Guest Editor's Introduction: Enduring Encounters: Reflections on the Literary Works of Évelyne Trouillot

• Published in: Palimpsest (Albany, N.Y.) Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. V - 40
• Main Author: Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nashville State University of New York Press 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Earthquakes; Essays; Fear & phobias; Intergenerational relationships; Narratives; Novels; Pessimism; Slavery; Writers; Haiti
• ISSN: 2165-1604; 2165-1612

The forthcoming publication of Trouillot's newest novel, Desirée Congo, presents a unique opportunity to look back at her monumental contribution to Caribbean and African diaspora literature, and to look forward to a new addition to her already expansive body of work.3 There is value in this simultaneous casting back and gazing ahead, perhaps best articulated by the fictional character Charlotte as she confides in her granddaughter Lisette in Rosalie l'infâme: "Un jour, je te le promets, je te parlerai de ces barracoons, un jour ou tu auras besoin d'ailes pour te porter au-dela du moment present. Whether it is individual characters' fears or their feelings of awe, confusion, and revulsion during the fleeting encounters that Nadeve Ménard so expertly dissects, Trouillot writes first and foremost about people whose lives and experiences shed light on the broader themes of political instability, socioeconomic inequality, and the legacy of Haiti's history in the present. [...]as Ménard shows, those worlds periodically collide in Trouillot's stories, a collision that lays bare the violence of explosive encounters rather than presenting readers with idealized notions of building bridges across difference. Each layer of the story reveals a set of relationships that is at once intensely personal for the characters, and emblematic of contemporary social interactions that betray the colonial roots of the racial and class divides on the island.