Novel
Mimola or the Story of a Casket
Mimola ou l'histoire d'une cassette
Antoine Innocent · 1906
Synopsis
Aunt Rosalie, a woman from Dahomey who was reduced to slavery, has left a daughter, Julie. After her death, Julie's youngest child, Mimola, falls under the grip of a nervous illness that nothing cures, as if seized by occult forces. Her mother consults the vodou priests and takes her on a pilgrimage to the Saut-d'Eau waterfall, at Ville-Bonheur; two young men educated in Paris, Léon Dajobert and Albert Deltan, accompany them and discuss along the way the place of vodou in Haitian society.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in the newspaper Le Soir, then in book form the same year from E. Malval, under the subtitle Petit tableau de mœurs locales. The criticism of the time, according to Giulia Zanin, accused the author of encouraging superstition and of attacking the Catholic clergy. The book was reissued in 1935, 1970, 1981, 1999, 2006 and 2019, and Susan Kalter translated it from French and Creole into English in 2018, for the Illinois State University presses.
Who it is for
A novel in French mixed with Creole, reissued in Haiti in 2019 and translated into English; the reader enters into the practices of Vodou.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first Haitian indigenist novel to depict Vodou, it remained its author's only book.
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