Maika Moulite Maritza MouliteDear Haiti, Love Alaine

Abstract

always leave / an urgent silence / or the final steps / that make a man disappear). Finally, in “Harm,” Valverde describes “future nostalgia” and the linguistic and poetic mechanism used in eliciting flows of feeling and meaning. The process is painful, and yet the pain and the poetic mechanism of “harm” are what lead to expressions of beauty and an ability to capture fragments of life and sparks of light. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Maika Moulite & Maritza Moulite Dear Haiti, Love Alaine Toronto. Inkyard Press. 2019. 422 pages. IN THEIR DEBUT novel, Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, co-authors Maika and Maritza Moulite craft a mosaic of modern-day Haiti that simultaneously exploits and undercuts stereotypes. Like Alaine Beauparlant, the eponymous teen protagonist they create, the Moulite sisters explore the complexities of Haitian heritage from the cross-border context of Miami, Florida, and the island. Their innovative take on the epistolary novel elaborates plot and characterizations by means of a multimedia miscellany, including emails, screenshots, television transcripts, postcards, and school assignments . Reading between these multimedia lines, the reader-as-detective pieces together a compelling portrait of a contemporary adolescent who is coming of age and coming to grips with her family’s mysterious past, her economic privilege, and her shifting perspectives on Haiti’s blend of realities and superstitions. After a disastrous class presentation on Haitian history and following her mother’s own televised breakdown, Alaine learns she is being shipped off to Haiti (an allusion to a common threat immigrant parents really do invoke, threatening to ship misbehaving children’s prized possessions to the home country). In Haiti, she reunites with her mother and estranged relatives and delves into a hereditary curse that might be at the root of her mother’s breakdown. Along with her aunt, the Haitian minister of tourism and creator of a mobile app for charitable aid, Alaine visits iconic landmarks, learns about important people in Haiti’s history, and discovers her own family’s controversial past following the bloodline of Marie-Louise Coidavid, a nineteenthcentury queen of Haiti. She confronts tales of power and war, infidelity, corruption, and a country desperately trying to start afresh from its prismatic past. This trip not only uproots Alaine from Miami but gives her a dose of realBooks in Review Javier Cercas Lord of All the Dead: A Nonfiction Novel Trans. Anne McLean. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 269 pages. CONSIDERED ONE of Spain’s most acclaimed novelists, Javier Cercas knows how easily men lie to themselves in order to give themselves sufficient leeway to do unimaginable harm. They repeat the same falsehoods so often, truth blurs and becomes increasingly more elusive. Sometimes overtaken by a bout of sentimentalism and the promise of redemption, they try to confront realities they have spent a lifetime denying. But their tenderness is still laden with the same simmering brutalities that have often hampered them. Cercas doesn’t try to pretend otherwise and plays fast and loose with time, history, and memory in all of his spectacular autobiographical novels. His slippery narrators, whom he names after himself, try to distract us by obsessively chasing someone else’s secrets but eventually feel compelled to turn the lens upon themselves. In his new work, Lord of All the Dead, he chases the ghost of his uncle Manuel Mena, adored by his mother and dead at nineteen fighting on behalf of Franco, but we soon come to realize the novel isn’t really about his uncle, despite the many pages devoted to tracking his uncle’s last movements in the war. It is about Cercas ’s lingering guilt and shame about his family’s willing participation in Francoism . He is disturbed by their provincialism JAVIER CERCAS 98 WLT SPRING 2020 ity regarding the difficulties of life in her ancestral country. The authors paint a realistic picture of the grittier sides of Haiti in stark contrast to the glamor of Haiti’s elite. Driven to decipher her family curse, Alaine pores over diaries tucked away by her mother at a similar age and discovers that there is more to this curse than rumors. Vodou, in this novel, is not sensationalized but nuanced; it is mysterious but...