Hollins University Assistant Professor of French Jeanne Jégousso has translated two works by Haiti’s first published female novelist for a new book released this month by Rutgers University Press.
Jégousso translated the acclaimed novels Cruel Destiny (1929) and The White Negress (1934) by Cléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956), a poet, writer, and feminist who employed her sentimental fiction to explore matters of race, gender, nationalism, and sovereignty. A contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Valcin emerged as an influential writer and political figure among the Black Atlantic diaspora.
Cruel Destiny and The White Negress are now available in English translation for the first time. Rutgers University Press notes, “These two novels expand our understanding of Caribbean literature, as well as the political struggles and artistic triumphs of Black women in the Americas.”
The tragic love story of two people drawn together by a magnetic attraction but kept apart by a dark family secret is at the core of Cruel Destiny. The novel depicts the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti’s elite society, and also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French.
In The White Negress, a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very different men: a Black Haitian lawyer and a white American carpetbagger. Rutgers University Press says the novel offers “a fresh spin on the tired tragic mulatta trope. Valcin reveals the racial prejudices, class tensions, and anti-colonial resentments of an island under American occupation.”
In addition to translating the novels, Jégousso served as the book’s co-editor with Adam Nemmers, an associate professor of English at Lamar University. Myriam J.A. Chancy, a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College, wrote the foreword.
In recognition of the book’s publication and her scholarly achievement, Jégousso was recently honored with an Author Celebration Award at the 50th annual conference of the Caribbean Studies Association.
