Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie

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.