At the Crossroads of History: The Cohabitation of Past and Present in Kettly Mars’s L’Ange du patriarche

Abstract

AbstractIn her seminal work Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997), Myriam J. A. Chancy posits that Haitian women writers offer a feminized version of Haitian history where fiction serves as a conduit for historical discourse that too often silences women. Similarly, Kettly Mars’s L’ange du patriarche (2018) shifts the emphasis of the Bois-Caïman ceremony from Boukman to the lesser-known woman said to have assisted at the ritual. In the novel, the spirit of Marinette pye chèch, a vengeful lwa believed to have been the woman who slaughtered the black pig at the Bois-Caïman ceremony, haunts the family of the protagonist Emmanuela. Through a close reading of Emmanuela’s reluctant engagement with the spirits that haunt her family, this chapter argues that Mars develops a notion of cohabitation, a willingness to stand at the crossroads of the empirical and the mythical in order to transcend the presumed binaries of past and present. Through Emmanuela, Mars offers a praxis by which one might live with the ghosts of the past, to bring their voices to life, without being dominated by them: a skeptical acceptance of events like the Bois-Caïman ceremony that individuals may simultaneously doubt and accept as truth.