Caribbean island. The 18 new stories, most by native Haitians, are introduced by Haitian-born National Book Award finalist Danticat. The editor/introducer does triple duty with "Claire of the Sea Light," which focuses on the sensuality of the island seen through a young girl's eyes. Each remaining tale has a different geographical setting. The opening and closing stories, Patrick Sylvain's "Odette" and Rodney Saint-Éloi's "The Blue Hill," deal with the recent earthquake. The former follows a grandmother's movements shortly after the disaster; the latter gives the quake a more metaphoric dimension. Other highlights: "Paradise Inn," by Kettly Mars, begins with the hero, Gokal's new police chief, arriving at his new post on a dark, humid night. In Josaphat-Robert Large's "Rosanna," the heroine's excitement over an outing with her beloved aunt soon turns to fear. Izzy Goldstein, the hero of Mark Kurlansky's wry "The Leopard of Ti Morne," knows that inside his Jewish exterior is a Haitian soul and decides to live accordingly. "The Harem," by Ibi Aanu Zoboi, probes the MO of Jean-Robert, an incorrigible seducer known to his conquests as Robby.
Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow by Fabienne Josephat
Haiti, 1965. Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, is the impoverished island nation's brutal dictator. Relentless curfews, and Papa Doc's terrifying Tonton Macoutes militia, have made life in Port-au-Prince increasingly difficult for struggling taxi driver Raymond L'Eveillé. But it is Raymond's brother, Nicolas, a wealthy professor at the local university, who is stirring up trouble. A secret manifesto penned by Nicolas is rallying opposition to Papa Doc. After a tip-off from a disgruntled student, Nicolas' home is raided and the manifesto discovered, landing him in Fort Dimanche, a notorious, disease-ridden prison many enter but few ever leave. Meanwhile, Raymond's wife leaves him, taking their children and escaping the island. With his family gone, Raymond gets himself arrested as part of a death-defying plan to break his brother out of jail.
Fabienne Josaphat's electric prose brings to life a horrifying and not so distant time in Haiti's past while exploring the best and worst of humanity. The novel examines power's tendency to corrupt, the impulse of nationalistic pride, and, above all, the human desire to survive, while describing in rigorous detail the shocking realities of life in the Baron's shadow.
Dézafi by Frankéttiene
Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature to English-language readers for the first time.
Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne’s novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.
Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain. Translated by Langston Hughes.
An English-language edition of this novel, which tells of the traditional rural life and people of Haiti, dominated by the natural world. This is a deeply powerful story of the harsh existence of peasant farmers struggling in a world both beautiful and unforgiving. The tale begins with the return of Manuel, a prodigal son, to his aging parents’ homestead and the realities of subsistence agriculture in a drought-stricken region. He brings new ideas, with the potential to transform the lives of people in the community. He encounters old feuds and resistance to change but he persists, and his determination to bring the people of the village together to improve their lives leads to a dramatic conclusion in this story of redemption.
The author, Jacques Roumain, is a critical figure in the development of Haitian literature and culture in the 20th century, and this novel, originally written in French, was translated in the 1930s by the noted Harlem Renaissance poet and author Langston Hughes and by Mercer Cook, professor and chair of romance languages at Howard University, who also taught at the University of Haiti, in Port-au-Prince.
God Loves Haiti by Dimitry Elias Léger
A native of Haiti, Dimitry Elias Léger makes his remarkable debut with this story of romance, politics, and religion that traces the fates of three lovers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the challenges they face readjusting to life after an earthquake devastates their city.
Reflecting the chaos of disaster and its aftermath, God Loves Haiti switches between time periods and locations, yet always moves closer to solving the driving mystery at its center: Will the artist Natasha Robert reunite with her one true love, the injured Alain Destiné, and live happily ever after? Warm and constantly surprising, told in the incandescent style of José Saramago and Roberto Bolaño, and reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s hauntingly beautiful Love in The Time of Cholera, God Loves Haiti is an homage to a lost time and city, and the people who embody it.
In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero
The quest for an elusive amphibian in the mountains of violence-torn Haiti brings together an unlikely pair of hunters--American herpetologist Victor Grigg and his Haitian guide, Thierry Adrien--whose individual stories unfold and intertwine in a mesmerizing tale of love, sex, and fraternal rivalry; of the propagation and extinction of species in the natural world; and of the mysterious forces of nature that govern the fate of all living creatures.
In the Palm of Darkness is a compelling tale that reads like a murder mystery but also reveals a highly sophisticated and refined literary voice.
Non-Fiction
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
MacArthur Foundation Fellow Edwidge Danticat was a toddler when her parents moved to Brooklyn for work and safety, leaving her with her aunt and uncle at home in Haiti until she could join her parents in the United States a decade later. Danticat was close with her uncle, a community leader and pastor who chose to remain in Haiti with his congregation. In this poignant 2007 memoir – a finalist for the National Book Award – Danticat is now grown and living in Miami, facing the death of her father and the birth of her first child while her uncle and his son are fleeing for their lives from the Haitian government and gang disputes that have destroyed his church. “Through the seemingly effortless grace of Danticat’s words, a family’s tragedy is transformed into a promise of collective hope,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. It is “a testament to family bonds so strong they can survive separation, distance, even death” (People). Claims The Philadelphia Inquirer, if this book “does not break your heart, you don’t have one.”
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz
A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes, over time and in the pages of this book, a lover of Haiti, pursuing the heart of this beautiful and confounding land into its darkest corners and brightest clearings. Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a journey into the depths of the human soul as well as a vivid portrayal of the nation’s extraordinary people and their uncanny resilience. Haiti has found in Amy Wilentz an author of astonishing wit, sympathy, and eloquence.
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint L’Overture by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failings―his white mistresses, his early ownership of slaves, his authoritarianism ―Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaint’s understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century.
Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene by Mimi Sheller
In Island Futures Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on post earthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because foreigners are largely ignorant of Haiti's political, cultural, and economic contexts, especially the historical role of the United States, their efforts to help often exacerbate inequities. Caribbean survival under ever-worsening environmental and political conditions, Sheller contends, demands radical alternatives to the pervasive neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and US military domination that have perpetuated what she calls the "coloniality of climate." Sheller insists that alternative projects for Haitian reconstruction, social justice, and climate resilience—and the sustainability of the entire region—must be grounded in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions that call for deeper transformations of transnational economies, ecologies, and human relations writ large.
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, was the first major analysis of the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe. And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces—and in the process helped form the first independent post-colonial nation in the Caribbean.
Down Among the Dead Men by Dany Laferrière
The story of Dany Laferriere, the narrator and writer living in exile in Montreal, who finally comes home to Haiti. Nothing is different, and yet everything has changed.
There is his mother, who has never left Haiti, not even for one minute, and who still performs all the rituals of old. But there is also the army of zombies that takes over the streets at night, while the American army occupies the country by day.
What is this country of dead men? Is every Haitian a secret citizen? Is it possible for Laferriere to cross over to that country and then return?
Laferriere wanders through Port-au-Prince interrogating old friends and new acquaintances. The tone becomes strident, as do the questions: Do we stay? Do we leave? What's the point? Where can we be ourselves and live like humans at the same time? In the end Laferriere decides to head for Bombardopolis, a village where you only need to eat once every three months -- a way of curing hunger? What will become of him once he gets there, and who will he be when he returns?
Articles / Podcasts
The Founder of Surrealism Helped Inspire a Revolution in Haiti