Cléante Valcin

Cléante Desgraves Valcin (born 13 January 1891 in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti; died 26 January 1956) was a feminist activist and French-language writer.

Quotes

La Blanche Négresse (1934 novel)

translated into English by Jeanne Jégousso with the title The White Negress (2024)

• - "Doctor," Raoul Desvallons said desperately, "is it true nothing else can be done to save my wife?" (beginning of Chapter I)

• For [him] a woman's heart was just a toy: he had broken so many of them without remorse! (chapter I)

• Remorse is a slow but harsh venom. (chapter III)

Cruelle Destinée (1929 novel)

translated into English by Jeanne Jégousso with the title Cruel Destiny (2024)

• - "Madeleine?... Jane?... Did you see your father leave?"
  "Yes," said Jane to her mother, "Daddy kissed me, crying, and told me he is coming back in fifteen minutes...."
  - "Where was I? Where was Madeleine? What time was it? Why did no one call us? Oh my God! Oh my God!"
  • beginning of Chapter I

• "Poor little white butterflies!" [she] thought. "Why is your life so fragile and our game so brutal?" (chapter IV)

• The stronger the love, it seems, the more the indifference is felt among the spouses who, before their union, did not ask themselves if they esteemed each other a little, if after the hurricane of their violent passions they could find calm in the shade of friendship. (chapter VIII)

• Wealth does not cure the illnesses of the mind and the heart. Only the affection, the devotion, the altruism of a loved one can if not cure them, at least alleviate them. (chapter X)

• [she] remained silent, but her whole soul was torn with pain. (chapter X)

• The heart has, in a hidden corner, a seed of ingratitude ready to germinate at the slightest circumstance; one can prevent this unhappy seed from growing with vigorous and incessant efforts, and eventually annihilate it, but it takes very little for the seed to be reborn as if by magic. (chapter XIII)

Quotes about

• [about the translations of her novels being published in English] it creates a space to consider the merits of Valcin's oeuvre on its own grounds and to appreciate the work, in context, for beginning to voice the realities of a sector of Haitian women at a time when all Haitian women were largely silenced, ignored, and violently repressed, for what it dared to say.
  • Myriam J. A. Chancy, from her Forward (2023) to Cruel Destiny & The White Negress

• Cléante Desgraves Valcin's Cruel Destiny and The White Negress are two extraordinary works of twentieth-century Haitian feminist literature that merit our attention today. Thanks to Jégousso and Nemmers's elegant and clear-eyed rendering of Valcin's sentimental prose, present-day readers have a truly precious opportunity to consider both race and gender in ways that transgress the stubborn borders of the Atlantic world.
  • Kaiama L. Glover, used as blurb for Cruel Destiny & The White Negress (2024)

• a pivotal figure of Haitian feminism and literature.
  • Nadève Ménard, from blurb for Cruel Destiny & The White Negress (2024)

• For too long Haiti has been a locus only of misery and penury in the imagination of the English-speaking world, the Pearl of the Antilles having been tainted by writers like Seabrook, who made a fortune peddling lurid tales of werewolves, cannibals, and zombies to credulous American audiences. May it be that introducing Anglophone readers to the vital perspective of Cléante Desgraves Valcin helps offer a corrective to that enduring astigmatism.
  • Adam Nemmers, from his editor's Introduction to Cruel Destiny & The White Negress (2024)

• Among the less predictable consequences of the American Occupation of Haiti, it is not paradoxical to see a radiant and sudden bloom of our literature, of which a few pathetic [editor's note: "Producing an effect upon the emotions; moving, stirring, affecting (obsolete)"] novels will bear witness to our most distant posterity of the reaction of our souls in the face of the brutality of this situation. The White Negress that Madame Virgile Valcin presents today for advertising partakes of the same nobility of feeling. It is a psychological drama. A moving drama which shows the harsh instinct of possession, the tenderness of the father, a husband's affection [editor's note: "Favorable or kindly disposition toward a person or thing (obsolete)"] toward pride, vanity, and the psychosis of racial prejudice.
  • Jean Price-Mars, from his Preface (1934) to La Blanche Négresse. Translated into English by Jeanne Jégousso

• Madame Virgile Valcin not only wrote this book with the talent of an informed storyteller, but she poured all her heart into it, a heart aching from the bruises from which we have all suffered for nineteen years while our homeland has been occupied by the American military forces and by the occult power of American finance. With the skill that befits such a delicate task, she has weaved the action of the drama within all the social, political, and mundane material with which Haitian life was kneaded during these heavy years...It is this amalgam of fiction and realism, mixed with a certain poetic taste, that gives The White Negress the endearing interest which characterizes this book from the first to the last page.
  • Jean Price-Mars, from his Preface (1934) to La Blanche Négresse. Translated into English by Jeanne Jégousso