SALON D’AYITI BOOK CLUB
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Read the books from our 2023 event in partnership with The Center For Fiction; Salon D’Ayiti!
Use the helpful links below to purchase books in English, French, and Kreyòl, as well as learn about literary events in NYC.
Children’s Books
Written by Frantz Derenoncourt, Jr. Illustrated by Kervin Andre
Heroes of the Haitian Revolution offers a glance at several freedom fighters who helped transform the richest slave colony in the world into the first independent Black nation in the western hemisphere. Read how some of these former enslaved Africans rose to become Generals, Presidents, Kings and Emperors of the sacred land called Haiti. A must read for lovers of liberty and justice for all mankind.
Written by Tico Armand and Angie Bell
In this modern fable full of poetry, desire, and blood, a creative young Haitian girl struggles against seemingly impossible odds to escape the cruel reality of her Port-au-Prince slum.
Tico Armand and Angie Bell, two creative women entrepreneurs and Haitian artist Bousiko are releasing the second book out of The Adventures of Yaya series! After releasing “Soup Joumou kay Grann Pola” and touring multiple cities in the United States and in Haiti, children from different communities were beyond excited to learn about Haitian culture and Haitian Creole.
The Adventures of Yaya focuses on the history, culture, and language of the Haitian people and today, The Adventures of Yaya is introducing “KONBIT”, a way to introduce the spirit of togetherness to our children at an early age. This second book focuses on Yaya and her friends dealing with a challenge to do a team project where they are taught the importance of teamwork through learning about “Konbit”, a traditional way to harvest in Haitian culture.
This trio of passion driven creatives has given birth to a movement that is sure to be a driving force in understanding and being captivated by the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
Books in English
Written by Paul Clammer
How did a man born enslaved on a plantation triumph over Napoleon’s invading troops and become king of the first free black nation in the Americas? This is the forgotten, remarkable story of Henry Christophe.
Written by Marie Lily Cerat, Patrick Sylvain, and Dr. Jalene Tamerat
In Education Across Borders, educators Patrick Sylvain, Jalene Tamerat, and Marie Lily Cerat draw on their experiences as immigrants and educators to address racial inequity in the classroom. By centering the needs and lives of their immigrant students, the educators provide culturally relevant pedagogies that value the diverse experiences of Haitian and Dominican youth. Compelling and insightful, Education Across Borders reminds us that inclusive and diverse classrooms are essential for the success of immigrant students.
Written by Edwidge Danticat
A romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival. Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.
Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.
Written by Ida Faubert
Translated by Danielle Legros Georges
Island Heart is a book of English translations of the poems of the Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert. Born in 1882 in Port-au-Prince, Faubert was among the rare women writers whose work appeared under her own name in early 20th-century Haitian literary publications. Bicultural, biracial and privileged, Faubert neither easily fit socially-prescribed categories for women of color in France or Haiti, nor conformed to them, all the while promoting and participating in the movements of Haitian writers and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of poems evokes the beauty, power, and mystery of nature—and reflects the intricate web of the human experience of love, loss and longing.
Written by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Coming of age as a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else—is there really only one way to have an autonomous life? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, who can pass, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it—for herself and for generations to come.
Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States and rich with historical detail, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new and immersive novel will resonate with readers eager to understand our present through a deep, moving, and lyrical dive into our complicated past.
Written by Francesa Momplaisir
When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a run-down house in a quickly changing community, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and necessary legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness.
What he can’t begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.
Written by Ibi Zoboi
Warrior Princess. That’s what Nigeria Jones’s father calls her. He has raised her as part of the Movement, a Black separatist group based in Philadelphia. Nigeria is homeschooled and vegan and participates in traditional rituals to connect her and other kids from the group to their ancestors. But when her mother—the perfect matriarch of their Movement—disappears, Nigeria’s world is upended. She finds herself taking care of her baby brother and stepping into a role she doesn’t want.
Nigeria’s mother had secrets. She wished for a different life for her children, which includes sending her daughter to a private Quaker school outside of their strict group. Despite her father’s disapproval, Nigeria attends the school with her cousin, Kamau, and Sage, who used to be a friend. There, she begins to flourish and expand her universe.
As Nigeria searches for her mother, she starts to uncover a shocking truth. One that will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about her life and her family.
Written by Francesca Momplaisir
A novel about one family wading through the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, from the acclaimed author who has been compared to Toni Morrison “at the height of her power” (Harper’s Bazaar)—a haunting and astonishing story of restoration and disaster, motherhood, and the bonds that carry through generations. Genevieve, a single mother, flies from New York to Port-au-Prince with her teenage son, Miles. The trip is meant to be an education for fifteen-year-old Miles—a chance to learn about his family’s roots while coming to terms with his father’s departure—but it’s also an excuse for Genevieve to escape the city, where her life is dominated by her failed marriage and the daily pressures of raising Black children in America. For Genevieve, the journey is also a homecoming of sorts: An opportunity to visit the island she remembers from childhood and reconnect with family. But when the country is rocked by a massive earthquake—decimating the city and putting their lives at risk—their visit becomes a nightmare of survival. Written before the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti in 2021, The Garden of Broken Things delivers readers beyond the headlines and into the shattered world of a distant family—coming together, forced apart—suddenly brought to the brink.
Edited by Kaiama L. Glover, Laurent Dubois, Nadève Ménard, Millery Polyné, and Chantalle F. Verna
The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti’s dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections—most of which appear here in English for the first time—are representative of Haiti’s scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales.
Written by Erin L. Durban
Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Erin L. Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention. One maintains imperialist notions of a backward Haiti so riddled with cultural deficiencies that foreign supervision is necessary to overcome Haitians’ resistance to progress. The other sees Haiti as a modern but failed state that exists only through its capacity for violence, including homophobia. In the context of these competing claims, Durban explores the creative ways that same-sex desiring and gender creative Haitians contend with anti-LGBTQI violence and ongoing foreign intervention.
Compelling and thought-provoking, The Sexual Politics of Empire examines LGBTQI life in contemporary Haiti against the backdrop of American imperialism and intervention.
Written by Myriam J. A. Chancy
What Storm, What Thunder tells the story of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti through ten voices.
In intimate prose, Chancy deftly reveals the inner lives of her characters, drawing the reader into their hopes, dreams and regrets, to recount how each of them do — or do not — survive: a wealthy, expat water bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker who pines for a beautiful call girl; the call girl and her business partner, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; his teenage sister who longs for the life she sees in a telenovela; a grieving mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son who haunts them both; and the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all.
What Storm, What Thunder is a novel about hope, courage, and the importance of community. It is also a masterful literary portrait of contemporary Haiti and a moving character study of a Port au Prince devastated by the 2010 disaster.
Books in French
By Makenzy Orcel
The voice of the heroine reaches us from beyond the grave. Both anonymous and embodied, it is the voice of one woman and of all women. She tells us in notebooks stolen from time and death about a stolen childhood, a torn adolescence, a shattered life and destiny.
Having grown up in a provincial village where gossip reigns, neglected by her parents, especially by her mother who prefers the roses in her garden, she no longer finds comfort in her grandmother who is more loving. She escapes to Paris in hopes of leading a life free from the ghosts of the past. There she studies literature at the Sorbonne, finds love with a man who had fled the war in Mali, experiences the world of work, before finally undergoing the test of abandonment and sinking into poverty and irreversible wandering. By sharing the autobiography of a dead woman in dazzling language, Makenzy Orcel takes us, through this Human Sum, the second part of a trilogy initiated by L’Ombre Animale, into the poetic belly of the world.
By Gary Victor
Dangerous men are legion. This is at least what Gary Victor tried to demonstrate in A Dangerous Man (C3 Editions, 2022), his new collection of short stories. From Dream Made Flesh, to Amanda’s Fallen Angel and The Remission of Time, and A Dangerous Man, (eponymous title of the collection), Gary Victor serves us four succulent short stories. These are made up of carnal desires and of perilous well-spiced love affairs, all embellished with little zests of the marvelous.
Books in Kreyòl
By Denize Lauture
“Kouwè kritik Frantz-Antoine Leconte di nan yon bèl ti kout plim sou pwezi Denize Lotu Lauture, michan powèt sa a, ansyen soudè nan Harlem ki vin pwofesè nan gwo lekòl Etazini, otè plizyè liv byen note, se yon nonm «ki aspire pou l pou l tradui yon chay lespwa miltip» nan lavi l. (…)
Powèm Denize yo touche tout kalte bagay, ki rive ak tout kalte koze ki pale nan lakou a, keseswa nan powèm «Lannwit ounsi yo» kote nan yon sèl souf li devwale tout kondisyon malsite zonbi yo—«Batwèl lou adwat / Boul savon wòch agòch / Ganmèl plen rad sal / Nan mitan janm / Men yo ap fwote / Men yo ap tòde…(…)
Se te zanmi defen Pòl Larak ki te pale m yon jou de Denize Lotu, li di m: «Fòk ou rankontre ak Denize Lauture, yon michan powèt, misye ekri yon powèm ki di yo bay Ayiti yon “Kout poud desounen”.» —Tontongi, powèt, eseyis, editè an chef revi Tanbou
To purchase, please reach out to Haiti Cultural Exchange at info@haiticulturalx.org
Translated/Multilingual Books
Written by Jean D’Amerique. Translated by Thierry Kehou
In this modern fable full of poetry, desire, and blood, a creative young Haitian girl struggles against seemingly impossible odds to escape the cruel reality of her Port-au-Prince slum.
Often finding herself alone within the four walls of a hovel in a Haitian shantytown with corrugated iron for a roof, the young girl tirelessly tries to compose a letter that will capture what is in her heart and soul. She is consumed with love for a classmate, the daughter of her teacher, and searches for words to faithfully express her feelings and her dreams.
In a poetic language that encompasses poverty and idealism, she observes the violence, the shortcomings, and the addictions of the adults around her. Her passion makes her resilient, nurturing her character and helping her to invent a better fate than the one to which she seemed doomed.
By Yanick Lahens
In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a “high-pitched sweetness”, a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Korosòl Resto-Bar, when the broken and deep voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.
Brune’s father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what has happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this still unpunished crime as well.
Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince: Ezekiel, the poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Nerline, women’s rights activist; Waner, diligent pacifist; and Ronny the American, at home in Haiti as in a second homeland.
Nourishing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and tenderly revealing the intimacy of the lives within.
By Kettly Mars
I Am Alive (Je Suis Vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars’s latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world. When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chêne. His sister Marylène has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist’s model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Éliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.
Alaso: Rezistans
Alaso: Fwontye
Alaso: Fanmi
By Nègès Mawon
The family is theoretically organized around heterosexual marriage and children, but materially in Haiti as elsewhere, the family is based on the ability of women to extend their labor force in the domestic sphere and compensate for the absence of men, even when they are physically present. A feminist struggle aims to put an end to the regime of patriarchal terror and therefore to the conception of the family synonymous with subordination, exploitation (financial, social, emotional, physical, spiritual and psychological) of women, young girls and children.