Maladi pa tombe sou bèt (“Illness befalls humans”) is a Haitian proverb that foregrounds the precariousness of human life and acknowledges our vulnerability to illness and death. Sayings use few words to express a great deal. As I reflect on the translation of Rosalie l ’ infâme by Évelyne Trouillot, this saying comes to mind precisely because my translation into English of this evocative Haitian novella coincided with the Haitian earthquake in 2010.1 This is why I've been sifting through both words and debris. During the winter and spring of 2010, I spent months in Boston poring over words that captured, in vivid detail, the dreadful conditions under which the enslaved women, men, and children lived in eighteenth century Saint-Domingue. By that summer, I was clearing rubble in Léogâne, the epicenter of the earthquake. The rubble’s material characteristics began to take on a visceral quality, its coarse brittleness infusing my words, thoughts, feelings. The presence of rubble was overwhelming. It was everywhere, a constant reminder of the lives lost. Working in rubble and handling rubble connected me to the destruction: I looked at it, I touched it, I pushed it around with my feet, I carried it around in a wheelbarrow, the contents of which I would dump by the side of the road, away from the site. I stepped over it and around it to reach a friend’s house. Rubble became mine to consider, to cry over, to break into small pieces, to transport, imagining its reuse for new roads, for essays
Maladi pa tombe sou bèt（“疾病降临在人类身上”）是一句海地谚语，它预示着人类生活的不稳定，并承认我们容易受到疾病和死亡的影响。谚语用很少的词来表达很多。当我回忆起Évelyne Trouillot翻译的《罗莎莉·英菲奥姆》时，我想到了这句话，正是因为我把这部令人回味的海地中篇小说翻译成英文时恰逢2010年海地地震。1这就是为什么我一直在筛选单词和碎片。2010年冬春季，我在波士顿花了几个月的时间仔细研究那些生动详细地描述了18世纪圣多明各被奴役的妇女、男子和儿童生活的可怕条件的文字。那年夏天，我正在震中莱奥涅清理瓦砾。瓦砾的物质特征开始呈现出一种发自内心的品质，它粗糙的脆性融入了我的文字、思想和感受。瓦砾铺天盖地。它无处不在，不断提醒人们逝去的生命。在瓦砾中工作和处理瓦砾将我与破坏联系在一起：我看着它，触摸它，用脚推它，用独轮车把它运来运去，我会把里面的东西倒在路边，远离现场。我跨过它，绕过它，来到一个朋友家。碎石成了我的，可以思考、哭泣、破碎、运输，想象它被重新用于新的道路和散文
{"title":"One Word at a Time: Sifting through Debris, Uncovering Memory","authors":"M. Salvodon","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Maladi pa tombe sou bèt (“Illness befalls humans”) is a Haitian proverb that foregrounds the precariousness of human life and acknowledges our vulnerability to illness and death. Sayings use few words to express a great deal. As I reflect on the translation of Rosalie l ’ infâme by Évelyne Trouillot, this saying comes to mind precisely because my translation into English of this evocative Haitian novella coincided with the Haitian earthquake in 2010.1 This is why I've been sifting through both words and debris. During the winter and spring of 2010, I spent months in Boston poring over words that captured, in vivid detail, the dreadful conditions under which the enslaved women, men, and children lived in eighteenth century Saint-Domingue. By that summer, I was clearing rubble in Léogâne, the epicenter of the earthquake. The rubble’s material characteristics began to take on a visceral quality, its coarse brittleness infusing my words, thoughts, feelings. The presence of rubble was overwhelming. It was everywhere, a constant reminder of the lives lost. Working in rubble and handling rubble connected me to the destruction: I looked at it, I touched it, I pushed it around with my feet, I carried it around in a wheelbarrow, the contents of which I would dump by the side of the road, away from the site. I stepped over it and around it to reach a friend’s house. Rubble became mine to consider, to cry over, to break into small pieces, to transport, imagining its reuse for new roads, for essays","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49391977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Évelyne Trouillot’s novels, short stories, poetry, children’s stories, and play—not to mention her interviews, op. ed. pieces, and academic articles—introduce us to chapters of Haiti’s history spanning roughly two hundred and fifty years. From a plantation in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue during the 1750s to present-day, postearthquake Haiti, the experiences, trials, and tragically haunting memories of her characters serve to bring into focus countless rifts in the country’s complex and often conflicted past. Despite the turbulent time periods in which we discover these protagonists, and the resulting adversity to which they are prone, their struggles are not waged on battlefields; nor do they lead to conspicuous positions of power befitting heroines or, alternately, to the imprisonment or execution of would-be martyrs. For as quintessential as the Vodou ceremony of the Bois Caïman, the decisive Battle of Vertières, or the notorious Fort Dimanche are to understanding Haiti’s past, Trouillot’s characters have not (yet, at least) appeared at the forefront of these or other similarly iconic places and events in the country’s history. Instead, they emerge in what might be considered the chambres interdites of Haiti’s past—places that have remained closed, hidden, or merely overlooked within and by the country’s dominant historical narratives. Akin to the eponymous “forbidden room” in the author’s first published collection of short stories, the far corner of which, concealed by curtains, “invaded [the young narrator’s] dreams, covering them with a clammy fear which flowed over [her], redolent and warm,”1 the settings of Trouillot’s works provide opportunity for confronting what has been described as the institutionalized
{"title":"History, Humanity, and the Literary Construction of Haiti in Évelyne Trouillot’s Works","authors":"J. Herbeck","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Évelyne Trouillot’s novels, short stories, poetry, children’s stories, and play—not to mention her interviews, op. ed. pieces, and academic articles—introduce us to chapters of Haiti’s history spanning roughly two hundred and fifty years. From a plantation in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue during the 1750s to present-day, postearthquake Haiti, the experiences, trials, and tragically haunting memories of her characters serve to bring into focus countless rifts in the country’s complex and often conflicted past. Despite the turbulent time periods in which we discover these protagonists, and the resulting adversity to which they are prone, their struggles are not waged on battlefields; nor do they lead to conspicuous positions of power befitting heroines or, alternately, to the imprisonment or execution of would-be martyrs. For as quintessential as the Vodou ceremony of the Bois Caïman, the decisive Battle of Vertières, or the notorious Fort Dimanche are to understanding Haiti’s past, Trouillot’s characters have not (yet, at least) appeared at the forefront of these or other similarly iconic places and events in the country’s history. Instead, they emerge in what might be considered the chambres interdites of Haiti’s past—places that have remained closed, hidden, or merely overlooked within and by the country’s dominant historical narratives. Akin to the eponymous “forbidden room” in the author’s first published collection of short stories, the far corner of which, concealed by curtains, “invaded [the young narrator’s] dreams, covering them with a clammy fear which flowed over [her], redolent and warm,”1 the settings of Trouillot’s works provide opportunity for confronting what has been described as the institutionalized","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42276497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In December 2004, on a break from the African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches conference in Paris, I browsed through the Musée Dapper bookstore (which, unfortunately, closed in 2017). A brightly colored book cover featuring a regal black woman in prof ile and a red detachable band proclaiming the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone award caught my eye. It was Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l ’Infâme, which I devoured that very night.1 What a powerful introduction to her work! It is significant that Philippe Davaine’s artistic rendering depicts narrator Lisette as a close-cropped, natural-hair wearing woman who completely dominates the sailing ship in the background, intimating that she and her ancestors survived the Middle Passage and Atlantic slavery. That a small portrait of Trouillot graces the upper lefthand corner of the back of the book articulates, complements, and reinforces that message, linking the two women to and through centuries of history in a similar way that the knotted cord bonds Brigitte to Lisette. Likewise, Trouillot’s oeuvre connects her to predecessor Marie Vieux Chauvet, contemporary Marie-Célie Agnant, and successor Edwidge Danticat, who wrote the foreword to M. A. Salvadon’s translation The Infamous Rosalie.2 While these Haitian-born writers have all spent years away from the island nation, Trouillot was the only one to return definitively, so that her literary identity has never been debated. Nevertheless, these writers are particularly mindful about representing Haitian women’s and girls’ experiences, and accordingly, creating women-centered texts. Trouillot’s novels, short stories, plays, and children’s and young people’s literature in French and Creole, most of which are published in Port-au-Prince and available abroad, privilege multigenerational relationships with political, social, historical, and gender resonances.
{"title":"Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie","authors":"R. Larrier","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In December 2004, on a break from the African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches conference in Paris, I browsed through the Musée Dapper bookstore (which, unfortunately, closed in 2017). A brightly colored book cover featuring a regal black woman in prof ile and a red detachable band proclaiming the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone award caught my eye. It was Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l ’Infâme, which I devoured that very night.1 What a powerful introduction to her work! It is significant that Philippe Davaine’s artistic rendering depicts narrator Lisette as a close-cropped, natural-hair wearing woman who completely dominates the sailing ship in the background, intimating that she and her ancestors survived the Middle Passage and Atlantic slavery. That a small portrait of Trouillot graces the upper lefthand corner of the back of the book articulates, complements, and reinforces that message, linking the two women to and through centuries of history in a similar way that the knotted cord bonds Brigitte to Lisette. Likewise, Trouillot’s oeuvre connects her to predecessor Marie Vieux Chauvet, contemporary Marie-Célie Agnant, and successor Edwidge Danticat, who wrote the foreword to M. A. Salvadon’s translation The Infamous Rosalie.2 While these Haitian-born writers have all spent years away from the island nation, Trouillot was the only one to return definitively, so that her literary identity has never been debated. Nevertheless, these writers are particularly mindful about representing Haitian women’s and girls’ experiences, and accordingly, creating women-centered texts. Trouillot’s novels, short stories, plays, and children’s and young people’s literature in French and Creole, most of which are published in Port-au-Prince and available abroad, privilege multigenerational relationships with political, social, historical, and gender resonances.","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44604482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Little Suitcase","authors":"Évelyne Trouillot, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel","doi":"10.1353/pal.2019.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2019.0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2019.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49015180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Évelyne Trouillot undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the landscape of Haitian letters. As a novelist, playwright, essayist, author of short stories and children’s books, and a meticulous researcher of Haitian history, her broad range of texts in French and Creole have resonated with readers across the Caribbean and Europe. Her work has been recognized by a slew of prestigious literary awards including the 2004 Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone awarded in Grenoble for her novel Rosalie L’ infâme, the 2005 Prix Beaumarchais for her play Le Bleu de l ’ île, and the 2010 Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for her novel La Mémoire aux abois.1 For North American readers, access to Trouillot’s work has been a more recent phenomenon with the translated novels The Infamous Rosalie and Memory at Bay in 2013 and 2015, respectively.2 It is through translation that Anglophone audiences come to Trouillot’s work and decipher her texts’ dramatization of encounters between past and present, and across racial and class divides in Haiti. But why a special issue on Évelyne Trouillot? And why now? The forthcoming publication of Trouillot’s newest novel, Desirée Congo, presents a unique opportunity to look back at her monumental contribution to Caribbean and African diaspora literature, and to look forward to a new addition to her already expansive body of work.3 There is value in this simultaneous casting back and gazing ahead, perhaps best articulated by the fictional character Charlotte as she confides in her granddaughter Lisette in Rosalie l ’ infâme: “Un jour, je te le promets, je te parlerai de ces barracoons, un jour où tu auras besoin d’ailes pour te porter au-delà du moment présent. Un jour, où ton besoin sera plus fort que
Évelyne Trouillot无疑在海地文学史上占有重要地位。作为一名小说家、剧作家、散文家、短篇小说和儿童读物的作者，以及对海地历史一丝不苟的研究者，她广泛的法语和克里奥尔语文本引起了加勒比海和欧洲读者的共鸣。她的作品获得了一系列著名文学奖项的认可，包括2004年在格勒诺布尔举办的法语职业妇女福利互助会奖（Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone），以表彰她的小说《罗莎莉·L’infâme》，特劳伊洛的作品是最近才出现的现象，2013年和2015年分别翻译了小说《声名狼藉的罗莎莉》和《海湾的记忆》。2正是通过翻译，英语观众来到特劳伊洛的作品中，解读她的文本对过去和现在，以及海地种族和阶级差异的戏剧化遭遇。但为什么要出一期关于Évelyne Trouillot的特刊呢？为什么是现在？Trouillot的最新小说《Desirée Congo》即将出版，这为我们提供了一个独特的机会来回顾她对加勒比和非洲散居文学的巨大贡献，并期待在她已经庞大的作品中有一个新的补充，也许最能表达出来的是虚构人物夏洛特在《罗莎莉》中向孙女利塞特吐露的心声：“今天，我要散步，我要去军营谈判，我要在这一刻为搬运工加油
{"title":"Enduring Encounters: Reflections on the Literary Works of Évelyne Trouillot","authors":"Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Évelyne Trouillot undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the landscape of Haitian letters. As a novelist, playwright, essayist, author of short stories and children’s books, and a meticulous researcher of Haitian history, her broad range of texts in French and Creole have resonated with readers across the Caribbean and Europe. Her work has been recognized by a slew of prestigious literary awards including the 2004 Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone awarded in Grenoble for her novel Rosalie L’ infâme, the 2005 Prix Beaumarchais for her play Le Bleu de l ’ île, and the 2010 Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for her novel La Mémoire aux abois.1 For North American readers, access to Trouillot’s work has been a more recent phenomenon with the translated novels The Infamous Rosalie and Memory at Bay in 2013 and 2015, respectively.2 It is through translation that Anglophone audiences come to Trouillot’s work and decipher her texts’ dramatization of encounters between past and present, and across racial and class divides in Haiti. But why a special issue on Évelyne Trouillot? And why now? The forthcoming publication of Trouillot’s newest novel, Desirée Congo, presents a unique opportunity to look back at her monumental contribution to Caribbean and African diaspora literature, and to look forward to a new addition to her already expansive body of work.3 There is value in this simultaneous casting back and gazing ahead, perhaps best articulated by the fictional character Charlotte as she confides in her granddaughter Lisette in Rosalie l ’ infâme: “Un jour, je te le promets, je te parlerai de ces barracoons, un jour où tu auras besoin d’ailes pour te porter au-delà du moment présent. Un jour, où ton besoin sera plus fort que","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46079333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La Petite Valise","authors":"Évelyne Trouillot","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42760905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Haitian proverb “pè pa preche de fwa” instructs that fear does not have to strike twice for a lesson to be learned. Yet for the characters in Évelyne Trouillot’s fiction, fear is a recurrent emotion that surfaces time and time again, often before she or he acts in any way. As an affective register, fear is a reminder of a character’s vulnerability, which in turn helps to destabilize the notion of Haitian resilience. The resilience trope is one of the prevailing narratives that emerges in stories of Haitian suffering. While it is often used to produce a hopeful story about the indomitability of the Haitian spirit, the resilience trope also has the effect of denying what is ordinary, mundane, and, ultimately, human. As Edwidge Danticat has put it, “Haitians are very resilient, but it doesn’t mean they can suffer more than other people.”1 Tracing the aesthetics of fear—how Trouillot describes the emotion and how it figures in her work—establishes it as a productive emotion that arises in response to political predicaments, social tensions, historic moments, and personal traumas. In what follows, I consider fear as affect and aesthetics through examples from four novels: Rosalie l ’ infâme, L’Œil-totem, Absences sans frontières, and Le Rond-point.2 Fear has myriad sources in these novels. It emerges from the terror of slavery causing enslaved people to flee into the forest and become maroons, to provide sexual favors for their masters, to maintain deadly silences, or to kill newborn children as a way to free them from a life of slavery. It is the response of the young child living under occupied Haiti unable to walk freely in her neighborhood. It reflects the torment of an undocumented person who might be subject to deportation at any moment. It is the panic faced by the upper classes during waves of kidnapping as well as the anticipation of hunger for the poor. As these characters experience it, fear is a multilayered, manifold emotion with far-reaching results.
海地谚语“pèpa preche de fwa”指出，恐惧不必两次发作就能吸取教训。然而，对于Évelyne Trouillot小说中的人物来说，恐惧是一种反复出现的情绪，通常在她或他采取任何行动之前。作为一种情感记录，恐惧提醒人们角色的脆弱性，这反过来又有助于破坏海地人韧性的观念。复原力比喻是海地苦难故事中出现的主流叙事之一。虽然它经常被用来制作一个关于海地精神不屈不挠的充满希望的故事，但韧性的比喻也有否定平凡、世俗，最终否定人性的效果。正如Edwidge Danticat所说，“海地人很有韧性，但这并不意味着他们比其他人承受更多的痛苦。”1追踪恐惧的美学——Trouillot如何描述这种情绪以及它在她的作品中的表现——将其确立为一种富有成效的情绪，这种情绪是在应对政治困境、社会紧张局势、历史时刻和个人创伤时产生的。在下文中，我通过四部小说中的例子将恐惧视为情感和美学：《罗莎莉》、《l’Œil图腾》、《无锋缺席》和《朗德观点》。2恐惧在这些小说中有无数来源。它源于奴隶制的恐怖，导致被奴役的人逃到森林里，成为被放逐的人，为他们的主人提供性服务，保持致命的沉默，或者杀死新生儿，以此将他们从奴隶制的生活中解放出来。这是生活在被占领的海地的一个年幼的孩子的反应，她无法在自己的社区自由行走。它反映了一个随时可能被驱逐出境的无证人员的痛苦。这是上层阶级在绑架浪潮中面临的恐慌，也是对穷人饥饿的预期。正如这些角色所经历的那样，恐惧是一种多层次、多方面的情感，具有深远的影响。
{"title":"The Affect and Aesthetics of Fear in Évelyne Trouillot’s Novels","authors":"R. Jean-Charles","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The Haitian proverb “pè pa preche de fwa” instructs that fear does not have to strike twice for a lesson to be learned. Yet for the characters in Évelyne Trouillot’s fiction, fear is a recurrent emotion that surfaces time and time again, often before she or he acts in any way. As an affective register, fear is a reminder of a character’s vulnerability, which in turn helps to destabilize the notion of Haitian resilience. The resilience trope is one of the prevailing narratives that emerges in stories of Haitian suffering. While it is often used to produce a hopeful story about the indomitability of the Haitian spirit, the resilience trope also has the effect of denying what is ordinary, mundane, and, ultimately, human. As Edwidge Danticat has put it, “Haitians are very resilient, but it doesn’t mean they can suffer more than other people.”1 Tracing the aesthetics of fear—how Trouillot describes the emotion and how it figures in her work—establishes it as a productive emotion that arises in response to political predicaments, social tensions, historic moments, and personal traumas. In what follows, I consider fear as affect and aesthetics through examples from four novels: Rosalie l ’ infâme, L’Œil-totem, Absences sans frontières, and Le Rond-point.2 Fear has myriad sources in these novels. It emerges from the terror of slavery causing enslaved people to flee into the forest and become maroons, to provide sexual favors for their masters, to maintain deadly silences, or to kill newborn children as a way to free them from a life of slavery. It is the response of the young child living under occupied Haiti unable to walk freely in her neighborhood. It reflects the torment of an undocumented person who might be subject to deportation at any moment. It is the panic faced by the upper classes during waves of kidnapping as well as the anticipation of hunger for the poor. As these characters experience it, fear is a multilayered, manifold emotion with far-reaching results.","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43805569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How well an author is known beyond the borders of her country depends on several factors such as the language(s) in which she/he writes, the availability of their work in translation, the genres they favor, whether or not she/he is self-published, etc. In an international literary sphere that privileges the novel above all else, writers producing poems, plays, short stories, and other forms are often neglected. Or, if they happen to also be novelists, their novels are foregrounded as though they represent the entirety of their oeuvre. In this special volume that aims to bring more attention to Évelyne Trouillot’s literary production, it is especially important that her short stories are included. Trouillot entered the world of professional f iction as a short story writer (La Chambre Interdite) and her short story production has not faltered since she began writing novels.1 She has published four short story collections, and individual stories regularly appear in various anthologies as well as on websites. As is the case for her other texts, Trouillot explores a variety of themes in her short stories. Among them we find the stark juxtaposition of very distinct socioeconomic classes in fleeting moments of intimacy. The two stories I analyze here, “Primal needs” and “The Detour,” illustrate this practice.2 Both demonstrate the connections between various sectors of Haitian society as well as the ways in which they impact each other even when members of certain classes would like to maintain the pretense of distance. (Trouillot also takes up this theme in other genres, such as the novel Le Rond-Point, for example).3 The fact that Trouillot constructs these narratives by alternating perspectives between the main characters emphasizes that the story of one class cannot be told without telling that of others.
{"title":"The Lasting Impact of Fleeting Encounters in Évelyne Trouillot’s Short Fiction","authors":"Nadève Ménard","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2019.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2019.0001","url":null,"abstract":"How well an author is known beyond the borders of her country depends on several factors such as the language(s) in which she/he writes, the availability of their work in translation, the genres they favor, whether or not she/he is self-published, etc. In an international literary sphere that privileges the novel above all else, writers producing poems, plays, short stories, and other forms are often neglected. Or, if they happen to also be novelists, their novels are foregrounded as though they represent the entirety of their oeuvre. In this special volume that aims to bring more attention to Évelyne Trouillot’s literary production, it is especially important that her short stories are included. Trouillot entered the world of professional f iction as a short story writer (La Chambre Interdite) and her short story production has not faltered since she began writing novels.1 She has published four short story collections, and individual stories regularly appear in various anthologies as well as on websites. As is the case for her other texts, Trouillot explores a variety of themes in her short stories. Among them we find the stark juxtaposition of very distinct socioeconomic classes in fleeting moments of intimacy. The two stories I analyze here, “Primal needs” and “The Detour,” illustrate this practice.2 Both demonstrate the connections between various sectors of Haitian society as well as the ways in which they impact each other even when members of certain classes would like to maintain the pretense of distance. (Trouillot also takes up this theme in other genres, such as the novel Le Rond-Point, for example).3 The fact that Trouillot constructs these narratives by alternating perspectives between the main characters emphasizes that the story of one class cannot be told without telling that of others.","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2019.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43275367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bibliography of Works Related to Trouillot Studies","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/pal.2019.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2019.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2019.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66494856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/pal.2019.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2019.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2019.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66494868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：