| Agnant, Marie-Célie: Le livre d'Emma (Haiti) | |
| Author | Marie-Célie Agnant |
| Title | Le livre d'Emma |
| Publisher | Les Editions du remue-ménage/Editions Mémoire |
| Place/date of publication | Montréal/Port-au-Prince, 2001 |
| Copyright/contact | with Canadian publisher |
| ememoire@hotmail.com | |
| ISBN | 2 89091 186 1 |
| Pages | 167 |
| Genre | prose (novel) |
| Original language | French |
| Translations | none |
| Keywords | women, quest for identity, psychology |
| Topic/theme | "Le livre d’Emma" is an important and complex novel about black Haitian women and their inner conflicts. |
Review The plot of the novel centres on the protagonist of the title. Emma ends up in a psychiatry ward in Montréal, she being accused of having murdered her daughter Lola, whose father is Nicholas Zankoffi. Since Emma is absolutely not willing to answer the questions of Dr. MacLeod, the psychiatrist on duty, in French though she knows this language, a Haitian interpreter named Flore is called, a woman being as intelligent as understanding. Soon she gives up the neutral position which her job prescribes and becomes an passionate advocate of Emma. Using a precise and yet very poetic language, she tries to decode Emma’s delusion and to interpret her expressions deviating from common linguistic codes. Emma talks about her childhood in a Haitian village called "Grand-Lagon”, "cette terre de malédiction”, and about her mother Fifi who is filled with hatred and feels overtaxed by her five children. Moreover, Emma describes how she found shelter in a neighbouring village where she lived with a Voodoo priest named Matti teaching her to keep her memories of the ancestors alive and how to read dreams. On the other hand, Matti also encouraged her to study at the university. Thus, Emma goes to France, studies history specialising in the history of slavery. When she submits her thesis on this subject to the University of Bordeaux it is thrown out because it allegedly lacks coherence. Emma is said to have murdered her daughter before handing in a revised version of her thesis a second time. Emma’s story is not presented as a linear account, but it is composed of seemingly unconnected fragments of medical reports. Although the interpreter Flore follows the attitude of Western psychiatry in her reports, she realises that these concepts are useless when it comes to cure Emma of her suffering. This suffering has to be seen against the background of the fact that for generations black women have been exposed to disgrace and violence weighing heavily on them like a curse. And violence always included sexual violence as rapes of women on slave ships and in the sugarcane fields show. Before Emma, the case 122, departs this life by committing suicide she has one last question: "Are hatred and contempt which humans have soaked up in large doses since the beginning of the world curable?” The story’s ending is a bit unusual. After Emma’s death Flore resorts to the arms of Nicholas Zankoffi, Emma’s former lover, a Frenchman. Contrasting with Emma, Flore does not consider herself as a black person in the first place, but above all as a woman. | |