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A review by inherbooks
The Infamous Rosalie by Évelyne Trouillot
5.0
“These words come back to remind me that I am a slave, and it is in this truth that my strength lies. Whether a field slave or a house slave, man, woman or child, the slave is a creature who has lost his soul between the mill and the sugarcane, between the ship’s hold and its steerage, between the crinoline and the slap in the face. Shame stains our every gesture. When we place our feet, undeserving of shoes on the ground, when we let our exhausted bodies fall on cornhusk mattresses, and when we swing the bamboo fahs, we crush our souls under the weight of our shame. Only our gestures of revolt truly belong to us.”
130 pages deep, The Infamous Rosalie, titled after the slave ship Rosalie during the Middle Passage, tells the tale of Lisette, a house slave in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) living in the shadowing stories of her grandmother, godmother and the disappearing lives surrounding her. The author, Haitian herself, was inspired by the tale of an Arada midwife who killed 70 babies to protect them from the life of a slave and kept the knotted umbilical cords.
The stories are told with detail, harrowing but necessary, given the atrocities humankind (read: colonizers) enacted sickeningly proudly. Slaves were subjected to horrors on simply a whiff of suspicion that they may be involved in plots to poison their masters. I couldn’t stomach reading Lisette’s voice recount the stories of death and disappearing potential for the sake of…??? The white man? And his gluttony?
Evelyne Trouillot writes: “I wasn’t intending to write a historical novel. May I be forgiven, then, for the few discrepancies and creative liberties I’ve taken. I only seek to acknowledge my characters’ humanity. Yet I must refuse any responsibility for the torture and punishment described in the text. They are all unfortunately true, born of the cruel and perfidious imagination of those who proclaimed themselves to be civilized.”
This is a historical novel everyone needs to have on their shelves. Be reminded, history isn’t about the heroes – that stories of those who did and did not survive must also be told. This isn’t a story of celebration but of revolution through life and death.
130 pages deep, The Infamous Rosalie, titled after the slave ship Rosalie during the Middle Passage, tells the tale of Lisette, a house slave in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) living in the shadowing stories of her grandmother, godmother and the disappearing lives surrounding her. The author, Haitian herself, was inspired by the tale of an Arada midwife who killed 70 babies to protect them from the life of a slave and kept the knotted umbilical cords.
The stories are told with detail, harrowing but necessary, given the atrocities humankind (read: colonizers) enacted sickeningly proudly. Slaves were subjected to horrors on simply a whiff of suspicion that they may be involved in plots to poison their masters. I couldn’t stomach reading Lisette’s voice recount the stories of death and disappearing potential for the sake of…??? The white man? And his gluttony?
Evelyne Trouillot writes: “I wasn’t intending to write a historical novel. May I be forgiven, then, for the few discrepancies and creative liberties I’ve taken. I only seek to acknowledge my characters’ humanity. Yet I must refuse any responsibility for the torture and punishment described in the text. They are all unfortunately true, born of the cruel and perfidious imagination of those who proclaimed themselves to be civilized.”
This is a historical novel everyone needs to have on their shelves. Be reminded, history isn’t about the heroes – that stories of those who did and did not survive must also be told. This isn’t a story of celebration but of revolution through life and death.