Désirée Congo

by Evelyne Trouillot, M. A. Salvodon (translator)

The newest English translation of one of Haiti’s most powerful literary voices

Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot—one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world—constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces—a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

214 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 23, 2024

About the author

Evelyne Trouillot was born, lives and works in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her first novel Rosalie l’infâme was awarded the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone, in Grenoble, France in 2004. Evelyne Trouillot has published several more novels and three collections of short stories, two books of poems, one in Creole and one in French. She has also written an essay on the situation of children and human rights in Haiti Restituer l’enfance. Her first play Le bleu de l’île received the Prix Beaumarchais, ETC Caraibes in 2005. Her novel La mémoire aux abois, presents a compelling view of the dictatorship that Haiti suffered during the Duvalier era. It received the Prix Carbet de la Caraibe et du Tout Monde in 2010. Her latest novel Absences sans frontières tells the story of a family separated by migration, but strengthened by their love and respect for one another. In 2014, Trouillot published a book of poems in France, Par la fissure de mes mots. In 2015, her latest novel Le rond point was awarded la Bourse Barbancourt, in Haiti. La memoire aux abois was translated by Paul C Daw into English under the title Memory at Bay and published by University of Virginia Press in 2015.
Several short stories by Trouillot are available in English, such as http://wordswithoutborders.org/articl....
you can see Evelyne Trouillot interview about le rond point on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak8zW...

You can read Edwidge Danticat's interview with the author at http://www.theroot.com/views/bomb-roo....

Reviews

[Myriam]

Un roman captivant sur l'indépendance d'Haïti et la lutte pour la liberté, avec une grande diversité de personnages attachants et pluridimensionnels, mettant en lumière les cruautés et complexités d'un pan de l'histoire qu'on devrait tous mieux connaître.

(Lu pour un mandat professionnel précis, d'où l'absence de note.)

[Purple Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would make a great movie!