Mimola Or the Story of a Casket Antoine Innocent
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Illinois State University ISU ReD: Research and eData Undiscovered Americas Summer 7-5-2018 Mimola or the Story of a Casket Antoine Innocent Susan Kalter Illinois State University Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/ua Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Innocent, Antoine and Kalter, Susan, "Mimola or the Story of a Casket" (2018). Undiscovered Americas. 1. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/ua/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by ISU ReD: Research and eData. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undiscovered Americas by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FICTION MIMOLA • ANTOINE INNOCENTANTOINE Tante Rosalie had first seen the light of day on the shores • TRANSLATED BY SUSAN KALTER SUSAN BY TRANSLATED of Dahomey. Upon coming of age, she had suffered the same fate as so many others, unwitting victims, carried to Saint-Domingue by an odious trade. Father, moth- MIMOLA er, brother, sisters had all suddenly disappeared, dis- OR THE STORY OF A CASKET persed, alas! to different parts of the island. What dark days she had known! What atrocities, what tortures! Scars ranging all over her body attested ANTOINE to the inhumanity of the colonists. But finally, the hour of deliverance rang; and there she is now, dragging her old carcass through the streets. INNOCENT TRANSLATED BY SUSAN KALTER AME R I CAS DOWNSTATEO LEGACIES ODL MIMOLAOR THE STORY OF A CASKET MIMOLAOR THE STORY OF A CASKET ANTOINE INNOCENT TRANSLATED BY SUSAN KALTER AMERICAS O DOWNSTATELEGACIES Undiscovered Americas Series Illinois State University 4241 Publications Unit Normal, Illinois 61790-4241 http://english.illinoisstate.edu/pubunit/ Copyright © 2018 by Susan Kalter All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Cover and Book Design: Publications Unit, Department of English, Illinois State University, Director: Steve Halle; Production Intern: Brigid Ackerman; Production Assistant: Sanam Shahmiri ISBN 978-0-9974041-2-8 First Edition CONTENTS Preface & Translator’s Notes vii Mimola or the Story of a Casket Part I 1 Part II 35 Notes 141 Afterword 159 Historical Contexts 177 Works Consulted 199 PREFACE AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTES They say that one never learns something more intimately than when one has to teach it. Perhaps, then, translation is the only rival to the insight expressed in this adage. If our research has been thorough, this English language translation of Antoine Innocent’s Mimola or the Story of a Casket is the first in existence. Given that it is also the first formal literary translation that I have ever attempted, I have no doubt that it will be improved upon in years to come. Nevertheless, despite this novice attempt, the nearly twenty years that have elapsed since my first discovery of this and other superb texts of fin de siècle Haitian literature without seeing the advent of their translation indicates the necessity of beginning somewhere. It is time that students in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world start learning and that professors and other teachers start teaching more widely our intellectual and literary heritage from the French-speaking Caribbean. vii viii Antoine Innocent The period from 1890 through 1915—punctuated in Haiti by its nineteen-year occupation by the United States— witnessed the flourishing of a literary culture. It was not the beginnings of Haitian literature, but merely a particularly prolific era of its production, as was that era in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Poetry, novels, and periodical literature, including newspaper participation, all enjoyed a certain popularity among the French-reading classes. It was a popularity sustained and propelled by a circle of mostly Paris-educated friends and acquaintances, who supported one another’s endeavors both positively and negatively as editors, critics, readers, and rivals ideological, artistic, and political. Of the novelists, the four who stand out as having known some success beyond their own shores were Frédéric Marcelin, Justin Lhérisson, Fernand Hibbert, and Antoine Innocent. Another writer, the poet Masillon Coicou, also published a slightly less widely circulated novel during the first decade of the twentieth century when most of the other men’s significant works appeared. Upon returning to Antoine Innocent’s work in 2013, my understanding of its significance had been enriched by fifteen years of teaching American Indian, as well as African American, US at large, and some greater North American texts. The African-rooted religious practices and spiritual beliefs of numerous Haitians and Innocent’s depiction of that inheritance resonates deeply with indigenous thought across Native North America and attempts over centuries by both practitioners and outsiders to conserve, revive, explicate, educate, and enrich populations with an understanding of indigenous cosmologies and their cultural expressions. Just to name one example, Mimola ix the centrality of prayer directed toward the four cardinal points of the material world strikes this uninitiated reader as a significant theological, intellectual tie among African and North American traditionalists. Noteworthy is the throwing of corn and other food to the four corners and reminiscent uses of cornmeal as well. Honoring of ancestors and blood ties, as well as an ecological sensitivity, significant and central ritual roles for women, and a wide-reaching sense of our dimensions of interconnectedness and obligation also stand out as features in common, even while Innocent talentedly demonstrates the predominantly Eastern hemispheric origins of Vodun, its intimacies with ante-Christian European beliefs. Augmenting those parts of the novel that focus upon religion, often through an anthropological view open to the same strong critiques as early twentieth-century ethnography in the United States, there is visible a prevalent theme of savagery versus civilization. That theme ties the narrative closely to American—especially US and European colonial— treatments of Native subjects. Innocent’s efforts to translate what his character Léon and many “foreigners” steeped in Western civilization see as savage remnants of a dark Africa never explicitly question the validity of the terms or their opposition per se; they do, however, deny most efforts to bring Haiti into civilization in any way but through the ancient practices. The practices acquire recognizability, familiarity, respectability through association with those of Celts, Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Saxons, Germans, Slavs, and, implicitly, with those of ancient Israel and its polytheistic neighbors. Moreover, contrasts of character intermittently reverse the actors in the savagery-civilization dance. This motif Innocent x Antoine Innocent surely found amid myriad writers at his fingertips. He presents, for example, at the opening of Part I, Dan-Maoua’s mother instructing her daughter about God, which is then used to demonstrate greater Dahomey and greater Africa as a scene of naïve, pure, pious theological instruction, only to set that scene against the opening of Part II, where we are introduced to Manzila’s brutish, hypocritical, and oh-so-civilizationist rapist. If both Native Americans and descendants of Africa and the African diaspora have historically been measured against a civilizationist standard, their spokespersons and writers—as exemplified again through Innocent—as well as a multitude of European and Euramerican allies, have consistently measured those ideologues against their own standard and found them wanting. Innocent takes the indictment a courageous—even blasphemous—step farther, pulling the reader into the inner voices of Albert and Léon as they accuse the Virgin Mary and Jesus themselves of cruel neglect and indifference toward those Christianity would picture itself civilizing and saving. Osage intellectual John Joseph Mathews remarked that the Osage elders “threw away” the old beliefs, the objects associated with them, the old knowledge, in part to protect their children as the times and white society forced a change upon them. Mimola’s grandmother has slightly different motives, but they operate within a similar context with a comparable loss of cultural beliefs and heritage and a reminiscent seeking after them by the grandchildren so separated from them. The older generation’s hiding, rather than transmission, of the knowledge may be why she and her friend Tante Marguerite say that there are mysteries the Creole cannot understand—or it may be for reasons beyond this one; this book leaves open the question Mimola xi of whether they are right or whether future generations might understand these mysteries as Africans did, whereas Mathews’s books seem to close that question. “Poor child! Poor mother!” writes Innocent’s narrator. “How would they ever penetrate the secrets of a heredity, unconscious and blind, the affinities of blood which exist between us and beings that we have never known and yet that we carry within us!…How finally to know that we are tied to our origins by bonds so much stronger [than time, distance, the crossing of the Atlantic] that neither time nor distance, nor the crossing could absolutely free us from them.” Other Native North American thinkers and writers hold out similar beliefs that there are certain knowledges or traits found “in the blood.” These are only a few of the numerous intersections with American Indian, US,