Poet, publisher, activist, the Haitian Rodney Saint-Éloi delivers with his novel When it’s sad Bertha sings a moving story of mourning and homage to his deceased mother. Standing in front of the coffin of the deceased, the writer evokes the trajectory of this powerful and fragile woman, exemplary of courage, maternal love and generosity. Under the poetic pen of the son, the mother becomes the metaphor of a country which has known the worst, but still remains animated by the hope of a brighter tomorrow.
After Dany Laferriere,Rodney Saint-Eloi is arguably Montreal’s most famous Haitian writer. Living since 2001 in the Quebec capital where he did his graduate studies, he became known as a publisher and poet. He is the founder of the publishing house Mémoire d’encrier, which publishes poets and prose writers from Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, but also Native American and Haitian authors, with the ambition of ” bring together the continents and dare to invent a new world “.
A writer himself, Rodney Saint-Éloi is the author of stories, essays and above all numerous collections of poetry, with evocative titles such as graffiti for aurora (1989), Anonymous stones (1994), I had a city of water, earth and happy rainbows (1999), or even I have a tree in my canoe (2010) and I am the daughter of the burnt baobab (2015), to name but a few.
Cyrano in shorts
Born in Cavaillon in Haiti in 1963, the man likes to say that he came to writing very early, writing, from the age of thirteen, love letters for his school friends. Among the teenagers around him, this Cyrano in shorts enjoyed a certain reputation. His initiation to poetry dates, according to the author, from his encounter with the work ofAimé Césairethis ” fundamental ghostwriter which has been the source of inspiration for generations of poets from Haiti and elsewhere: I came to writing by reading Césaire, fantasizing about life. What can it be when you’re in a country rotten by dictatorship? Césaire gave me back my body. When we read Notebook of the return to the native country, we feel a magic. Césaire communicated this magic to me, this ability to transform all the rot that surrounds us when we live under a dictatorship. And it gave me wings. I have become in this telluric power an element among the elements. Reading Césaire, I felt within me the fire that could not be extinguished. »
The poetic fire shines brightly in When it’s sad Bertha sings, the latest opus from the pen of Rodney Saint-Éloi. Less a novel than a prose poem, this book is a vibrant tribute from the poet to his mother who died in 2016. Published in 2020 in Canada, reissued last January in France, it has been compared by the writer Alain Mabanckou to the my mother’s book by Albert Cohen, whose writing by Saint-Éloi is reminiscent of the intensity and inventive energy.
The author recounted that it was standing in front of his mother’s coffin that the idea of writing a book recalling the trajectory of the deceased came to him, no doubt to better ward off the silence and the trauma of the dead. The result is a real catharsis story conducive to the identification between mother and son, which is mentioned in the opening page of the novel:
“I’m talking to you about Bertha.
Bertha is dead.
This sentence exists, I repeat it to doubt every word. To return to the past, to childhood, to renew the dialogue, to explore stories and silences. I teach a mother’s lesson to a son, and a son’s lesson to his mother. This strong link has made us into beings of sparks. How to repair the outrage that is death if not to put to music these words which resemble a love letter to the sea, a lullaby to the dead mother? Is there a prophecy that one day projects the son into the skin of the mother? Images invade my memory: a loving and beautiful mother, a scent of familiar linden, the taste of the native land, and this piece of blue sky.
Bertha’s voice speaks inside me.
His eyes stare at me. I am now my mother. »
A book that was not easy to write, if we are to believe the author. At the microphone of RFI, he confided that it required four years of intense work. Its text has gone through 77 different versions and survived 12,733 moments of doubt so that the son can get in tune with the mother and make the voice of the deceased heard through his own. This transfer, which is of the order of identification, was no doubt possible because as Bertha’s first-born, Rodney is the only one of his siblings to have known her for a long time, and this despite their separation at the following Bertha’s exile to the United States. It is indeed in Connecticut that Bertha will die, at the age of 72, by falling in her church.
Capital Woman
The eldest of the children, Rodney was born from Bertha’s first love, when she worked as a seamstress in a mulatto family in the beautiful neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The idyll could only end badly for the young 16-year-old teenager, of popular origin. Despite the gossip, the girl decided to keep the child and raise him alone, with the complicity of her grandmother Tida. Capital woman in the life of little Rodney, Tida dialogued with the stars. Illiterate herself, she introduced her great-grandson to the magic of the alphabet and the hieratic power of the biblical scriptures. Through Bertha, it is to grandmother Tida as well as to all the other women from the depths of the province of Chatry who helped him grow up that the writer pays homage in these pages.
” I wanted to say thank you, not just to Bertha, explains Rodney Saint-Éloi, but to all the women who have helped me to live. Somehow, I cleared myself of certain misunderstandings, of confusion, because I grew up in a completely patriarchal society, where you are told that the masculine prevails over the feminine. I saw the violence of men in Bertha’s life. Writing this book feels like washing myself to become a better human being and the son Bertha longs for. »
Above all, Bertha wanted her son to be different from the men in her life, all of whom disappointed her expectations. A stubborn lover, mother of four children from four different fathers, she went through life giving a lot, only receiving wounds and humiliations in return. ” None of the men in your life are at your funeral “, is surprised his son.
In one of the most beautiful chapters of his novel, Rodney Saint-Éloi recounts his mother’s art of loving. Whenever a new lover burst into her life, she was beaming with happiness, humming love songs all day long, until she neglected her son. To console himself, he took refuge in reading and writing. ” I choose to fade away, flying away on the wings of the alphabet, the place of my first exile. I discover forbidden lands, wars and peace. I stay late at night in the school library. Back home, under the blanket of my bed, I read by the light of a small oil lamp “, remembers the disappointed son. Don’t worry, the mother always ended up coming back, because the husbands were often fickle and unstable.
Requiem to the Dead Mother and Book of Absent Fathers, When it’s sad Bertha sings is also a hollow narrative of Haiti, of the ” rotten country », of its patriarchal society, its injustices and its bottomless miseries. Bertha is here the metaphor of this country victim of human and geological violence, which prevent it from flourishing. But Haiti never stopped resisting, astonishing the world with its creativity. Just like Bertha, who had made the Haitian proverb “Me fallen, me raised » his philosophy of life. When we fall, we get up. Haiti, Bertha, same fight.
When it’s sad Bertha sings, by Rodney Saint-Eloi. Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson. 272 pages, 19 euros.