Description
Set during Carnival in Haiti 1938, a young and beautiful woman named Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion on her wedding day and collapses at the altar. She is buried and later resurrected by an evil sorcerer and, as a zombie, enters the collective memory of her town of Jacmel. Hadriana's conversion serves as the inciting incident into an exploration of the strange and esoteric on the island, where Voodoo and Catholicism keep a symbiotic relationship, young women turn into zombies, young men turn into lascivious butterflies and nothing is quite what it seems.
Hadriana in All my Dreams is a frolic through mystery and eroticism that reveals vital truths about the nature of humanity.
About the Author
Rene Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures Aime Cesaire, Pablo Neruda, and Andre Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history-from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Elie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti's Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revo- lutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and '70s-Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti's past and present. Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, coeditor of Yale French Studies' Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Feminine (issue no. 128), and translator of Franketienne's Ready to Burst and Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Edwidge Danticat is the award-winning author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah's Book Club selection), Krik? Krak!, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I'm Dying, and several other books. She is the editor of four anthologies, including Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2: The Classics.
Book Information
ISBN 9781909762732
Author Rene Depestre
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd
Publisher Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd
Series Jacaranda
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 128mm * 18mm