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Évelyne Trouillot

The newest English translation of one of Haiti’s most powerful literary voices

 Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot—one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world—constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces—a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

University of Virginia Press

CARAF Books

Désirée Congo

M. A. Salvodon

Maryse Condé

The Last of the African Kings follows the wayward fortunes of a noble African family. It begins with the regal Béhanzin, an African king who opposed French colonialism and was exiled to distant Martinique. In the course of this brilliant novel, Maryse Condé tells of Béhanzin’s scattered offspring and their lives in the Caribbean and the United States. A book made up of many characters and countless stories, The Last of the African Kings skillfully intertwines the themes of exile, lost origins, memory, and hope. It is set mainly in the Americas, from the Caribbean to modern-day South Carolina, yet Africa hovers always in the background.

The Last of the African Kings

Richard Philcox

René Depestre

The latest novel by one of Haiti’s most brilliant writers

 The most recent book by the renowned Haitian novelist, essayist, and poet René Depestre, Popa Singer is a semiautobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule.

 To celebrate her son’s return home after years of exile, Dianira Fontoriol (aka “Popa Singer”)—an indomitable mother armed only with her sewing machine and her personal convictions—determines to resist in her own way the infamous Ubu King of the Tropics: François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Depestre’s novel tells the story of this at once intimate and epic struggle. Combining colorful fantasy and biting social satire, it is a deeply personal and singularly artistic take on an infamous chapter in Haitian history.

Popa Singer

Kaiama L. Glover

Patrick Chamoiseau

The discovery in Robinson Crusoe of the footprint of a fellow human on an abandoned island is a haunting and iconic moment in world literature. In the hands of Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the most innovative and lauded authors in the French language, this moment of shattered solitude becomes an occasion for Crusoe to reconsider his origins, existence, and humanity and for one of our most acclaimed novelists to craft a powerful meditation on race and history.

Chamoiseau’s novel contrasts two intertwining narratives—the log entries of a slave ship’s captain and the story of a castaway who awakens on a beach and must rebuild his entire world alone. Chamoiseau creates a new perspective on the Crusoe myth, not only injecting the slave trade and Creole history into this previously ahistorical tale but conceiving an intensely original, freeform prose influenced by Creole cadence. This powerful work by a literary master is available in English for the first time in this eloquent and vivid translation.

Crusoe’s Footprint

Charly Verstraet

Jeffrey Landon Allen

Kettly Mars

I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars’s latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world.

When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chêne. His sister Marylène has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist’s model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Éliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.

I Am Alive

Nathan H. Dize

Fabienne Kanor

While researching in Nantes, a port city enriched by the slave trade, celebrated French novelist Fabienne Kanor came across a chilling report written in 1774 by the commander of a slave ship, Le Soleil. Captain Louis Mosnier recounted the loss of valuable "cargo" when fourteen African women escaped from the ship’s hold to leap overboard rather than face enslavement. Half of them drowned or were eaten by sharks.

From this tragic incident, Kanor has composed a powerful, polyphonic novel in which each woman tells her own vivid story. Their disparate lives from differing cultures, conditions, and perspectives intersect through their violent mistreatment, profound sense of disorientation, and collective act of resistance. These intertwined narratives reveal the brutalizing effects of slavery, not only on the victim but also on the oppressor: the master can no more escape its dehumanizing effects than can the slave.

Humus

Lynn E. Palermo

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end.

Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

The Belle Créole

Nicole Simek

Frankétienne

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—the first book ever published in Haitian Creole—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.

Dézafi

Asselin Charles

Maïssa Bey

This new translation brings together two of Algerian author Maïssa Bey’s important works for the first time in English. "Do You Hear in the Mountains..." is a compelling piece of autofiction in which three destinies meet dramatically on a train moving through France. We meet an Algerian refugee, whom we recognize as Bey herself. She has escaped the civil war and cannot forget her father’s commitment to independence nor his death under the torture of the French soldiers. Sitting near her is a retired doctor whose military service in Algeria coincidentally took him to the same area at the time of that tragedy. Their neighbor is a girl who would like to understand this past that is so painful to discuss. The eleven diverse tales that follow, presented under the title "Under the Jasmin, at Night," exemplify some of Bey’s recurring themes—the Franco-Algerian colonial legacy and the feminine condition. Together, these works provide an unforgettable picture of a turbulent history that reaches across generations and continents.

CARAF: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Do You Hear in the Mountains... and Other Stories

Erin Lamm

Fawzia Zouari

The first novel available to English readers by Fawzia Zouari, one of the most important North African authors writing today, begins with an emergency crew’s arrival at a Parisian apartment. Two emaciated young women, sisters, are brought out on stretchers. To the crowd of onlookers the women’s condition is mystifying; for the two sisters, this is the inescapable end to a tragic series of events.

Inspired by an actual news story from the French headlines, I Die by This Country introduces us to Nacéra and Amira. Casting her mind back in the midst of the opening pages’ upheaval, Nacéra pieces together her fragmentary knowledge of her parents’ lives in rural French Algeria and their immigration to Paris in the years following Algeria’s war for independence. Her memories of how both she and Amira struggled to find their place as children of immigrants reveals the enormous stress of social exclusion and identity conflicts facing immigrant youth. Nacéra and her family yearn for acceptance, but the reader sees this dream becoming increasingly unattainable.

Zouari’s frank prose and penetrating storytelling deftly relates the multigenerational experience of Franco-Algerian immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As France continues, like so many western countries, to struggle with questions regarding national identity, immigration, and its colonial past, the experiences depicted in this novel resonate more than ever.

I Die by This Country

Skyler Artes

Daniel Picouly

October 15, 1793: the eve of Marie-Antoinette’s execution. The Reign of Terror has descended upon revolutionary France, and thousands are beheaded daily under the guillotine. Edmond Coffin and Jonathan Gravedigger, two former soldiers now employed in disposing of the dead, are hired to search the Parisian neighborhood of Haarlem for a mysterious mixed-race "leopard boy," whose nickname derives from his mottled black-and-white skin. Some would like to see the elusive leopard boy dead, while others wish to save him. Why so much interest in this child? He is rumored to be the son of Marie-Antoinette and a man of color--the Chevalier de Saint-George, perhaps, or possibly Zamor, the slave of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV.

This wildly imaginative and culturally resonant tale by Daniel Picouly audaciously places black and mixed-race characters--including King Mac, creator of the first hamburger, who hands out figures of Voltaire and Rousseau with his happy meals, and the megalomaniac Black Delorme, creator of a slavery theme park--at the forefront of its Revolution-era story. Winner of the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, this book envisions a "Black France" two hundred years before the term came to describe a nation transformed through its postcolonial immigrant population.

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

The Leopard Boy

Jeanne Garane

Leïla Sebbar

The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leïla Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision.

The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar’s bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar paints an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father’s Arabic language and culture, depicting her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and to convey the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised "between two shores"--the colonized and the colonizer.

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Arabic as a Secret Song

Véronique Tadjo

"To attain some sort of universal value," Véronique Tadjo has said, "a piece of work has to go deep into the particular in order to reveal our shared humanity." In Far from My Father, the latest novel from this internationally acclaimed author, a woman returns to the Côte d'Ivoire after her father’s death. She confronts not only unresolved family issues that she had left behind but also questions about her own identity that arise amidst the tensions between traditional and modern worlds. The drama that unfolds tells us much about the evolving role of women, the legacy of polygamy, and the economic challenges of daily life in Abidjan. On a more autobiographical level, the author depicts a daughter’s efforts to come to terms with what she knew and did not know about her father.

Set against the backdrop of civil strife that has wracked the Côte d'Ivoire since the turn of the century, this story shows Tadjo’s remarkable ability to inhabit a character’s inner world and emotional landscape while creating a narrative of great historic and cultural dimensions.

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from the French

Far from My Father

Amy Baram Reid

Lynda Chouiten

A prize-winning novel from one of Algeria’s rising literary stars

 In A Waltz, Lynda Chouiten depicts an irreverent and creative woman with an artistic temperament navigating the stiflingly conservative society in which she was raised. The narrative follows the path of Chahira, a seamstress from El Moudja—a fictional small coastal town in the Kabyle region of Algeria—to an international design competition in Vienna. Along the way, A Waltz expresses the strain of competing value systems, regional identities and expectations, and a cacophony of voices bearing down upon one woman while asking challenging questions about the nature of madness, confinement, and resistance to a patriarchal world.

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