The Roving Tree

Elsie Augustave's debut novel, The Roving Tree, is an accessible novel on the experience of a Haitian-American woman raised by whites who adopt her. The novel's emphasis on women and the protagonist, Iris Odys, navigates the protagonist's identity crisis and development while criticizing race relations in the US, the Haitian class system, and Mobutu's Zaire. Given some of the similarities in literary depictions of Duvalier and Mobutu, Augustave's novel is at least innovative for showing the parallels in the two dictators.

Unfortunately, this novel suffers from its very accessibility in that Augustave seems to "dumb" things down significantly. The novel begins to feel more like a simple introduction to Haiti in some ways, although Iris's experiences in Senegal and Zaire was a admirable plot development that thematically matches and completes Iris's great-grandmother's words. As in other immigrant literature, the central theme is one of identity, and Augustave's novel succeeds on that front. Vodou is also very important to advancing this story, an aspect of Haitian-American literature sometimes neglected or ignored.