Last summer, when Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, Dany Laferrière, who is arguably the island nation’s best-known living author, seemed exasperated by media requests for comment. “I had the impression that people were waiting for me to confirm the death of the president from the bottom of my bed in Montreal”, he wrote in an article published in The Journal of Montreal.
Instead he recommended reading a novel published in 2020, The Villages of God, which describes life in a poor neighborhood [de Port-au-Prince, la capitale haïtienne,] where the gangs run and the police can’t get in. According to Laferrière, the book humanizes the poor of Haiti while showing the disintegration of state power that created the conditions for the assassination of the head of state. And, unlike him, the author, Emmelie Prophet, lives in Port-au-Prince.
The media hooked. Overnight, the novelist was interviewed by all the major titles in Quebec, and her Montreal publisher, Mémoire d’encrier, had to reprint 10,000 copies of her work in less than a month to meet demand. According to Prophet, the turn of events has changed “the destiny of the book”.
The writer had already published five novels and garnered several awards and nominations, but the success of Villages of God in Canada and Europe earned him a particularly dazzling reputation. She greets the “burnt heads” of the Maison Mémoire d’encrier, founded by the Haitian poet Rodney Saint-Éloi, for having believed in her all this time. “It’s good to have editors like that.”
Rich catalog of indigenous authors
Operational since 2003, Mémoire d’encrier publishes more than twenty titles a year from its offices located on the edge of the Montreal neighborhoods of Rosemont and Villeray. It publishes Quebec authors, but also writers from Haiti, Africa and France. It also offers a judicious selection of translations [en français] authors such as Souvankham Thammavongsa, winner of the Giller Prize [le prix le plus prestigieux pour la littérature anglophone au Canada]and Ocean Vuong, a successful American novelist and poet*.
In addition, we can say that the publishing house has become a leader in the dissemination of Aboriginal literature in French. Its catalog contains novels by Innu writers Naomi Fontaine and Joséphine Bacon, as well as translations of works by Thomas King. [un romancier d’ascendance cherokee]Leanne Betasamosake Simpson [une artiste et intellectuelle membre de la Première Nation d’Alderville]Tomson Highway [un écrivain de culture crie] and the late Lee Maracle [1950-2021, qui était issue de la communauté amérindienne Sto:lo].
An exceptional success
Mémoire d’encrier is today a major player in the field of French-language literature: its authors are often in the running for the most prestigious Quebec prizes and the house can count on distribution networks in Canada, Haiti and certain regions. of French-speaking Europe. It has six full-time employees, three of whom — starting with the manager — are people of color.
This success contrasts with Quebec’s reputation for cultural homogeneity. Quebec’s media sector, the Conseil des arts et des lettres and the province’s cultural scene as a whole have all been criticized for their lack of diversity in recent years. Prime Minister François Legault’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism has become a permanent source of controversy.
In the field of publishing, however, the problem does not seem to be confined to the Canadian province. In 2020, the #PublishingPaidMe campaign highlighted on social media the low fees paid to black authors [dans toute l’Amérique du Nord]. The same year, an article published in the New York Times revealed that only 11% of titles published by major US publishers in 2018 were written by people of color. He also pointed out