When she first embarked on her new book, When the Mapou Sings, Nadine Pinede ’86 thought she was writing a work of nonfiction. A Haitian-American writer, Pinede had always been fascinated by the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s trips to Haiti in 1936 and 1937 and the fieldwork she’d conducted there on traditional folklore and spiritual practices. Hurston wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while living in Haiti; and her anthropological investigations yielded another, stranger book, too: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, a genre-breaking firsthand account of her sometimes shocking discoveries.
But Pinede soon realized there were too many holes in the story. Very few of Hurston’s letters from that time still exist, and her fieldwork notebooks have vanished. Pinede was intrigued by a reference to a young Haitian woman named Lucille—in Tell My Horse, Hurston mentions hiring her as a domestic servant and praises her, but nothing else is known about Lucille’s life. “The more I got into the research, the more I saw that there were just a lot of mysteries and gaps to be filled,” Pinede says. “And that’s an invitation to write historical fiction.”
Nearly two decades (and an M.F.A. and numerous writing workshops) later, the book that has emerged is a young-adult novel that blends politics and magic realism and more than one love story. The narrative is centered on the character of Lucille, a teenager coming of age in 1930s Haiti, in the years after the American occupation. A daughter whose mother died giving birth to her, she is bold, resourceful, and aching for connection. She hears a woman’s voice—her mother’s, she thinks—singing to her from inside one of the sacred mapou trees near her home. She carves figurines from wood, a craft learned from her father, and becomes close friends with a classmate, the beautiful and sweet Fifina.
But when Fifina suddenly goes missing and her mapou tree is cut down, Lucille marches to the home of the village section chief, a powerful and corrupt official, to confront him. That brash act puts her family at risk and sends her fleeing to Port-au-Prince, where she finds forbidden love, encounters some of Haiti’s real-life luminaries—anthropologists, artists, editors, democracy activists—and, eventually, lands in Hurston’s household. The novel’s final section, when Lucille joins the author on her fieldwork in Haiti’s countryside, is a breathless journey through danger, heartbreak, and hope, before winding back toward home.
The novel is written in verse. With its short lines and abundance of white space, narrative poetry can be more accessible and inviting for young readers than text-filled pages of prose, Pinede says, but also: poetry is often better suited for conveying painful emotions and traumatic experiences. A more glancing and indirect art form, “It can be a way of controlling heavy, dark material that would be overwhelming in prose.”
When the Mapou Sings is Pinede’s first plunge into young-adult fiction. A poet, essayist, and short-story writer now based near Brussels, Belgium, she created an independent concentration at Harvard, in literature and social criticism (after the enormously popular Gen Ed course of the same name taught by the late psychiatrist Robert Coles). Later, as a Rhodes Scholar, she earned a master’s in literature at Oxford University, and then a Ph.D. in the philosophy of education at Indiana University. For her M.F.A., at the Whidbey Writers Workshop in Washington State, Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat served as thesis adviser and helped Pinede shape and refine her idea for When the Mapou Sings.
In writing the book, she spent countless hours in archives and libraries, reading histories and biographies, listening to recordings, examining Hurston’s original manuscripts. Pinede’s plot unfolds between 1934 and 1937, a period of tremendous political and creative ferment in Haiti, but one that isn’t well understood—“Even for people who study the history of Haiti,” she says. (Much of what was produced about Haiti around then, such as The Magic Island, by American travel writer William Seabrook, or early Hollywood movies like White Zombie, offered sensationalized versions of the country. Says Pinede, “That’s part of what Zora Neale Hurston was working against in her research.”)
And so, the writer also drew on her own family’s past. Pinede’s parents, Claudette (a science educator) and Eduarde (an engineer), were Haitian exiles from the Duvalier dictatorship, and her great-grandmother had grown up during the American occupation and became a market woman selling goods in Port-au-Prince’s historic Iron Market (an illustration of its iconic red gate now decorates the back jacket of When the Mapou Sings). When Pinede was a child, her mother would tell vivid, dramatic stories about “Grandmè Mimise,” who, Pinede says, was “a woman ahead of her time”: unruly, independent, hard-headed—a survivor. She became the main inspiration for the character of Lucille.
Pinede’s parents had met as students on an academic fellowship in Paris, and Pinede and her younger brother grew up in Canada and the United States. But Haitian culture was deeply woven into their childhoods. “In our house, there was Haitian food; there was Haitian music,” she says. “We had Haitian history books. We had the busts of the fathers of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe.” A home the family spoke French and Haitian Creole, while the children learned English in school. They also traveled to Haiti regularly. “After Papa Doc died”—president and dictator François Duvalier, who died in 1971—“we were able to go visit every summer,” she says. “Things were still repressive, but not as much, and families could be reunited.”
It was a complicated childhood in some ways: she grew up very aware of Haiti’s fraught and often painful relationship to the United States, and recalls sometimes being bullied by other children for being Haitian. But for her and her brother, “There was a lot of pride in the culture,” she says. Pinede’s mother was a great storyteller and keeper of family lore, and she inspired her daughter to write. “Our parents made sure that we had a deep knowledge of Haiti and a strong sense of identity from all facets of our history—because the Caribbean was the original melting pot. Much of it was against our will [because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade], but there is great richness there.”
Pinede often speaks in similar terms: of richness, accumulation, connection. The hyphen in Haitian-American is a bridge, she says, not a wall. She talks that way about When the Mapou Sings, too. The novel is full of historical facts and references to real people and events; their presence deepens the narrative and gives context to the crises that dominate today’s news about Haiti.
But the book not a history lesson, Pinede says. It is a story about people. More than once, Lucille recites the Haitian Creole proverb, “Tout moun se moun”: Everybody is somebody. “Really,” Pinede says, the book is “a story of different kinds of love”: filial and maternal, friendship and romance, the connection to home and to the natural world. “And then there’s the love that develops between Zora and Lucille,” she says, two women who don’t trust each other when they first meet, who find themselves both tied together and pulled apart by history and identity.
Meanwhile, history is a thread that weaves through the story. “It is a continuous presence,” she says. “History, as they say, is never really history. It moves through us today.”
