International Praise for Yanick Lahens
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2014
Winner of a French Voices Award, 2015
“Yanick Lahens adeptly dipped her pen nib in tears to write Moonbath. She brandished her writing instrument with dexterity, creating Cétoute as a metaphor symbolizing both the pain and the promise of Haiti.”
—LANIE TANKARD, The Woven Tale Press
“Lahens is the most important living female Haitian author wrting in French.”
—PROFESSOR CHRISTIANE MAKWARD, Pennsylvania State University review
“[Lahens] describes her country with a forceful beauty—the destruction that befell it, political opportunism, families torn apart, and the spellbinding words of Haitian farmers who solely rely on subterranean powers.” —Donyapress
“One of the finest voices of Haitian contemporary literature.” —L’Ob’s
“Everything is there, the content, powerful, and the style, poetic.” —Les Echos
“Its poetic and political reflections are a prosperity…” —Feuilleton
“Her work occupies a privileged place in the feminine literature in Haiti, by its independence of spirit and its freedom of tone.” —Les Francophonies
“From the writing of Yanick Lahens we find in Moonbath, these spaces of ‘faults.’ Those moments when everything can tilt, where the encounter exists, where it arises chaos, tragedy, and Beauty. A perpetual questioning of the imaginary, the social constructs, their encounters with the Other, on the scale of men and women.” —Africultures Magazine
“Her powerful magical words give this magisterial novel a violent beauty.”
—NOELLA at NOFI News
“...luxurious and mixed language...” —Radio Télévision Luxembourg
“Yanick Lahens offers here a personal and contrasting picture of her country, with a complex and hallucinatory, lyrical and intimate narrative, inhabited by a powerful breath. The magic operates and one lets oneself bewitched.”
—Encres Vagabondes
“The literature of Haiti, already so fertile, is being enriched with this book.”
—l’Humanite Daily News
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
Copyright © Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2014
Originally published as Bain de Lune in 2014
English translation copyright © 2017 by Emily Gogolak
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-57-2 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016959433
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This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution · (800) 283-3572 · cbsd.com
At the end of the work, the reader will find a genealogical tree and a glossary to provide the definition of the words followed by an asterisk upon their first occurrence.
I am Atibon-Legba
My hat comes from Guinée
So does my bamboo cane
So does my old pain
So do my old bones […]
I am Legba-Bois Legba-Cayes
I am Legba-Signangnon […]
I want yams to soothe my hunger
Malangas and pumpkins
Bananas and sweet potatoes
RENÉ DEPESTRE
A Rainbow for the Christian West
[…] he destroyed this beauty that could have led me to fall into relapses of desire […]; I resemble God’s old mistress, Death.
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Fires
CONTENTS
