9781803093666
Seagull Books, 2024
originally published as L'Empereur, 2021
translated by Nathan H. Dize
hardcover
read earlier
145 pp
I can't for the life of me remember where I first came across this book, but I'm definitely happy that I did. I liked it so much that I recently bought this author's The Immortals, also translated by Nathan Dize, published in 2020. At this point I'd read anything else he's written or will write in the future. Another excellent Seagull publication, for sure, the sort of book that speaks to why I love translated fiction so very much.
The main character of this story goes unnamed until closer to the end, and even then not actually afforded a name, only the initial P. (as I will refer to him here). The beginning of the book finds him sitting in his small room in Port-Au-Prince waiting for the police, with the evidence of his crime next to him. He knows two things: one, he "asked for none of this" -- that he was just waiting for a bus -- and two, that the knock on the door that just happened isn't the police, because "they don't open doors here," they just kick it down. More importantly though (and somewhat cryptically for the reader, at least in this early section) he feels that
"... even after the police arrive to beat me down, walk all over me, crush me and all the other things we alow only criminals to endure, before putting me in handcuffs and tossing me in their wagon on a one-way trip to hell,"
he will be able to find some kind of freedom.
Very briefly, because as usual to tell too much is definitely to ruin the experience, The Emperor is a novel whose beginning is also its ending, but the journey back to that small room and his search for freedom begins with the story of P.'s life before he gets to that point. It starts with him having been left on the side of the road as a small child, having only a vague recollection of
"a hand caressing my cheeks, of a soft and broken voice that told me, 'Wait right there, sooner or later the bus will appear; get on board and let the bus take you far away',"
and believing that his parents might have been among those who had given their children "up to nature" after a hurricane which had "ravaged the southern region of the island." That particular story he will "never be able to tell," because he really has no idea of what actually happened. He does remember being taken to a lakou, where he acted as "restavèk, a slave, a sheep, an entertainer for the spirits, tasked with calling upon them" through his drumming, having to master the art at first but eventually developing a style as one which "awakened the dogs in me." The so-called Emperor, who ended up taking control of the lakou, was the "only one to speak, the great pensive master at the centre of attention, at once the shepherd and the top dog, there, where time begins and the horizon ends." In describing the Emperor as a shepherd, P. continues the metaphor by labeling the people as sheep, whose minds the Emperor had addled and crushed, while "diverting their gaze from reality." Houses that were "planted around" the man's own dwelling were "not homes but narrow sheep pens, ajoupas, huts, used to corral an entire flock of absent souls, followers who are force-fed truths and falsehoods by the mystical master." P. describes himself as "the imperfect sheep, the one who does not wait to be invited, to be told to go ahead and graze." The only person he trusts is the "very old sheep," whose ancestors had lived in the time of the Haitian Revolution, who mainly stays silent but completely gets what's going on in the lakou. It is a solitary life P. lives, and as he withdraws deeper into this solitude, his only true companion is his inner voice that he calls "The Other Within." His years in the lakou are harrowing, but he does eventually manage to get away and find a life in Port-au Prince. It is in this city where his crime occurs, with events in the capital taking us back to the beginning of the novel as he awaits the police. By this time, the reader has a solid grip on why P. refers to his crime as having been "unavoidable."
It doesn't take long for P. to realize that in moving to the capital he has traded life in one lakou for life in another, with an employer who in his own way, is another corrupt Emperor figure, holding power over his employees, and people choosing to read about what's happening in the newspaper ("the analgesic writings the watchdogs of the status quo use to brainwash us, to crush us, to jettison us all ...") rather than to stick their noses outside "and attempt to change" things. At one point he asks where people turn who are "angry, who refuse to accept injustice and the sanctioned moral order," concluding that "We'd all leave if we could, every single one of us," to escape the "black hole" where they live.
Orcel delivers with huge impact, building the story of not just one life, but that of a nation which has been plagued by corrupt leaders, failed institutions and violence, a world that "brings death to freedom." I can't really do the novel the justice it deserves here, but it is both haunting, immediate and hugely relevant, a story with writing that worms its way into your psyche and under your skin and makes you feel. I can think of no higher praise. Definitely and hugely recommended.
