Popa Singer (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French)

The latest novel by one of Haiti’s most brilliant writers

The most recent book by the renowned Haitian novelist, essayist, and poet René Depestre, Popa Singer is a semiautobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule.

To celebrate her son’s return home after years of exile, Dianira Fontoriol (aka “Popa Singer”)—an indomitable mother armed only with her sewing machine and her personal convictions—determines to resist in her own way the infamous Ubu King of the Tropics: François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Depestre’s novel tells the story of this at once intimate and epic struggle. Combining colorful fantasy and biting social satire, it is a deeply personal and singularly artistic take on an infamous chapter in Haitian history.

René Depestre is one of the most important and celebrated Haitian writers of his generation. He is the author of The Festival of the Greasy Pole, among many works, and winner of the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle and the Prix Renaudot. Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University. She is the prizewinning translator of René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, among other works.