[40] marassas dishes: double clay vessels used during voodoo ceremonies or in household shrines. Marassas is the Creole word for twins, who are believed to have special powers in voodoo practice (trans.).
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[41] piastre: one gourde (see note 3 on p. 377) (trans.).
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[42] studded whips: Both lanières ferrées (studded whips) and rigoises (stiff cowhide whips) were used on slaves in Haiti; the latter are also still used on restaveks or unpaid child servants (trans.).
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[43] coco-macaques: peasant clubs or bludgeons (trans.).
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[44] Iambi: conch shell used as a horn.
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[45] coumbite: collective farm work.
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[46] hounsis: voodoo dancers.
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[47] “restez-avec-monsieur”: Here Chauvet gives the etymology of the Haitian Creole word for an unpaid and illiterate child servant, the reste-avec or restavek. As Chauvet points out, reste-avec is short for “restez-avec-monsieur”-“Stay with the gentleman” (trans.).
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[48] tafia: See note 7 on p. 377.
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[49] Cocobés: Creole word for cripples (trans.).
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[50] houngans: male voodoo high priests (trans.).
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[51] simples: A simple is a plant or other substance having one “simple” remedial virtue (trans.).
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[52] Massillon Coicou’s “L’Alerme” in unison: Haitian poet (1867-1908) executed by President Pierre Nord Alexis. The poem refers to the siege of the fort of Crête-à-Pierrot (1802), a major battle of the Haitian Revolution in which Dessalines’ 1,300 men were surrounded by Leclerc’s 18,000 French colonial troops; the rebels ultimately broke through enemy lines and escaped the fortress largely intact (trans.).
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[53] Baudelaire… Rimbaud drank too: Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), French Symbolist poet associated with decadence, author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil); François Villon (b. 1431), French lyric poet whose rowdy and sometimes criminal life included time in prison; and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), French Symbolist poet who sought mystic revelation through a “derangement of all the senses” (trans.).
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[54] banda dance: suggestive Haitian dance, associated with voodoo ritual; also known as the “guede” dance; possibly related to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial zarabanda or sarabande, banned in Spain in 1583 for its obscenity (trans.).
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[55] Boisrond-Tonnerre: Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806), Haitian historian who wrote the 1804 Independence Act of Haiti (trans.).
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[56] sèche: French slang for cigarette (trans).
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[57] “Bugger me!”: This conversation is part of a larger discussion about francophonie. René’s conclusion is that a poet who writes in a loan-language is a loan-poet (poet on layaway). His exclamation “bougre de bougre” highlights the historicity of language. “Bougre” is a seventh-century term that is short for the Latin word for Bulgarian, a term that first meant heretic, then sodomite and then dummy. A few lines down, when René asks “What the fuck would a great French poet be doing in this mudhole?” the French word used for mudhole is bled, a slang word coined by the French military in Algeria, which in turn comes from a local Arabic word (blad) for town (trans).
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[58] imitor patrem: Latin for “I imitate my father,” a sarcastic allusion to Catholic catechism (trans).
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[59] This is no call: A butchered quotation from “La crosse en l’air” (1936), by the French poet Jacques Prévert (1900-77):
Rassurez-vous braves gens
ce n’est pas un appel à la révolte
c’est un évêque qui est saoul et qui met sa crosse en l’air
comme ça… en titubant…
There is no call for alarm
this is no call for rebellion
just a drunk bishop waving his white cross in the air
like so… staggering about…
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[60] “Green Calf” Street: Vauvert and veau vert (green calf) are homophones in French (trans).
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[61] rue de l’Enfer: Hell Street (trans).
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Love, Anger, Madness Page 41
