By Roxane Gay
This first collection from authentic, transformative and enchanting Roxane Gay is a heady mix of fiction, factual experience folded and blended in with poetry. Then heavily flavoured with voices from the Haitian diaspora experience. Gay is the bestselling author of the memoir Hunger and in Ayiti, we feel and hear her skill at representing overlooked or unheard voices.
She takes us into the world of people pulled away and then back towards this powerful intoxicating country. She unpeels the tensions of migration and return.
A married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Each narrative evokes emotional connection and beautiful lived experience.
She intersects brutality and fairy-tale, first person and dream, the books shifts on a sentence, lurching into a new reality, like a boat catching the wind at night. Not shy to call it as it is, Gay uses her power of convincing narrative and the strength that comes from belief and struggle to breathe life into the voices in this superb book and to force us, on her beautiful affirming terms to reevaluate our own clichéd misconceptions about Haiti and see it seething with potential and astonishingly pertinent lessons in life.
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