The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2024
Set in contemporary Haiti, Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor arrives to the Anglosphere at a time when the Caribbean nation is in the news for ongoing political, economic, and humanitarian crises. In Nathan H. Dize’s translation, the words of Makenzy’s protagonist almost seem to presage the current moment as he articulates: “In short, this country is a sea of shit. A tomb. . . we live in a black hole. We’d all leave if we could, every single one of us.”
The protagonist does not have a name—or more specifically, he cannot seem to remember it. Presumably abandoned by his helpless family in a hurricane-ravaged countryside, he is only given an alphanumerical code as an identity, and grows up in a lakou ruled by a self-fashioned, pseudo-spiritual leader—the titular Emperor, who occupies the most beautiful house in all of the lakou. The protagonist sketches: “The other houses planted around the Emperor’s are not homes but narrow sheep pens, ajoupas, huts, used to corral an entire flock of absent souls, followers who are forced-fed truths and falsehoods by the mystical master. . .” Amongst them, the protagonist—who is later christened “P” by the only woman he will ever love—is the least sheeplike. Celebrated as a drummer in the local Vodou rituals but equally subjected to the lakou’s terrors, the narrative follows his life as he manages to flee its confines, reincarnating himself as a newspaper deliveryman in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The Emperor is written in a stream of consciousness style, and this design of P’s thoughts communicates the claustrophobic nature of his mental landscape, on which scurries a concoction of anger, anxiety, distrust, and a constant sense of imminent, lurking violence. Almost reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, the narrative is carried along an overarching tone of disconnection; in addition to his namelessness, the protagonist is also unaware of what he looks like. He ruminates on never having looked at his own reflection, and apprehends whether his appearance resembles the person he is inside. However, P is not the only one who remains nameless (and faceless); the host of characters he introduces—whether exploitative or comforting or everyday neutral—are never named. Fundamentally, this perhaps conveys the extent of withdrawal the protagonist embodies due to his past experiences, because such is how power shapes its subjects. P, whose only close companion is the “Other Within” (the voice inside his head), speculates: “How could I survive until now in this immeasurable solitude?”
This tale of merciless solitude, once it shifts within the cityscape, also becomes a document of navigating the streets on foot while internalizing the strangest of extremes—a tale that feels like a daily blessing of stars in magical sunrises, but a tale that also endures the constant, raging threat of armed gangs. At times, there is a hint of an eventual resignation to the daily drudge, while in the background, plenty happens in the circadian, firsthand experience of poverty and natural calamity: the public protests, the indifference of the state, and a general, disorienting lawlessness. This cramped existence—marked by a loneliness desperately filled with masturbation, an affair which meets an abrupt end, and the psychological chaos of remembering his past life—ultimately culminates in a murder. It is here that the tale essentially begins as the protagonist waits in his bedroom for the police to find him.
Orcel’s oeuvre instinctively looks at life from the standpoint of the most marginal. His previous novel, The Immortals, bore testimony to the lives of female sex workers on the Grand Rue in the aftermath of the apocalyptic 2010 earthquake, and in The Emperor, the sense of a temporal crisis—the impossibility of a future—continues. In addition to the meteorological catastrophe that left P orphaned, there is a series of socio-political crises that define P as a subject-citizen of the end times—crises which are conveniently employed to legitimise Western economic, military, and political interference. In this sense, the genesis of the apocalyptic era lies in the horrific legacy of plantation slavery and colonialism. One of the most blatant expressions of this legacy is language, as P articulates at one point: “Like the vast majority of Haitians, I speak Kreyol. And, those who speak Kreyol have limits, we’re not accorded any sort of grandeur or relevance, we are not considered gentlemen. Contrary to those who awkwardly slap two or three words in French together to show off, earning their place and that of others.”
In Tropical Apocalypse, Martin Munro discusses the apocalyptic tone employed by contemporary Haitian writers. As the apocalypse is an evangelical concept, the apocalyptic, he writes, is often circumvented by the Afro-Creole religion of Vodou through its belief in the “regeneration of the world”, in which death is a celebration: the beginning of life as the body returns to the natural environment. Vodou, with its emphasis on the cycle of life and rebirth, is more attuned to a sense of the never-ending. Though it imbibed the aspect of millenarianism through its contact with European Christianity, such a millenarian element served a different function. Broken away from its Western and theological context, it instead set in motion a firm belief in the end of a turbulent period of time, not time itself.
Additionally, the Vodou rituals honouring the deity of war, Ogou Feray, includes the mention of Boukman, Dessalines, and Christophe—all key personalities in the Haitian Revolution. This return to the beginning of the nation is not ascribed to a choked future in a temporal loop, but rather pays tribute to the past, deriving from it a renewed courage and revolutionary spirit to move towards the future—a necessary conviction amidst the ruinous present, which otherwise, as described by P, “gradually crumbles in the depths of anticipation. . .”.
However, there is a certain faithlessness associated with Vodou in The Emperor, which has as its epigraph Nina Simone’s “Ain’t got no God”. The scepticism of P, shaped by his personal experience in the baobab-shrouded lakou, is not presented as an offence to the memories of Haitian ancestors and their lwas (spirit forms), but as a consequence of religious power being used to justify the worst of human behaviour. The Haitian nation is no stranger to the prospect of the institution of religion as repressive political force, especially as demonstrated by the dictatorial regime of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his brutal militiamen, the Tonton Macoutes, some of whom were also influential Vodou priests in their community. During this time, Vodou became a Duvalierian institution, and upon the death of Duvalier, who had once declared himself “president for life”, he was canonised and venerated as a lwa. Munro writes, in Tropical Apocalypse, about post-slavery organised groups such as the Tontons Macoutes and the Chimères: “[T]he notorious private militia of the Duvalier presidents, were named after the Creole bogeymen figures who would kidnap errant children in the night and keep them in their knapsacks, while . . . the organized gangs hired from the urban slums to support Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas party, are named after shadowy monsters . . . . In both cases, the names . . . suggest that they are manifestations of the unfinished past, phantoms born of the enduring legacy of slavery in the Caribbean.” In a certain sense, the Haitian past is ever-present— both recognising the perpetuation of its apocalyptic cycle through references of traumatic servitude and, at the same time, yearning to break free of the same cycle through revering memories of the Haitian Revolution.
On the surface, The Emperor might come across as a novel of P’s personal torment, but it is concurrently an elegy of a failing nation. After having left the lakou, P feels that he has escaped from the fate that The Emperor had envisioned for him—of being transformed into a version of the zonbi. Yet, looking back at his life in the lakou, he fondly remembers the Very Old Sheep. Dedicated to Vodou, the Very Old Sheep had come from another era, descended from a line of ancestors who had witnessed the Haitian Revolution. He also happened to be the only person in the lakou who treated the Emperor’s authority with scepticism. Eventually tortured into silence, he chose to discreetly recount his memories to P, who unsurprisingly offers to him the most beautiful lines of the text: “This yoke of misery was my Our Father, my Hail Mary, my Dahomey, my four hundred and one lwa, my twenty-one nations, my painful bread, my enraged drums in the heart of bodies, my trance.” With this, Makenzy seems to quietly express that the only way to escape from contemporary terrors, from the prolonged and deafening end of the world, is to draw from the strengths of the past.
Moumita Ghosh is a Kolkata-based freelance writer and researcher.
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