Moonbath Read online

  International Praise for Yanick Lahens

  Winner of the Prix Femina, 2014

  Winner of a French Voices Award, 2015

  “Yanick Lahens adeptly dipped her pen nib in tears to write Moonbath. She brandished her writing instrument with dexterity, creating Cétoute as a metaphor symbolizing both the pain and the promise of Haiti.”

  —LANIE TANKARD, The Woven Tale Press

  “Lahens is the most important living female Haitian author wrting in French.”

  —PROFESSOR CHRISTIANE MAKWARD, Pennsylvania State University review

  “[Lahens] describes her country with a forceful beauty—the destruction that befell it, political opportunism, families torn apart, and the spellbinding words of Haitian farmers who solely rely on subterranean powers.” —Donyapress

  “One of the finest voices of Haitian contemporary literature.” —L’Ob’s

  “Everything is there, the content, powerful, and the style, poetic.” —Les Echos

  “Its poetic and political reflections are a prosperity…” —Feuilleton

  “Her work occupies a privileged place in the feminine literature in Haiti, by its independence of spirit and its freedom of tone.” —Les Francophonies

  “From the writing of Yanick Lahens we find in Moonbath, these spaces of ‘faults.’ Those moments when everything can tilt, where the encounter exists, where it arises chaos, tragedy, and Beauty. A perpetual questioning of the imaginary, the social constructs, their encounters with the Other, on the scale of men and women.” —Africultures Magazine

  “Her powerful magical words give this magisterial novel a violent beauty.”

  —NOELLA at NOFI News

  “...luxurious and mixed language...” —Radio Télévision Luxembourg

  “Yanick Lahens offers here a personal and contrasting picture of her country, with a complex and hallucinatory, lyrical and intimate narrative, inhabited by a powerful breath. The magic operates and one lets oneself bewitched.”

  —Encres Vagabondes

  “The literature of Haiti, already so fertile, is being enriched with this book.”

  —l’Humanite Daily News

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3

  nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  Copyright © Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2014

  Originally published as Bain de Lune in 2014

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Emily Gogolak

  First edition, 2017

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-57-2 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016959433

  —

  This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

  Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution · (800) 283-3572 · cbsd.com

  At the end of the work, the reader will find a genealogical tree and a glossary to provide the definition of the words followed by an asterisk upon their first occurrence.

  I am Atibon-Legba

  My hat comes from Guinée

  So does my bamboo cane

  So does my old pain

  So do my old bones […]

  I am Legba-Bois Legba-Cayes

  I am Legba-Signangnon […]

  I want yams to soothe my hunger

  Malangas and pumpkins

  Bananas and sweet potatoes

  RENÉ DEPESTRE

  A Rainbow for the Christian West

  […] he destroyed this beauty that could have led me to fall into relapses of desire […]; I resemble God’s old mistress, Death.

  MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

  Fires

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Glossary

  INTRODUCTION

  From the moment in 2014 when Yanick Lahens’s novel Bain de lune was published in France and won the prestigious Prix Femina, I have wanted to read it. Haitian and French friends and fellow-writers were urgently recommending the book to me. But unfortunately my French is American schoolboy French and is incapable of registering literary quality or intent. In French, I could barely get the gist of the story and not much more. Now that I can read it in English, thanks to this excellent translation by Emily Gogolak, it’s clear that I was wise to have waited, for Moonbath is a linguistically subtle, supremely intelligent work of art that both requires and abundantly rewards close attention from its reader. In this sense, and in many others as well, it compares favorably with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The reader has to be able to hear the unique voice (I should say, the voices) of the novel in order to experience it.

  In Moonbath, there are essentially two alternating, intercut voices, two distinct points of view. The first, set off in italics, is the voice of a woman whose name and identity and fate we won’t fully learn until the end of the novel. Lyrical and mysterious, infused with lamentation, hers is a story of betrayal and abandonment and ultimate redemption. It is the spiritual center of the book. The second is the collective, choral, female voice of a community—the point of view of a people as opposed to that of a person—and thus in an important sense it is the political center of the book. It drives the narrative, carrying us through generations from the pre-Duvalier era to the near present, in which everything changes and yet nothing changes. Taken together, the two voices weave a spiritual and political tapestry that is nothing less than the history of the Haitian people.

  And yet, for all its Haitian particulars—the beliefs, ceremonies, and ancient traditions of voudon, the culture and language of an isolated Kreole hillside village, the lives and deaths of three generations of a large extended family—it is a universal story. What is true and inescapable for Lahens’s characters is true and inescapable for all of us. And for all its references to the contemporary world—the American occupation(s) of Haiti, the reign of the Duvaliers and the macoutes, the rise and fall of Aristide, catastrophic hurricanes, the tragic drownings of migrants fleeing to Miami, even the recent United Nations-sponsored cholera epidemic—Lahens’s story is as ancient and classical as Greek tragedy. It could have been set in hundreds, probably thousands, of places in the world, from the hil
ls of Honduras to the Sudan to Cambodia. I can imagine this story being set in any isolated village anywhere, even in Maine or Mississippi or Idaho. It’s set in Haiti only because that happens to be the world Yanick Lahens knows best.

  A great novel changes its reader’s imagination. We close the book with our vision of the world and humanity altered, revised in a deep and lasting way and not merely embellished. When we finish Morrison’s Beloved, for example, we believe in the felt reality of what we experienced there: the inhuman closure of slavery, the necessary murder of a child in order to save it from a life worse than death, the loving ongoing presence of a ghost. That is the unique power of great fiction: it provides its reader with an experience, not just an account. Moonbath has the same effect. This is not “magic realism”—it is realism of the highest order. So that, by the time we come to the final pages, we have lived through everything that Lahens’s characters have lived through, their sufferings and joys, their cruelties inflicted and received, their religious ecstasies and denials, and the ongoing presence of their gods. The reader who finishes this novel will be different than the reader who began it.

  Russell Banks

  July 2017

  1.

  After a madness lasting three days, here I am, stretched out, at the feet of a man I don’t know. My face a hairsbreadth from his worn, muddy shoes. My nose overtaken by a stench that nearly revolts me. To the point of making me forget this vise of pain around my neck, and the bruise between my thighs. Difficult to turn over. To stand back up. To put one foot on the ground before the other one follows. To cross the distance that separates me from Anse Bleue. If only I could escape. If only I could run as far as Anse Bleue. Not once would I return. Not a single time.

  But I cannot. I can’t anymore…

  Something happened at dusk on the first day of the storm. Something that I still can’t explain. Something that broke me.

  Even though my eyes are closed, nearly shut, and my left cheek is pushed right up against the wet sand, I still manage, and this gives me some relief, to look over this village built like Anse Bleue. The same narrow huts. All the doors and all the windows shut. The same leprous walls. On both sides of the same muddy road leading to the sea.

  I want to force a cry up from my belly to my throat and make it spurt out from my mouth. Loud and clear. Very loud and very clear until I rip these big dark clouds above my head. Crying for the Grand Maître,* Lasirenn,* and all the saints. How I would love for Lasirenn to take me far, very far, on her long and silky hair, to rest my aching muscles, my open wounds, my skin all wrinkled by so much water and salt. But before she hears my calls, I can only pass the time. And nothing else…

  All that I see.

  All that I hear.

  All that I smell.

  Every thought, fleeting, full, overpowering. Until I understand what happened to me.

  The stranger took out his cell phone from his right pocket: a cheap Nokia like the ones you see more and more at the All Stars Supermarket in Baudelet. But he couldn’t use it. His whole body trembled. So much that the phone flew out of his hands and fell straight on my left temple. A little more and the Nokia would have hit my eye…

  The man backed away abruptly, his eyes terrified. Then, working up the courage, he bent over slowly and stretched out his arm. He grabbed the phone quickly while taking extraordinary care to not touch me.

  I heard him repeat very quietly, three times in a row, his voice choked with emotion: “Lord have mercy, lord have mercy, lord have mercy.” I still hear his voice…It gets mixed up with the sea that writhes in wild sprays upon my back.

  In my head, the images rush. Clash. My memory is like those wreaths of seaweed detached from everything, dancing, panicking on the foam of the waves. I would like to be able to put these scattered pieces back together, to hang them up one by one and reconstruct everything. Everything. The past. The time from long ago, like yesterday. Like three days ago.

  Year after year.

  Hour after hour.

  Second by second.

  To retrace in my mind the route of a schoolgirl. Without brambles, without bayahondes,* without an airplane in the night sky, without fire. To retrace that route as far as the wind that, this night of the storm, enchants me, intoxicates me. And these hands that make me lose my footing. Stumble.

  To piece together the whole sequence of my existence, to understand once and for all…To bring back to life, one by one, my grandfathers and my grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, as far back as my franginen* forefather, to Bonal Lafleur, to Tertulien Mésidor and Anastase, his father. To Ermancia, Orvil, and Olmène, who were like water and fire to each other. Olmène whose face I do not know. Olmène whom I always missed and whom I still miss.

  What a storm! What a tumult! Throughout this story, it will be important to pay attention to the wind, the salt, the water, not just to men and women. The sand was turned around and upside-down in the greatest disorder. Like land waiting to be sowed. Loko* blew for three days in a row and swallowed the sun. Three long days. The sky turned a lighter and lighter gray. Milky in places.

  “Do not do what you might regret,” my mother hammers into me. “Don’t do it.”

  I ramble like an old woman. I rant like a mad woman. My voice breaks at the back of my throat. It’s still because of the wind, the salt, the water.

  2.

  The elusive gazes of the men, the slightly aghast looks from the women, upon the arrival of this rider, all to suggest that he was a dreadful and dreaded being. And it’s true that we all dreaded Tertulien Mésidor.

  Tertulien Mésidor loved to pass through all of the villages, even the most distant, to test his power. To measure the courage of men. To weigh the virtue of women. And to check the innocence of children.

  He had emerged from the candy colored curtains of the devant-jour. At that hour when, behind the mountains, a bright pink rips through shreds of clouds to run flat out over the countryside. Sitting on his ash gray horse, he was dressed as usual in a stately straw hat, the wide brim turned down over two bulging eyes. A cutlass hung from his belt and following his lead were two other riders, who advanced with the same slow and resolute steps as their master.

  Tertulien Mésidor went toward the fish stall that reeked of offal and decomposing flesh. At his approach, we started talking very loudly. Much louder than usual, vaunting the variety of fish, the quality of the vegetables and provisions, but without taking our eyes off the rider. The more we watched him the louder we spoke. Our racket on this dawn was nothing but a mask, another, for our acute awareness. When his horse reared, the procession froze. Tertulien Mésidor bent down to whisper into the horse’s ear and to caress its mane. “Otan, Otan,” he murmured softly. The animal stomped in place and shook its tail. The man with the wide-brimmed hat wanted to go ahead on the rocky path between the stalls. With a gesture of authority, he hit the flanks of the horse with his heels and, squeezing the bridle, forced the animal to trot in that direction.

  He had hardly advanced a few meters when he took the reins to stop himself again. The movement was so abrupt that the two other riders had a hard time holding back their horses, who were also stomping now. Tertulien Mésidor had just glimpsed, sitting among all the women, Olmène Dorival, the daughter of Orvil Clémestal, whose smile split the day in two like the sun and who, without realizing it, had twisted the bottom of her skirt and slid it between her thighs. Two eyes were already undressing her and she didn’t have the slightest suspicion of it.

  By the light trembling of his nostrils, the two other riders knew what to expect. Tertulien Mésidor kept his eyes fixed for a few seconds on this band of fabric that hid Olmène Dorival’s spring and flower. It took his breath away. For a few seconds. Just a few seconds. But long enough to lose himself. Captive to a magic spell with no explanation.

  Tertulien Mésidor’s desire for Olmène Dorival was immediate and brutal, and it sparked within him a longing for entangled legs, furtive fingers,
hips taken right between his palms, the scent of ferns and wet grass.

  Tertulien Mésidor must have been fifty-five. Olmène Dorival was barely sixteen.

  He owned three quarters of the lands on the other side of the mountains. He was a don.* A great don.

  More often than not she went barefoot and the only shoes she had ever worn were hewn from rough leather.

  He had made several trips to Port-au-Prince, and had even traveled beyond the seas and danced the son* with the mulattoes of Havana.

  She had only left the limits of Anse Bleue to accompany her mother to the fish market in Ti Pistache, which smelled of rot and offal, and where flies danced wild sarabandes. Or, recently, a little further away, to the big market in Baudelet.

  Unverifiable legends and tenacious truths hatched under the name of Tertulien. They said that he had stolen, killed. That he’d had as many women as there were in our village of peasant women and fishermen. And many other things…

  In the monotony of very ordinary days, Olmène Dorival only escaped by the graces of the gods, who sometimes straddled her in dreams, tempers, colors, and words.

  3.

  Tertulien, taking the reins of his beautiful ash-gray horse, leaned over to caress its mane again. But all of a sudden, not being able to stand it any longer, he clapped his hands in one quick, brusque motion, toward Olmène. The sound echoed in all of our ears like a whip. Olmène Dorival did not think the command was meant for her. Neither did we. She had, like all of us, sometimes noticed this rider in the dust of the streets or on the Frétillons’ porch, next to the big general store, in Baudelet. But she had done nothing but notice him, with due distance. He belonged to the others—the victors, the rich, the conquerors—not to the conquered, the defeated, like her. Like us. Poor like salt, maléré, ill-fated.

  Olmène turned around but all she saw behind her were Man Came the elderly medicinal herb vendor, Altéma the amputee sleeping right on the floor, and a young man holding a donkey’s bridle. She understood that she alone had to face the gaze of this man, the mere mention of whom cast a dark shadow over the eyes of her father, Orvil Clémestal, and made his mouth swell with a dense saliva, which he spat out in a thick stream into the dust. She told herself that she would pretend to have seen nothing. Heard nothing. She lowered her head softly and pushed her disorderly braids back beneath her scarf. Then she played at arranging whatever fish—sardines, kingfish, parrot fish—her father and brother had caught the previous day, laying out the sweet potatoes, yuccas, red beans, and millet in the basket that she and Ermancia, her mother, had placed on the ground. Raising her head, she took a long look at the man on the horse. He started to want everything: her wrists, her mouth, her breasts, her flower, and her spring. And, while she scanned every trait of Tertulien Mésidor’s face behind the smoky circles that rose from his pipe, Ermancia finished laying out everything she had brought with her daughter from her jardin.*