Desiree Congo

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot—one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world—constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval.

It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces—a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.