Description
Cléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was a poet, writer, and feministmost prominently Haiti's first published female novelist, who employed her sentimental fiction to explore matters of race, gender, nationalism, and sovereignty.A contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Valcin emerged as an influential writer and political figure among the Black Atlantic diaspora.Now, for the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation. Cruel Destiny(1929) tells the tragic love story of Armand and Adeline, drawn together by a magnetic attraction, yet kept apart by a dark family secret. Depicting the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti's elite society, it also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French. InThe White Negress(1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very differentmen, a Black Haitian lawyer, and a white American
