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language: Haitian Creole (English tr. Asselin Charles)
country: Haiti
year: 1975
form: novel
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 18.7.23-22.7.23
I actually finished Frankétienne’s Dézafi (tr. Asselin Charles) last weekend, but I’ve been so busy with moving that I’m only now writing my review. it came to my attention some time ago both because it was the first published novel in Haitian Creole and because it’s about zombies.
regretfully, I must concede the accuracy of the opening sentence of the blurb — “Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel.” this is primarily because Frankétienne was a spiraliste, a Haitian literary movement with an interest in both unusual narrative structures and unusual typography. there are (at least) four different voices in the novel: a more or less conventional third-person literary narrator in roman type; a collective voice in italics that appears to belong to the community of Ravin Sèch, where most of the novel is set; an almost-verse (with line breaks indicated by /s) collective voice in bold that appears to belong to the zonbis, enslaved plantation workers variously drugged or murdered and reanimated by a local landowner; and several cursive interludes that serve as section headings.
the boundary between the italic voice and the bold voice is, however, fluid: at times the bold voice recounts the events of one particularly dramatic night of dézafi, or cock-fighting, attended by all the locals; at times the italic voice speaks of the zonbis’ hunger and alienation. most of the novel is about these last: hunger, poverty, and capitalist exploitation both by the local bourgeoisie and by American corporations. while it’s true, as the blurb says, that the novel’s climax is a zonbi uprising, this is really only the last 20 pages or so: the rest of it is a portrait of Ravin Sèch through the eyes of various members of the community — the cruel landowner, his abused daughter, an elderly formerly-rich man, his abused nice, a younger man who leaves for Port-au-Prince to seek his fortune, the older aunt he leaves behind, a middle-aged man who hides in an attic by day and only descends into the world at night, and a variety of others who appear in passing or intermittently.
I didn’t love it as much as I think I would have had the zonbis-as-such been more in focus, but it’s an incredibly evocative and grim — but also hopeful, pushing towards the possibility of change, towards the moment when the situation can only explode into something different — exploration of the effects of capitalism and imperialism on Haiti, on everyday life in a neocolony, and on the relationship between wage labor and slavery. the translation is excellent (notwithstanding Charles’s laments about some of the choices he had to make), and I loved the almost-poetry of the italic and bold voices, especially. definitely worth a read if you’re at all interested.
moods: dark, hopeful, mysterious