The Enigma of the Return

"Only a journey without a return ticket can save us from family, blood and small-town thinking."

Laferrière's The Enigma of the Return is a mixture of verse and prose on identity and exile for an autobiographical narrator clearly based on Dany himself. After hearing of his father's death, the narrator, Windsor, returns "home" to Haiti and discovers more about himself, his family, and to which 'homeland' he truly belongs. Central to the narrative is one of Aimé Césaire's most important writings, a poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, which greatly enhances this novel if one is familiar with it. Indeed, Laferriere seems to reject the "anger" of Césaire's significant text, and waxes poetic on the meaning of being an exile and the role of memory and childhood. Yet, the text contains some moving satire and critical passages on the state of Haiti, one in which the Haitian elite, the legacy of colonialism, and the Duvalier dictatorship share the blame for the sad state of Port-au-Prince and the countryside. 

In addition, there is more Vodou symbolism and metaphorical allusions to Haitian painting and culture in this text, making it, in my opinion, one of the author's best works since An Aroma of Coffee. Laferrière's ability to capture the beauty of the Haitian countryside, the colors, the dusty streets, and retain his passion for his 'homeland' while also being fully of the icy North is quite impressive (hats off to David Homel's translations). Furthermore, this work provides a sort of response to the Dalembert novel I recently read, coming from the Diaspora instead of focusing on those trapped in the island who have to leave to make a life for themselves. The novel asks some of the same questions about the flight of people to the North, whether or not one can stay and make a life by remaining in Haiti, and what it means to be an immigrant, a traveler, and what does home mean (similar to I Am a Japanese Writer, too). 

Favorite Quotes

"In my dream, Cesaire takes my father's place."

"We're stuck in a bad novel ruled by a tropical dictator who keeps ordering the beheading of his subjects."

"Entire populations travel northward in search of life."

"I miss my childhood more intensely than my country."

"For most people the hereafter is the only country they have any hope of visiting."

"If you're not thin when you're twenty in Haiti, it's because you're on the side of power."

"There are so few tourists in this country we should pay them to stay."

"The Tonton Macoutes of my era had to hide behind dark glasses. Serial killers. Papa Doc was the only star."

"Every family has its absent member in the group portrait. Papa Doc introduced exile to the middle class. Before, such a fate was reserved only for a president who fell victim to a pup or one of those rare intellectuals who could also be a man of action."

"Why stay in this mud hole mixed with shit trampled by crowds hemmed in by malarial anopheles when you could lead a dream life?"

"In the international media, Haiti always appears deforested. Yet I see trees everywhere."

"The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan, or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes La Rochelle, or Paris."

"Kidnapping has become such a lucrative business that the rich weren't going to miss out on the action for long."

"The night before, I drank some fruit juice from a stall along my way, just to prove that I was still a son of the soil. Nationalism can trick my mind, but not my guts."

"I had forgotten about culture in the provinces, so refined and so musty."

The Other Side of the Sea

"In the possibility of changing life into the dew of hope for all."

Louis-Philippe Dalembert's The Other Side of the Sea, translated by Robert H. McCormick, uses magical realism, Biblical allusions, and Vodou symbolism to tell the story of Port-au-Prince and exile from the time of US Occupation to Titig, or Baby Doc. Falling under what some scholars refers to as the aesthetics of degradation, the novel contains numerous metaphors and breath-taking prose that describe the fetid decay of Haiti's capital city. The 1937 Massacre (which seems to compare it to the Babylonian Captivity as Haitians fled for their lives across the Massacre River), the Duvalier dynasty, and the plight of Haitian boatpeople and the persistent desire to emigrate permeate the text, across time. 

Given how centered the narrative is on the city and the sea, Port-au-Prince (and its gradual decay) emerges as a character in the text that symbolizes the nation, just as Noubot and Jonas, the grandmother and her grandson, symbolize Haiti. McCormick also translates Dalembert's stream of consciousness (maybe that is not the correct term, correct me if I am wrong) sections on the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage in each chapter of the story, connecting the plight of Haitians abroad with that of the dehumanizing Middle Passage. Vodou also infuses the text by drawing on Vodou and African cosmology for "the other side of the sea" and describing a return to Ginen although most of central characters are not Vodou practitioners. 

As for magical realism, it is used with a light touch, and is particularly powerful for satirical purposes when Dalembert criticizes the Duvalier dictatorship or the US government's response to the boatpeople crisis and how the sharks and killer whales feasted on Haitian bodies (again, tied to the Middle Passage and the sharks that followed the slave ships across the Atlantic). This is probably the most powerful and rich book on the breakdown of Port-au-Prince and the family and communities contained therein, torn asunder within and without as the young, the fruit, are forced to leave and the elders, symbolized by Grannie, wither and take the past with them. 

Again, this is consistent with the Biblical themes and reality of decline in Port-au-Prince, as its overcrowded, filthy, and divided residents live a bleak existence and the others, on the other side of the water, are gradually forgotten or forget. Port-au-Prince as Sodom and Gomorrah, if you will, struck by hurricanes, disasters, inequality, and terror from Duvalier, Trujillo, and the US. As a novel, this is quite an interesting literary exploration of Port-au-Prince's history with strong Biblical overtones.

Favorite Quotations

"As for the whites, they would stay in the city for a whole generation. They had serious expressions on their faces. They were arrogant, disrupting our customs without excusing themselves, putting everyone on the military rhythm of their language." (12)

"The trouble with this story was not so much the bitter experience nor the other language over there that made us feel more like foreigners. It was rather staying on the same land. In short, to not really have left" (32).

"The Syro-Lebanese, the Jews, and the Palestinians, having arrived poorer than Job, made their fortune and brought their families over" (32).

"During that time, either you toed the line or his thugs would turn you into a diversion to beat the heat" (41).

"He wasn't part of that group of men who take their house for a hotel-restaurant, only entering to eat, sleep, and yell at wife and kids" (42).

"The entire city was living withdrawn into itself in a fear until then unknown. Formerly so beautiful, the night of the city belonged from then on to silence, one punctuated from time to time by calls for help from a mother, a female companion, a brother whom everyone pretended not to hear. Tongues seemed cast in lead while individual disappearances took place at vespers" (50).

"The city, if you can call it that, this morass where millions of humans live together, and three times as many pigs. All wallowing in the shit. One on top of the other. And that desire to vomit, in the name of God, that never comes to pass. He reels. His gait wavers" (61).

"These two women provided an equilibrium for me that I hadn't known until then. Grannie was the roots, Maite the branch that invited me, every day, toward new adventures in the sky" (96).

"But the city would be plagued for a long time after the events with the aftereffects of that period where an entire family would disappear on a simple anonymous denunciation" (100).

"The government of the Promised-Land-in-Spite-of-Itself wasn't long in reacting, either. It gave the green light to its naval commander, who launched dozens of gunboats filled with soldiers, armed to the teeth, with orders to shoot on sight. By all means possible, the invaders had to be turned away and the local population reassured since the presidential election was drawing near" (113).