Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

  “Hello, everyone,” I said.

  “Hello, Your Majesty,” they responded in chorus.

  “Might you have a bit of water to spare, my friends? I’m terribly thirsty.”

  My words were received with peals of laughter.

  “Just some water?” asked one of the peasant women. “Isn’t all of this yours?”

  With her arm, she traced a wide circle that encompassed the inlet, the sailboat, the coconut grove, the sea, and even the sun that shone on that January day.

  A young woman held out a calabash to me. As soon as I took hold of it, a stocky and mischievous black man pushed it aside. “Coconut water is more fitting for Her Majesty Simbi-la-Source!”

  He rushed over to one of the coconut trees on the shore, quickly climbed to the top, and brought down a cluster of coconuts. With a blow from his machete, he split one open and gave it to me after executing a low bow. My head thrown back, facing the sunny cove, I let the clear, fragrant, bittersweet water flood into me in intoxicating waves. After I had emptied the coconut in a single gulp, the man immediately offered me another, while his friends improvised a song in my honor:

  Simbi-la-Source, wa-yo!

  Simbi has emerged from the unknown

  to bless our great sailboat.

  Simbi is the head and the belly

  of the third bank of the waters!

  What a beautiful morsel of a woman

  Is that Simbi-la-Rosée, wa-yo!

  My death was cleared out of my veins entirely. The generosity of these people flooded me with a lust for life. Each new gulp brought back to my body and soul a sense of the woman who was being born for a second time within me. After drinking several coconuts in a row, literally blinded by the flowing water, I said, “I don’t know how to thank you,” placing a hand on my purse.

  “No, you don’t owe us anything. Where are you headed?” asked an old man.

  “What about you all?” I replied.

  “A few of us are emigrating to Jamaica. The journey only takes a day and a half at most. Would you like to accompany them, Your Majesty?”

  “Happily! Yes, yes, yes, I’ll leave with them forever,” I said, tracing a few dance steps in the sand to the applause of my hosts.

  These are the circumstances in which I arrived in Port Antonio, at dawn on February 3, 1938, having made the decision to cut all ties with my Jacmelian past. It was the first time that Immigration Services in Jamaica had ever seen a young white woman disembark with a bunch of Haitians, veritable pariahs of the Caribbean wherever they migrated in search of work. Profoundly flustered by my presence, the British agents pretended to believe the story my travel companions had already been spreading: I was Simbi-la-Source. The gods of Vodou had charged me with the task of escorting a handful of Jacmelian emigrants to Jamaica. Goddess or whore, I wouldn’t have had any trouble obtaining a lifetime resident’s permit in any island of the archipelago. In those days, white skin and blond hair, better than any diplomatic passport, were worth as much as a visa of divine right. But that is a whole other story. In these notes, I only hope to describe fifteen hours of the false death of a woman desperately, passionately, fatally in love with life.

  15

  For the Record

  Having told our two tales, Hadriana and I could have added, as an epilogue to the memoirs brought together here, the story of the ten years we have since spent as a happy couple. Yet, although not entirely convinced, we have decided to take it on faith that the travails and splendors of love have, in fact, no story . . .

  THE END

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Agoué-Taroyo: Vodou god, master of the sea and its islands.

  Ange: French word for angel. In this novel, it refers to the notion that each individual contains two forces—two souls—within him or her: the petit bon ange and the gros bon ange.

  Apo lisa gbadia tâmerra dabô!: Magic spell in African dialect.

  Baka: Evil spirit in the service of sorcerers.

  Banda: Fast-paced dance that mimics, at once, the acts of death and copulation.

  Baron-Samedi: Principle god of death, father of the guédés.

  Bizango: Member of a secret society dealing in black magic.

  Cadavre-collectif: Moment in the rada dance, after a casser-tambour, in which the crowd freezes in imitation of a cadaver.

  Caraco: Long, beltless, one-piece tunic once worn by elderly women in Haiti.

  Charles-Oscar: Former Minister of the Interior, known for his cruelty, who is represented as a devil during carnival.

  Dahomey: Former kingdom in western Africa; now southern Benin.

  Damballah-Ouèdo: God of springs and rivers, he holds a high position among the loas of the rada ritual.

  Erzili (or Erzili-Fréda): Goddess of love and beauty, guardian of freshwater; she is invoked under the name of Fréda Toucan-Dahomin, sometimes linked to the Mater Dolorosa.

  Femme-Jardin: Literally translates to “garden woman”; can mean mistress; can mean one of a man’s several wives who may live separately from him; or can mean a man’s favored or most beloved female companion.

  Guédé: Spirit of death who plays a major role in sorcery.

  HASCO: Haitian American Sugar Company, a North American sugar company established in Haiti.

  Homo Papadocus: Papa Doc (François Duvalier, Haitian tyrant from 1957 to 1971), well known for his Tonton-Macoutes, the regime’s “bogeyman” militia.

  Houngan: Vodou priest

  Jacques the Major (saint): Linked in Vodou to the loa Ogou, patron of blacksmiths, god of armies.

  Loa: Supernatural being in Vodou; more than a god or divinity, a loa can be a beneficial or a harmful spirit.

  Maître: Literally translates to master in English. In French, the term Maître is used in front of one’s name like Mister, but designates that the person is a male lawyer.

  Makandal, François: Famous eighteenth-century Maroon leader; a makandal is also a talisman.

  Mambo: Vodou priestess.

  Maroons: African slaves of West Indies and Guiana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who escaped from slavery and established their own communities.

  Nago-grand-coup: Rhythm of a warrior dance marked by undulating movements, hands on the knees, face thrusting forward and back as if to break the torso against some sort of obstacle.

  Ouidah: Beach in Benin, formerly Dahomey, where human cargo—“ebony wood”—was loaded onto ships during the time of the Atlantic slave trade.

  Rabordaille: Fast-paced carnival dance set to the beating of a small cylindrical drum with two layers of skin.

  Rada: Refers to a family of gods and to the rituals associated with them (word originates from the village of Allada in Benin).

  Sectes aux yeux rouges: Translates into English as red-eyed sects; it refers to the various factions who follow the practices of witchcraft, including: zobop, bizango, Vlanbindingue, and others.

  Simbi (or Simbi-la-Source): A white loa, goddess of the rains and beauty.

  Tête-gridape: Individual with kinky hair; by extension, the word applies to a small lamp with a smoky wick.

  Tonton-Macoutes: The Duvalier regime’s “bogeyman” militia—a sort of tropical SS.

  Vaksin: A bamboo trumpet-like instrument popular in Haiti.

  Vlanbindingues: Brotherhood of sorcerers whose members are supposedly bound together by acts of sorcery committed as a group.

  Vodou: Popular Haitian religion born of the syncretism of rites originating in sub-Saharan Africa and Catholic beliefs; it is an agrarian cult that plays the same role in Haitian life as that of pagan sects in ancient societies.

  Vertières: On November 18, 1803, in Vertières in northern Haiti, General Donatien de Rochambeau, leader of the expeditionary French forces, surrendered to Haitian General Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s revolutionary army. This was the first battle the French lost in the history of colonization.

  Yanvalou-dos-bas: A lively, cheerful dance performed with a hunched back and one�
��s hands on bent knees while rolling one’s shoulders in an undulating motion.

  Zozo: Vulgar Creole slang for penis.

  Translator's Note

  Hadriana in All My Dreams is a classic of Haitian letters. First published in 1988, the novel won the French Prix Renaudot, along with several other prestigious prizes. Almost immediately following its publication in French, it was translated into Danish, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Polish. Surprisingly, though, Hadriana has never been published in its entirety in English until now. This, I suspect, may have something to do with the novel’s shameless eroticism. Yes, there is more sex than politics in this narrative, at least on the surface, and perhaps certain clichés about Anglophone Puritanism hold true (figuring out how to translate Depestre’s twenty or so terms for human genitalia indeed had me stretching the limits of the English language). But if Depestre’s narrative foregrounds the sexual and the sensual within the frame of the marvelous, it is also a sophisticated work of social satire. Hadriana evokes the complexities of race, gender, and religion with which Haitians have long grappled; it reflects the author’s fraught relationship with a home he inhabits solely through the detritus of memory and the gift of his imagination.

  Bringing this novel to English-speaking audiences has particular resonance for me, a Caribbean literature scholar teaching in a New York City institution. New York is one of the primary sites of the Haitian diaspora and, as such, many of my students are first-generation Haitian Americans who read and write in English—not French. And so I’ve been a firsthand witness to the broader phenomenon whereby a transnational population is cut off from certain aspects of its cultural heritage. Insofar as René Depestre is an incontrovertible pillar of the Haitian literary canon, his extraordinary contribution to world letters ought to be read by all who can claim him as one of their own.

  —Kaiama L. Glover

  Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, coeditor of Yale French Studies’ Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Feminine (issue no. 128), and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst and Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

  René Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history—from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Élie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and ’70s—Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present. Photograph by Jacques Sassier © Editions Gallimard

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

  Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d’un programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis.

  ©1988 Editions Gallimard, Paris, France

  English translation ©2017 Kaiama L. Glover

  Foreword ©2017 Edwidge Danticat