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INTRODUCTION

From the moment in 2014 when Yanick Lahens’s novel Bain de lune was published in France and won the prestigious Prix Femina, I have wanted to read it. Haitian and French friends and fellow-writers were urgently recommending the book to me. But unfortunately my French is American schoolboy French and is incapable of registering literary quality or intent. In French, I could barely get the gist of the story and not much more. Now that I can read it in English, thanks to this excellent translation by Emily Gogolak, it’s clear that I was wise to have waited, for Moonbath is a linguistically subtle, supremely intelligent work of art that both requires and abundantly rewards close attention from its reader. In this sense, and in many others as well, it compares favorably with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The reader has to be able to hear the unique voice (I should say, the voices) of the novel in order to experience it.

In Moonbath, there are essentially two alternating, intercut voices, two distinct points of view. The first, set off in italics, is the voice of a woman whose name and identity and fate we won’t fully learn until the end of the novel. Lyrical and mysterious, infused with lamentation, hers is a story of betrayal and abandonment and ultimate redemption. It is the spiritual center of the book. The second is the collective, choral, female voice of a community—the point of view of a people as opposed to that of a person—and thus in an important sense it is the political center of the book. It drives the narrative, carrying us through generations from the pre-Duvalier era to the near present, in which everything changes and yet nothing changes. Taken together, the two voices weave a spiritual and political tapestry that is nothing less than the history of the Haitian people.

And yet, for all its Haitian particulars—the beliefs, ceremonies, and ancient traditions of voudon, the culture and language of an isolated Kreole hillside village, the lives and deaths of three generations of a large extended family—it is a universal story. What is true and inescapable for Lahens’s characters is true and inescapable for all of us. And for all its references to the contemporary world—the American occupation(s) of Haiti, the reign of the Duvaliers and the macoutes, the rise and fall of Aristide, catastrophic hurricanes, the tragic drownings of migrants fleeing to Miami, even the recent United Nations-sponsored cholera epidemic—Lahens’s story is as ancient and classical as Greek tragedy. It could have been set in hundreds, probably thousands, of places in the world, from the hills of Honduras to the Sudan to Cambodia. I can imagine this story being set in any isolated village anywhere, even in Maine or Mississippi or Idaho. It’s set in Haiti only because that happens to be the world Yanick Lahens knows best.

A great novel changes its reader’s imagination. We close the book with our vision of the world and humanity altered, revised in a deep and lasting way and not merely embellished. When we finish Morrison’s Beloved, for example, we believe in the felt reality of what we experienced there: the inhuman closure of slavery, the necessary murder of a child in order to save it from a life worse than death, the loving ongoing presence of a ghost. That is the unique power of great fiction: it provides its reader with an experience, not just an account. Moonbath has the same effect. This is not “magic realism”—it is realism of the highest order. So that, by the time we come to the final pages, we have lived through everything that Lahens’s characters have lived through, their sufferings and joys, their cruelties inflicted and received, their religious ecstasies and denials, and the ongoing presence of their gods. The reader who finishes this novel will be different than the reader who began it.

Russell Banks

July 2017