Evelyne Trouillot. Rosalie l'infame.

Cordova, Sarah Davies

Evelyne Trouillot. Rosalie l'infame. Paris. Dapper. 2003. 131 pages. 13 [euro]. ISBN 2-906067-88-1

ROSALIE L'INFAME refers not to an eponymous character in Evelyne Trouillot's first novel but to an eighteenth-century slave ship transporting three Arada women from freedom to enslavement. With LR (La Rosalie) singed upon their breasts, these forebears of Lisette, the novel's first-person narrator and protagonist, cannot escape the memories of their horrendous capture, Atlantic passage, and ensuing survival on a plantation in Saint Domingue. Only her godmother, Man Augustine, remains to watch over their creole descendant and to spare her some of the worst aspects of the slave condition. Complementing Trouillot's short stories, poems, and children's fiction, this nonlinear, suspenseful narrative unfolds to open out from the closure of disappointment, fear, and distrust into a wary hope for freedom on the island.

Trouillot's novel takes as its point of departure the historically documented self-denunciation of an Arada midwife who inserted a needle through the fontanel into the brain of seventy newborns to induce lockjaw, thereby preserving them from slave-hood. The author's happenstance finding of this sage-femme or "wisewoman" fuels her imagination to create a complex web of characters living the quotidian ignominy of slavery and its attendant cruelty and violence. The story is set before the Haitian revolution, when the French plantation owners, obsessively fearful of food poisoning, are preoccupied with quashing all signs of slave uprisings. In the face of this caste's repressive measures, the transplanted Africans and their proximate descendants attend to their future. For some, this entails eradicating their bloodline, while others select subterfuge and resistance strategies.

The parsimonious recounting of the past by Lisette's elders traduces into wise, often enigmatic saying--"paroles sibyl-lines"--and forewarnings to figure both as eye-openers and prescriptions for pain. The retelling of past experiences serves less as lesson and more as a means of deflecting, even avoiding or preventing, their repetition. Interlacing these survival tactics into her extended deferrals, Man Augustine prepares her godchild for the hardships that await her, whether she chooses the life of a maroon like her lover, Vincent, of a go-between like Michaud, or of servitude in the master's house.

Like a mystery novel, Rosalie l'infame postpones the telling of the family secret and leads the reader along the pathways of Lisette's gradual coming to knowledge and self-realization: "J'ai vecu si longtemps dans l'attente, avec la hantise presque douloureuse de l'histoire de ma grande-tante Brigitte, que, maintenant, je me sens vide d'espoir. Comme apres ces lendemains de calendas ou l'image de la derniere danse ne suffit plus pour remplacer l'impression de defaite et de lassitude a l'idee que rien n'a change: on est encore et toujours esclave et la realite dissipe brutalement la buee de sensations et de couleurs mensongeres."

Gradually filling in the past and surreptitiously inserting new elements in the story, various voices--male and female--layer the narrator's own perspective and insistent inquiries to fashion a tale of self-determination.

Sarah Davies Cordova

Marquette University