This book is written in a very special format called
spiralism. As you follow the spiral in a sort of imagined space, you see some of the same sights and hear some of the same stories on repeat, as if you are passing by them recurrently. A dézafi (in Haitian creole) is a cockfight, literally, and can also mean a struggle like the struggle to live in a brutal dictatorship of the type that Haiti suffered at the time the novel was published (1975). It’s challenging to read but I find myself connecting the abstractions about tyranny to what’s going on right now in our own country, especially in Minneapolis, especially under the dictator in Washington and his passive enablers in Congress and his goon squads of masked thugs.
In the novel, typeface changes signal the type of narrator. Sometimes an omniscient narrator who portrays the characters such as Uncle. Sometimes the stream of consciousness of a sort of collective. Third person narratives appear in a sanserif typeface — these describe life in the village and a story about some individuals.
“In Ravin Sèch, in Bouanèf, life is hard for the villagers. Thick tangled underbrush, thorns, dense shrubs, whitethorn acacia, sisal. In the midst of the collection of decrepit huts that make up the village a few strangely elegant houses with corrugated iron roofs stand out. Under a rusty bridge a few children are sitting around, arms crossed. A chatty river the color of horse piss flows caressingly over rocks and pebbles. The MacDonald Company railway tracks unfurl straight ahead flanked by two battalions of banana trees. Farther in the distance the sky and the sea are quarreling over whose blue mantle prettier.” (p. 21)
Alternately there is a stream of consciousness with various individual’s identities, printed in italics:
“The cock crowed long ago... The drums have been rumbling, the bamboo horns growling, and the conch shells honking for quite a while. Don’t keep hanging on to a rotten branch. Don’t rush to speak while the wind is blowing. Learn to listen so you don’t mistake the sound of rain falling for the rumbling of the storm. You just open your mouth and the swirling dust changes direction and the smoke somersaults. Let’s learn to observe! Let’s learn to listen.” (p. 22)
Dézafi is a challenging book, as it constantly spirals back to the same thing, and as I read I felt more and more how it was repetitive and demanding of my attention to what was new and what I had read before. We return frequently to the Loupgarou or werwolf and to zonbis, a kind of undead creatures. Poetic passages define the terms;
A stab with a dagger to puncture the two-headed drum
A flash of lightning to reveal the double-edged knife
A loaded word to unmask the fifth-column traitor
A shedding of skin to undress the mardi gras figure
A handful of salt to knock out the lougarou’s teeth
A stroke of the whip to knock o% the rotting navel
A cup of water to kill the death vèvè
A single rock thrown to blind the eye of the devil peering through the peephole
A single word uttered to open up the road to the sun
A single cry for help to clear the path to the light. (p. 56-57)
There’s so much to learn about zonbies such as their reaction to salt —
“Alibé, my brother, salt gives soul. When salt gets into a zonbi’s bloodstream, it slaps his body, shakes up his guts, wakes up his brain. Once a zonbi gets a taste of salt, he stops being passive, he becomes a bouanouvo, he sees clearly, he becomes strong. That’s when he gets enraged and wants to break loose. You understand, Alibé? You understand why Sintil says salt is poison?”
I’m not sure I understand this book.
Review © 2026 mae sander
