12645: Comments on Enice Toussaint's book (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Nlbo@aol.com

 Corbeteers,
I bought Enice Toussain'ts  295 page first person narrative " Une femme parmi
tant d'autres" in Montreal last Friday. Reading her kept me awake all night
Friday and I stayed with it all day Saturday. I shed tears, laughed and
uttered " Oh My God, is that true !'  while reading it.
I was on the phone with Encie for an hour Monday confirming the authenticity
of her story. She did not write it as a novel which I found quite intriguing
and courageous.  She narrated a story of survival, a story of a Haitian woman
orphaned at an early age who had survived a life time of rape, physical,
verbal, mental abuses while being in a romantic relationship with her
husband's cousin from the time she married him until she decided to leave him.
Obviously, one can read the story  of new immigrants who have to adapt to a
new culture, working menial jobs in factories workers, nursing homes, live
-in maids, and the like.
What I found most intriguing is her courage to  graphically narrate  her
intimate life which Haitian women don't discuss, not along write a book about
it in a non fiction format( memoire).  Among her paramours, I found her love
affair with her husband's cousin quite shocking, especially when  the cousin
migrated from Haiti and all three of them were in the same apartment,
continuing the affair and the husband never knew about it until she could not
keep the secret and told him herself.
I also found her a woman of heart. Though her husband was abusing her in
Haiti, she had him migrate to Canada. Though the abuses continued in
Montreal, she stayed with him until
the children that her husband had prior to marrying her arrived in Canada
also.
There is a lot more that those of you who speak French should read. I would
also recommend  linguists and anthropologists to analyze this book .Though it
is written in French, the tone, the expressions are Creole. Someone told me
this style is called " "couleur locale".
For instance, when she described a folk remedy that her aunt administered,
she wrote,
"Elle m'a frictionnée et elle m'a donnée à boire quelque chose qui goutait
mauvais."
>From her reading her story, she confirmed a conclusion that I made when I
spent a year conducting surveys, interviewing men and women from all social
strata in Haiti and in various states in the diaspora about their
relationships with one another.  Contrarily to what many think, men are not
the only ones involved in affairs, cheatings, having children with more than
one partner. Women are engaged in those behaviors also. Some cases may be
attributed to economic factors. As one often hears, a woman gets a child
while trying to feed the other. In other circumstances,  women like men have
affairs for emotional , social, curious, physical , and other reasons.
I wrote two grants so I could find time and resources to analyze and write a
comprehensive report of this survey, but did not get fundings. I pursued
other interests and  put that project aside.
Again if one can read French, Enice's book is intriguing .
Nekita