Böcker av Evelyne Trouillot

Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In Évelyne Trouillot’s sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly “in what language should I speak to you”? Marie-Célie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Coster’s concise and personal poems explore the world — its nature, light, wind — and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to “capture gently these moments of light” (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how “pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast” (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyòl appear facing the English translations by Danielle LeGros Georges. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

The novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Carbet--an award won by such distinguished authors as Maryse Cond Jamaica Kincaid, and Raphal Confiant-- Memory at Bay is now available in an English translation that brings to life this powerful novel by one of Haiti's most vital authors, velyne Trouillot.Trouillot introduces us to a bedridden widow of a notorious dictator (in effect, a portrait of Papa Doc Duvalier) and the young migr who attends to her needs but who harbors a secret--the bitter loss she feels for her mother, a victim of the dictator's atrocities. The story that unfolds is a deftly plotted psychological drama in which the two women in turn relive their radically contrasting accounts of the dictator's regime. Partly a retelling of Haiti's nightmarish history under Duvalier, and partly an exploration of the power of memory, Trouillot's novel takes a suspenseful turn when the aide contemplates murdering the old widow. Memory at Bay was praised by the Prix Carbet committee for the way it treats the enigmas of destiny and for a pairing of characters whose voices bring the narrative to the edge of the ineffable.CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French