Critical Edition of Haitian Writer Roger Dorsinvilles Memoirs of Haiti

Description

The availability of Roger Dorsinvilles work in English is a rewarding experience for readers outside the Francophone world. Memoirs of Haiti is indeed a welcome and necessary addition to the body of postcolonial work. Ostensibly about Roger Dorsinvilles personal recollections of twentieth-century Haitian history, these memoirs are rich in backgrounding the rise of the Duvalier regime due to the turpitudes locking Haitis intellectual and socio-political elite into a pattern of repetition. Rather than rehash ad nauseam the nightmarish stereotypes of Haitian history, Roger Dorsinville raises our understanding through his discourse crisscrossing time and space. The duality of surface and depth, as demonstrated in this book, is analogous to the argument made by the author regarding the distinction between written and spoken language, or the subtle distinction between the past time of events, and the present time of recollection. It also sets the stage for the concluding contributions that analyze Memoirs of Haiti from a variety of literary perspectives. This is a remarkable critical edition that conforms to the expected standards of literary scholarship while it enlightens the undeniable merit of an original narrative of history. – Marie Hlne Laforest, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples