2024/169: Hadriana in All My Dreams — René Depestre (translated by Kaiama L Glover)

One thing he said was very true: even in my coffin I was far closer to a carnival drum than to the tolling of church bells. [loc. 1580]

Set mostly in 1938, in the Haitian seaside town of Jacmel, this is the story of Hadriana Siloé, a white French girl who dies at the altar on her wedding day -- but has actually been zombified. The story's told, mostly, by her friend Patrick Altamont: they shared the same godmother, Madame Villaret-Joyeuse, who's reputed to have seven loins (there's a note in the afterword about the translator's difficulty in 'figuring out how to translate Depestre’s twenty or so terms for human genitalia') and whose final lover was a 'diabolical deflowerer' who'd been transformed into a butterfly. Patrick remains infatuated with Hadriana, whose death came after she said 'yes' to her wedding vows, and who's therefore the widow of Hector Danoze; whose death is celebrated not with a solemn mass but with a bacchanalian carnival; whose body mysteriously vanishes from her grave.

I liked the different modes of the narrative, from Patrick's breathless account of Hadriana's death to Hadriana's own account of ... well, of what happened next. (And what happened before the wedding: despite her family's wealth and whiteness, she was far from the helpless virginal heroine of other zombie stories, and clearly relished her sexual adventures and her 'sinfulness'.) The novel is erotic, fantastical, phantasmagorial and often very funny. I also found some scenes harrowing, in particular when Hadriana, escaping her captors, sought help in the town. The townsfolk loved their 'Creole fairy' and had just spent an evening celebrating her life and mourning her death -- but nobody would respond to her frantic banging on doors.

The Introduction by Edwidge Danticat contextualises the story as a deconstruction of the zombie trope, a negation of the typical Hollywood offering of brainless monsters. While the political context is only lightly sketched, the romanticism that echoes through this novel written in exile is lush and poignant. Danticat's introduction also mentioned 'lodyans', a term with which I wasn't familiar: it's a Haitian literary tradition, 'a tongue-in-cheek narrative genre meant to provoke laughter'.

Fulfils the ‘Inspired By Caribbean Mythology, Legend, or Folklore’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.