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Ibi Aanu Zoboi: Beyond “The Harem”

Ibi Aanu Zoboi in Haiti (Zoboi photos)

Meet Ibi Aanu Zoboi. She was born in Port-au-Prince as Pascale Philantrope. She is a talented Haitian author whose pen faces the future. “I want to see Haitian Sci-Fi,” Ibi says. “We need new narratives.”

Her story, “Earthseed” appears in the Caribbean Writer’s 25th Anniversary mega issue: Ayiti/Haiti. Earlier this year, Ibi’s showed her ‘noir’ side in the Danticat-edited Haiti Noir.

The anthology received a lot of attention from readers and critics. “The Harem”—Ibi’s well-received contribution—is set during the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti January 12, 2010. Her story follows an unapologetic philanderer who must choose which of his lovers to save as the city collapses into mounds of rubble.

In this VoicesfromHaiti InnerView, Ibi Aanu Zoboi shares the inspiration behind “The Harem.” Other works by Ibi can be found on the web, in literary journals, and anthologies, including the award-winning Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. She is a recipient of a grant in literature and writing from the Brooklyn Arts Council for the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project, a program for Haitian teen girls. Ibi lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ibi’s InnerView in English      In Haitian Creole

Happy Reading,

Katia D. Ulysse

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Michel DeGraff: Our Word is Our Bond

Professor DeGraff and Student in Haiti (photo by Christine W. Low)

In this VoicesfromHaiti InnerView, MIT Linguistics Professor, Michel DeGraff, speaks about his life work: empowering Haitian children through education.

 

 

Imagine a classroom in Haiti where students are forbidden to speak their mother tongue, Kreyòl. Instruction in most subject areas is in a foreign language: French. Students who lapse into Kreyòl are punished by teachers who themselves struggle with the foreign language. Most of the state-mandated exams are administered in high-level French. For some two hundred years, the practice has persisted even though modern linguists have demonstrated that Kreyòl—like any other bona fide language—can efficiently express any kind of complex meaning and is, therefore, a perfectly adequate instrument for instruction.

At home, in their communities, in the tarp cities, in the marketplace, with their parents and siblings, most students and teachers speak only Kreyòl. The songs they sing all day are in Kreyòl. The tales they tell at dusk are in Kreyòl. They think and dream in Kreyòl … until school starts the next day.

Full Text in English and in Haitian Creole. 

Happy reading (and viewing)

Katia D. Ulysse

VoicesfromHaiti

Honoring the Past. Celebrating the New Journey.

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Josaphat R. Large: Rosanna

Haitian Author, J-R Large

“When, as a young man, my body began to utter its  first words in the language of puberty, my mother had accepted into our home the daughter of a villager with whom we’d had a business relationship . . .”

Read Josaphat R. Large’s inspiration for Rosanna, the protagonist in his story in Haiti Noir in the InnerView Section of VoicesfromHaiti, and in Kreyol Pale.

Poet, novelist, and photographer, Josaphat R. Large’s novel Les terres entourées de larmes won the prestigious Prix littéraire des Caraïbes (Caribbean Literary Prize) in 2003. He was nominated for the Haitian grand Literary Prize of 2004, together with Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Frankétienne, Gary Klang, Dany Laferrière and Leslie Manigat. Large writes in French and Kreyol. The Society of French and francophone teachers of America has organized two colloquium on his literary production (specially his novels), one at Florida International University in 2001 and one at Fordham University in 2006.  Large also participated in the famous festival Étonnants-Voyageurs in 2007 and in 2008, he was one of the authors in the great literary opening organized in Port-au-Prince by the Presses Nationales d’Haiti (National Press of Haiti).

Text of J-R Large’s Rosanna in English

Teks J-R Large ekri sou pesonaj Rosanna lan liv Haiti Noir la

Happy reading!

katia

 

 

 

 

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A Valuable Secret: InnerView with Madison Smartt Bell

Photograph by Alyx Kellington

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of sixteen novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985),Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997)  and Soldier’s Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989.  Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990).  In 2002, the novel Doctor Sleep was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson.  Forty Words For Fear, an album of songs co-written by Bell and  Wyn Cooper and inspired by the novel Anything Goes,was released by Gaff Music in 2003; other performers include Don Dixon, Jim Brock, Mitch Easter and Chris Frank.

Bell’s eighth novel, All Soul’s Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007.  Devil’s Dream a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was published by Pantheon in 2009.  Bell’s latest novel, The Color of Night, will appear from Vintage Contemporaries in April 2011.    

Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York and in London and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B 1979) and Hollins College (M.A. 1981), he has taught in various creative writing programs, including theIowa Writers’ Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he has taught in the Goucher College Creative Program, where he is currently Professor of English, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires.  Bell served as Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College from 1999 to 2008.  In 2008 he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Voicesfromhaiti InnerView English Text