Haitian author Makenzy Orcel rose to prominence by publishing his first novel The Immortals in which he pays tribute to the Haitian prostitutes who died during the 2010 earthquake. In his new novel A human sum, who was a Goncourt 2022 finalist, the writer gives the floor to a young Frenchwoman whose voice reaches us from beyond the grave. Combining history and the individual quest, this seventh opus from the pen of this talented novelist is a total and poetic novel.
On the occasion of the publication this fall of his new novel A human sumthe Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel affirmed at the microphone of RFI: My literary project was first of all a voice “. He recounted how he was awakened one morning by a voice saying to him: Everything clears up from death… “. ” With this sentence, I had my novel… “, told Makenzy Orcel.
How can we be surprised when it is with this sentence that his new opus, incandescent and poetic, opens: ” everything clears up from death… time, as soon as it is stripped of its mysteries and its metamorphoses, bathes in an ocean of pure day, it seems to be returning to its inner source, I no longer feel its rough and feverish language, its irrepressible breath, the past, the present and the future unfold parallel in their respective situation and continuum, united in the same mirror, between the imminence and the absolute, the depths of the sky and the deepest tiny element in the human composition… »
Makenzy Orcel is a voice, a language, pure poetry that flows like diamonds on today’s diaphanous skin. At less than 40 years old, the man is one of the rising stars in the literary sky of Haitian letters, rich in stars and “ sewing suns » or to unravel. The flow of his poetic language is the strength of his stories, often tragic, but always inventive and baroque. A human sum is no exception to the rule.
Memory from beyond the grave
The novel tells the life and death of a young French woman, thirty years old. She committed suicide by throwing herself under the subway trains. Character never named, poet-slammer in her spare time, she dreamed of a simple happiness, but betrayed and abused by the man she loved, she took her own life. The approximately 600 pages of the book give to read the memories of beyond the grave of this character. Through the first-person text, the protagonist’s personal and desperate quest gradually emerges, but also the panorama of a contemporary France, rich in struggles and promises.
The main originality of the novel consists in telling the plot through the perspective of a deceased, making the character’s voice resonate beyond the borders of the known world. The dead are not dead in the universe of Makenzy Orcel. ” They are in the trembling tree, in the groaning wood as the poet would say.
How did this idea of telling life from the perspective of the deceased come about?
” It’s an old idea answers the writer. It was my mother who imprinted it in my head. She always told us stories, but each time they were stories of the dead. I was saying : ” Why, Mom, do you always tell us stories of the dead? We are here, we are alive. Tell us stories of the living. She then had this sentence saying that the dead are in the truth, we are in the lie. We don’t stop lying, but the dead, they, from over there, they know the truth about us, about everything. I kept all these stories in my head, and then at some point I thought there would be a way to write a book from my mother’s voice. Hence the idea of this old woman who tells from this place. I said to myself this idea is feasible, it is a universally romantic idea. This is the story of mankind. And now, I’m going to make it a trilogy. »
The first part of the trilogy, animal shadow, released in 2016, takes place in Haiti. An old Haitian talks about the place of her death. She goes up the river of her life, tells the social and political history of her native country, but also its myths and the story of its origins. In short, a total novel, where individual history and great history meet. A human sum, the second volume, is part of this approach, with the ambition of capturing French life in its entirety, through the experience of its heroine, who is emblematic of all the lives of women at a given time. An ambitious, epic project, which proposes to take us to the United States, in its third part.
A vengeful anger
The centrality of the feminine condition characterizes the work of Makenzy Orcel. At the center of his trilogy, three women with a painful destiny, but who move by the strength of their quest. The writer has often told how much he remains marked forever by the battles fought by his mother, her courage, her generosity. A human sum is dedicated to this maternal figure, the potomitan of her son’s life.
Born in 1983, in Martissant, a slum of Port-au-Prince, Makenzy Orcel became known by publishing his first novel The Immortals. Who are the immortals? These are the prostitutes of the Haitian capital who died during the 2010 earthquake, and to whom the novelist pays homage by tearing them from their prison made of rubble and their reputation as bad women, which sticks to their skin. The Immortals is not a book on prostitution, nor on the earthquake, but a story that gives voice to those who have not had the right to speak.
” I was born angry, I’ve been angry all my life, it’s this anger that made me want to write Makenzy Orcel likes to repeat. Author today of a fruitful work, rich in novels, stories, short stories and collections of poetry, he draws attention to himself by his desire to be the spokesperson for what he calls with vengeful anger ” the bottom of things “.
” When we grew up in a popular neighborhood, explains the author, almost all you see around you is violence, it’s despair, it’s children without fathers, it’s a country that is going adrift. All is not well. I just rather nothing goes. It’s a worrying world. From an early age, I wanted to tell about this disturbing world. At some point, it came out like this. My first collection of poems. Haiti is a country where poetry is a major genre. In my work, my little approach is to put the story at the service of the poem or the poem at the service of the story. The meeting of the two gives a book like L’ombre animal and A human sum that has just appeared. »
Next Saturday, in the second part of this column devoted to Makenzy Orcel, we will dwell at greater length on the fertile alliance of the poetic and the romantic in A human sum.
A human sum, by Makenzy Orcel. Editions Rivages, 622 pages, 22 euros.