Louis-Philippe Dalembert. Les Dieux voyagent la nuit.
Cordova, Sarah Davies
Louis-Philippe Dalembert. Les Dieux voyagent la nuit. Monaco.
Rocher. 2006. 220 pages. 16.90 [euro]. ISBN 2-268-05865-4
HAVING UNUSUALLY set his fourth novel, Rue du Faubourg
Saint-Denis--a mock film scenario in homage to Romain Gary and to La Vie
devant soi--in a multicultural Paris during the killer summer heat wave
of 2003, poet and novelist Louis-Philippe Dalembert returns in his fifth
novel to Haiti's haunting presence in his sociocultural imaginary.
Semi-autobiographical, Les Dieux voyagent la nuit (The gods travel by
night) explores Dalembert's thematics of predilection: (his)
childhood and religion's imprint on culture and self, but herein
from the perspective of the forbidden.
Dalembert's grandmother, who raised him in Port-au-Prince,
refused him all contact with Haitian vodou, which excluded the boy from
all sorts of activities. Years later, he asks his longtime paramour Caroline, first encountered during their adolescence and now living in
New York, to take him to a ceremony in Queens. When he embarrasses her
by not drinking from the circulating cup, they return in silence to her
Harlem flat. As they lie together, her back--unremittingly turned to
him--triggers a series of reminiscences. All childhood episodes, they
recall the taboo vodou rituals he dared himself to witness or act upon
to force his peers to stop branding him as innocent. However, fearful of
his admonitory grandmother, he could not brag about his efforts and
remained estranged from his friends. The adult narrator, too, finds
himself marginalized from that same world because of his
nonparticipatory voyeuristic nature and his bookishness, which create
similar liminalities between his agnostic perceptions and
Caroline's marassa spiritual beliefs.
Each of Dalembert's novels experiments with a different
register of language and narrative technique, and in Les Dieux voyagent
la nuit the narrative voice addresses the protagonist and exposes the
autobiographical pact's schism. Internal dialogues and
free-indirect discourse in the second-person singular, with occasional
imaginary discussions with the untouchable Caroline, attempt to redress
his sense of dispossession. Playing the gamut of language levels with
wordplays, deconstructions of idiomatic expressions, and
transliterations of Creole expressions, Les Dieux voyagent la nuit
deprecates and justifies the protagonist's shifting identity
positions. As much a soliloquy about casting blame as confessing, about
the storyteller as about the man, its tongue-in-cheek footnotes, which
appear to explain the vodou canon, formulate the gap between the learned
narrator and the "innocent" protagonist, and repeat the li(n)e
to the would-be knowledgeable reader. Notorious vagabond, the
author-narrator is a duck out of water, wanting in, yet left high and
dry, to watch excentrically.
Sarah Davies Cordova
Marquette University
