Tag Archives: Nathan Dize
Breaking Taboos and Caregiving in Kettly Mars’s “I Am Alive,” translated from French by Nathan H. Dize
Haitian writer Kettly Mars confronts readers with the silence surrounding mental illness in her novel “I Am Alive,” translated by Nathan H. Dize. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and told from multiple viewpoints, the novel plunges us into the secluded world of the Berniers, a bourgeois family living in Fleur-de-Chêne.
Memory and the Search of Stories Past: Emmelie Prophète’s “Blue,” Translated from French by Tina Kover
While “Blue” is set in a terminal of the Miami airport, to say that the novel is set in any one place in time would be misleading, when the novel is actually set in numerous locations, Miami, the shadow of New York City, a mountainous Haitian village named Suzanne, and the Haitian cities of Les Cayes and Port-au-Prince and many moments in time.
Translation as Testimony: On Makenzy Orcel’s “The Immortals,” Translated from French by Nathan Dize
By Jennifer Boum Make You immortalize all the whores of Grand Rue, taken away by this thing. Makenzy Orcel, The Immortals Makenzy Orcel. Nathan Dize. Two writers who have tasked themselves to transform the stories of others as they create language that allows the rendering and relaying of the voices of those who are too […]
“Gaza is Mayotte, Mayotte is France”: Natacha Appanah’s “Tropic of Violence” translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan
By Nathan Dize Gaza is a name capable of conjuring many ideas: statelessness, precarity, violence, tenuous and embargoed freedom, occupation, colonialism, and the list goes on. The name has also become synonymous with contested sovereignty in an era of postcolonial globalization, where, despite their supposed ephemerality, words like “settlements” and “camps” are imbued with a […]
Haitian Sacred Arts as Public Education: Antoine Innocent’s “Mimola, or the Story of a Casket,” translated from French and Haitian Creole by Susan Kalter
By Nathan Dize Mimola, or the Story of a Casket begins with an obituary, an homage to the family matriarch who survived the Middle Passage and who built and sustained a family, now two generations in the making. Antoine Innocent’s novel blends the urbane journalistic qualities of Port-au-Prince with the rich folk tradition of the […]