Cruel Destiny and The White Negress

Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin

Edited by Adam Nemmers and Jeanne Jégousso; By Cléante D. Valcin; Translated by Jeanne Jégousso; Foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy

Rutgers University Press

Cléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was a poet, writer, and feminist—most prominently Haiti’s first published female novelist, 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. Now, for the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation.

Cruel Destiny (1929) tells the tragic love story of Armand and Adeline, drawn together by a magnetic attraction, yet kept apart by a dark family secret. Depicting the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti’s elite society, it also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French.

In The White Negress (1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very different men, a Black Haitian lawyer, and a white American carpetbagger. Putting 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.

Together, these two novels expand our understanding of Caribbean literature, as well as the political struggles and artistic triumphs of Black women in the Americas.

Cléante Desgraves Valcin’s Cruel Destiny and The White Negress are two extraordinary works of twentieth century Haitian feminist literature that merit our attention today. Thanks to Jégousso and Nemmers’s elegant and clear-eyed rendering of Valcin’s sentimental prose, present-day readers have a truly precious opportunity to consider both race and gender in ways that transgress the stubborn borders of the Atlantic world. Kaiama L. Glover, author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being

A founding member of Haiti’s first formal feminist organization, La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, Cléante Desgraves Valcin was the first Haitian woman to publish a novel, Cruelle Destinée in 1929. This first complete translation into English of both of her captivating novels will contribute to ensuring her recognition as a pivotal figure of Haitian feminism and literature. Nadève Ménard, co-editor of The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics

These first published novels by a Haitian woman are groundbreaking, both as acts of cultural resistance to colonialism and occupation and as vehicles to explore the island’s paradoxes of colorism, class, race and gender. Although cloaked in an aura of sentimentality, their social portraits demonstrate clearly the central role of women in the construction of Haitian national identity. H. Adlai Murdoch, editor of The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories: Neoliberalism Since the French Antill

CLÉANTE VALCIN (1891-1956) was a Haitian novelist and activist who co-founded the journal Voix des femmes (Voice of women) and served as president for the country’s leading feminist organization La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale. After publishing the poetry collection Fleurs et Pleurs (1924), she wrote the first two novels ever published by a Haitian woman.

JEANNE JÉGOUSSO is an assistant professor of French at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she specializes in Francophone literatures from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. She co-edited the volume Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts, and is the co-director of the digital project The Library of Glissant Studies.

ADAM NEMMERS is an associate professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, whose research focuses on multi-ethnic American literature. He is author of American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation and the coeditor of Yours in Filial Regards: THe Civil War Letters of a Texan Family.

MYRIAM J.A.. CHANCY is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is the author of multiple academic works and novels, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press), From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and What Storm, What Thunder.

Foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy
Introduction
Translator’s Note

Cruel Destiny

The White Negress

Acknowledgements

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