Part One: Selections from Plidetwal/Rain of Stars by Évelyne Trouillot
During a 2005 interview in Bomb Magazine, Edwidge Danticat asked Évelyne Trouillot whether she prefers writing poetry or fiction. “Poetry, of course, is special, unique,” Trouillot responded. “It is a metamorphosis of language that transforms both reader and poet, an exquisite and melancholy exercise.” While Trouillot’s response doesn’t explicitly answer the question, it provides insight into the poetry of Plidetwal, or Rain of Stars (Édition Presses Nationales d’Haiti, Collection Souffle Nouveau, 2005). Danielle Legros Georges’ translation has provided us with a rare and vital opportunity to read Évelyne Trouillot’s Kreyòl poetry in English.
Rain of Stars is a long poetic sequence, sections of which appear in Blue Flare. In it, the speaker asks repeatedly “In what language should I speak to you?” First, in the language of poetry. Secondly, in Kreyòl, rather than French. Legros Georges, in her introductory essay, notes that Kreyòl is a “highly figurative language,” known for its “everyday poetry and sophisticated word play.” And of course, the translation into English is a further transformation. Haiti’s inherent tensions are lit up by the grace and tenderness with which this poet and this translator render the country’s complexities into poetry, transforming them and us, an alchemy both exquisite and melancholy.
This sequence is interested in how self and other recognize each other, relate to each other, negotiate space. The speaker asks who are you, what are you, and in what language should I speak to you
When children cry
and won’t stop
one after the other the words dry up
in the palm of my hand
not letting me baptize the dark
Believe me
I don’t know what you are (11)
Is it possible words can’t suffice? Or, maybe the poem is the means of discovering who the other is, how and in which language to speak to them: poetry.
“I look for your address on the internet/You are the laurel tree’s only butterfly” (18). You: unique and beautiful, a flickering, difficult to capture and hold, impossible to tame. The internet can’t help with this search, but poetry can. Like the butterfly, the “you” in these poems flickers into and out of light and shadow. Who are you when “the sun loses its way” and “continents don’t remain steady”? (13) Who are you “when a ten-year-old beggar/undresses his hunger beneath the statue of Saint Anne/each grain of rice leaving a scar on our skin”(12). In what language should the poet speak when the perceived world disorients, disturbs, and disarranges the mind, the senses: “mixing the smell of cadavers with the scent of cinnamon tea” (15).
The you is a constant yet shifting presence throughout the sequence. We’re told “Your face bathes in the depths of my eyes/You wrap me from the inside, we don’t need to change skins” (17). Here, the you is so close, nearly identical with the speaker’s reality, holding her from the inside. And the speaker’s eyes are themselves an ocean in which the you bathes. Bathes, such an intimate word. The you, like an island, simultaneously bathed and anchored in the speaker’s gaze. The poems often confound person and place, conjoin them and join them to the speaker.
Pain and love co-exist. In and through this existential tension, the poems embrace bewilderment:
I plunge into your island not knowing how to swim
with my grown-up shoes
tied to my hips
You open your mouth to speak my name
a rain of stars crucifies the space. (19).
The beloved is an island, and an island is the place where they love. When the beloved speaks, the language is of stars and starlight. This voice, a plidetwal, pluie d’étoiles, rain of stars. Évelyne Trouillot has said that beauty is a quest for meaning. She has said as well that writing allows her “to find a way to make the anonymous visible.” In her fiction, her characters accomplish this. And in poetry, the anonymous is made visible through image—what is more beautiful and yet anonymous than stars? The unknown and in a sense unknowable stars send their rain to touch the land, the people, their dreams.
For their own luminous ends, these poems harness the power of religious terms and spaces. The word crucify, while somber, also carries the twin meanings of sacrifice and redemption. The lover’s voice, the rain of stars, in calling the speaker by her name, redeems the island, its tensions, the fraught past and present of Haiti, a country both complicated and implicated, a place where violence distorts vision: “children can die/because mothers are shot in the head/with no one being shocked” (35). But it’s also and profoundly a place where stars reach down, touch both land and water, a place where “your arms surround my heart” (17).
Love saves both lover and beloved. The bewilderment of not knowing which language to speak is partly resolved by loving, which includes remembering or re-membering the other:
Even when I forget your hair’s color
My love resembles you
You’ve gotten under my skin
like a rain of stars at night (24)
Love resembles and re-assembles the other, both beloved person and beloved place.
“I swear that life can be beautiful” is another insistent refrain. If beauty is a quest for meaning, then the poem is both quest and fulfillment, and as such is able to bear witness to extremities of grief and pain, and to losses which seem utterly meaningless. Poem 38, What Water Wouldn’t I Dry, is dedicated to the children of Gonaïves who died in the terrible flooding of 2004. Pain grips the speaker’s heart “like a lost pang of childbirth.” It grips her head “like a lwa that lost its memory.” The repetition of the word “lost” suggests the lost children. And “pang,” birth pang, carries the twin promises of joy and sorrow. A lwa, spirit or divine messenger, guides or presides over human affairs and natural forces—rain, rivers, birth. And if a lwa loses its memory? It can no longer govern as it should, as is expected or hoped. Things go awry. Tragedy enters. “This pain can only speak in one language,” the speaker insists. A universal language that lives in the spaces between us, spaces we open to in and through sorrow, as well as in joy.
Évelyne Trouillot mentions the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish as both touchstone and influence. In his poem The Kindhearted Villagers, translated into English by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché, the villagers name the universal language of pain: “In the eternal saga of pain, we are the teardrop in the dove’s cooing.” A language of water and salt, the tears cleanse and sting, and make meaning the heart recognizes as true. In ways both subtle and obvious, Trouillot’s sequence is resonant with the work of Darwish who also often addresses an unnamed you.
In Rain of Stars, Poem 29, My Country, tells us
There are places where night sits at the front door
even at sunrise
There are places where children sleep behind clouds
so they won’t hear blood being shed
Where women forget to bear children
Where men zip their lips up to their eyes
There are places where life doles out sparkles
cash machines and the internet
to confuse the dark
Where night is as lit up as a taffeta dress on January first
in the old days
before second-hand clothes
before girls die in forgotten rooms
on Rue Tiremasse
There are places where light doesn’t need electric wires
traveling permit-free
across the minds of rebellious children
Here is Haiti, present and past, a place both modern and ancient. The country’s dazzling independence is celebrated every January 1st, and without the permission or consent of the powerful, the former colonial masters or the regime du jour, the rebels live on, despite economic hardship and ongoing violence. In the speaker’s country, girls die anonymously, and yet the people, and the children tucked behind clouds, are resilient.
The sea is an essential presence, the womb, the original place: “a space/in which to gather all my tears.” (30) The sea also “licks my feet/So I’m not lost in the mystery and turmoil of earth.” (25) The language of the sea provides relief, assurance. Wave after wave touches the shore, sometimes furiously, sometimes gently. Like the island itself, the speaker belongs to the sea. She is bound to it as companion, as inspiration, as source.
“From time to time I board a boat/like a sheet of paper that holds no ink,” (14) this complex surreal image captures the terror of displacement and dislocation. Simultaneously it evokes a writer whose words disappear, the enslaved people brought from Africa to Haiti, and those who left the country by boat, fleeing the brutal Duvalier regime in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The image reveals the speaker’s absolute connection to place: to leave would be equivalent to having her words vanish even as she writes them. It would be an unwriting of the self. And as well an unwriting of the other, the you, the beloved person, people, place.
Maybe because I translate the work of Paul Éluard, Trouillot’s sequence calls to mind Éluard’s great poetic sequences. Like Éluard, Trouillot’s lines move swiftly from one image to the next:
Believe me
I can’t say how I love you
When love wants to make a u-turn
On Grand Rue
our own sun
overturning cursed seeds
Upsetting the night (15)
Also like Éluard, she uses plain images such as sun, seeds, and night in surprising ways. The lovers possess their own sun which shines by night. Turning and overturning, upsetting expectations or an expected outcome, the language and logic are infused with Éluardian gestures. Throughout the sequence, the juxtaposition of the street’s miseries and the lovers’ intimacy inhabits its own kind of surreality. And Trouillot uses language of the body—mouth, guts, hands—to insist upon the material nature of experience, the pleasure and pain of love, whether for a beloved human or beloved country, for poetry, for possibility. Love is embodied. Becoming is embodied. Trouillot enacts a poetics of resistance which, like surrealism, is grounded in the material world even as it opens space for the possible.
Works Cited
Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash, University of California Press, 2003, p. 61.
Legros Georges, Danielle. “Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets.” Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets, Zephyr Press, 2024, p. xi.
Trouillot, Évelyne. “Detour.” Translated by Paul Curtis Daw, Words Without Borders, November 1, 2013, https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2013-11/detour/
Trouillot, Évelyne. “Évelyne Trouillot.” Bomb Magazine, Interview by Edwidge Danticat, January 1, 2005, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2005/01/01/evelyne-trouillot/
Trouillot, Évelyne. “Interview with Évelyne Trouillot.” Art Beat, PBS NewsHour, Interview by Jeffrey Brown, January 26, 2011, https: www.youtube.com
Trouillot, Évelyne. “Primal Needs.” Translated by Paul Curtis Daw, Words Without Borders, December 31, 2012, https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2012-12/primal-needs/