By Dany Laferrière of the Académie française
Almost five years ago, on June 7, 2021, I told you about a powerful book (Les villages de Dieu by Emmelie Prophète) on the real political situation in Haiti, in which I asked those interested in the country to focus their attention on the gangs that are rampant in Port-au-Prince in order to understand the desolation that has swept the country for several decades.
For many of you, it was the first time you had discovered these murderers in action, right in their own backyard. We learned that the villages where these monsters emerged were no different from other neighboring neighborhoods where people more concerned with public peace lived. At the heart of the violence, we encountered mothers working tirelessly, grandmothers going to mass, students being killed in uniform, and drug-addled gang leaders.
The terrible purple nights of pain, and the mornings spent stepping over pools of fresh blood. Emmelie Prophète allowed us to enter the belly of the beast.
Today, another novelist of the same caliber exposes the other side of this bloody story. Kettly Mars sets her furious tale in the affluent part of the megalopolis that is Port-au-Prince. She observes this colorful and wealthy crowd in its nocturnal pursuits with a goldsmith’s magnifying glass. While Prophète was sober, Mars pours a burning larva onto the page. Her words remain incandescent without ever losing their effectiveness.
Her alter ego, Désirée, known as Zi, belongs to that fringe of the petty bourgeoisie honest enough not to try to justify being part of the problem. During the day, she can be found in the tasteful gallery she inherited from her mother, Makaya, frequented by painters from Saint-Soleil and sculptors from the Village de Nouailles.
As soon as dusk falls, Zi heads off to cocktail parties where she rubs shoulders with international financiers, feminist senators, sincere but married seducers, and above all, sharp-toothed sharks mingling with alluring sirens, while pot-bellied crocodiles chat quietly with starving models who devour houseplants in the dim light.
Zi’s criticism often hits the mark because she alternates between gentleness (rare) and violence (constant), thus avoiding completely despairing those who can only endure her fury. She never spares herself, and this lucidity means that her monologue always rings true.
The novel opens with a long verbal panorama that exposes these social monsters under a blinding spotlight. One wonders why it is women (Emmelie Prophète, Kettly Mars, and their initiator Marie Vieux Chauvet) who so crudely expose what goes on behind the scenes. They are not fooled by the sales pitch, knowing that women can only be prey in the eyes of these predators.
Sensing that she will not leave the Magic Island alive, Zi does not hesitate to throw herself into the fray. The rest of the time, she weaves her web to catch a few lone wolves. Lover or enemy? A man has just thrown himself headlong into her heart. But now she is caught in her own game. Thus begins a passionate story set against the backdrop of gang warfare in a devastated city. To find her man for the night, Zi must cross dangerous neighborhoods. Their desire ignites a great fire in the bedroom.
This new novelist is on her fifteenth book, and the title of her latest is quite long: I Won’t Find You Twice in the Same Body—as if to say that this romantic encounter with this overly seductive expatriate will be brief and perhaps without consequence, but surely devastating.
As discreet as she is when she observes, she is just as direct when she is naked. She notes the initial shock of meeting this seductive doctor: That first kiss that erased everything, the sweat, the blood, the explosions, the betrayals, the rout of the flamboyants. Our bodies brushed against each other, touched and fused together. An orgasm that felt like a thrilling race under a shower of flowers and tears. Back home, she already laments:You can’t put a man in your skin when a city turns into a minefield, when you’ve never had a man in your skin so intensely before.
What to do with the gift of one of those mischievous little devils that swarm around Haitian nights? A man versus a country? The miserable Faustian pact. As soon as she accepts, the devil tests her twins, her best friend caught up in a media-political storm, in exchange for a few months where she will feel more alive than ever before.
From the very first encounters, everything is laid out on the table. Zi listens, impassive. He will not leave his wife, and he has already found work elsewhere. She coldly lays down her conditions, knowing full well that passion will sweep away all this chatter. Beneath the window, the city is already burning.
Along the way, we learn all about corruption in this country, from top to bottom. At the top, the clumsy game of this troupe of bad actors who have taken a breathless audience hostage with false promises, while at the bottom, people continue to be kidnapped, raped, and killed with machetes. And the corpses float in a sea of black mud, blood, and oil. This does not prevent a man from meeting a woman’s gaze.
Kettly Mars has just performed a triple backflip, eliminating all obstacles (the numerous barricades and travel bans) in the path of a woman in a country where her body is a lawless zone. To leave or to stay, that is the question? And she answers it with rare eloquence. Emmelie Prophète and Kettly Mars, with their very different styles, have addressed the country’s problems. A Haiti without folklore, where they choose to tell the truth by looking the bastards straight in the eye. This country is sinking with style.
Kettly Mars, Je ne te trouverai pas deux fois dans ce même corps
(Mémoire d’encrier, 2026)
On Saturday, March 7, Kettly Mars will sign her new novel and answer questions from Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, her interlocutor. The meeting and book signing will take place from 2 to 5 p.m. at the North Miami Public Library (1601 NE 164th St, North Miami Beach, FL 33162). Come one, come all!
