Cruel Destiny and the White Negress: Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin

Cléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was a poet, writer, and feminist--most prominently Haiti’s first published female novelist, who employed her sentimental fiction to explore matters of race, gender, nationalism, and sovereignty. A contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Valcin emerged as an influential writer and political figure among the Black Atlantic diaspora. Now, for the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation.

Cruel Destiny (1929) tells the tragic love story of Armand and Adeline, drawn together by a magnetic attraction, yet kept apart by a dark family secret. Depicting the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti’s elite society, it also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French.

In The White Negress (1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very different men, a Black Haitian lawyer, and a white American carpetbagger. Putting a fresh spin on the tired tragic mulatta trope, Valcin reveals the racial prejudices, class tensions, and anti-colonial resentments of an island under American occupation.

Together, these two novels expand our understanding of Caribbean literature, as well as the political struggles and artistic triumphs of Black women in the Americas.

Cléante Desgraves Valcin (January 13, 1891 - January 26, 1956) was a Haitian feminist, activist, and writer.

Adam Nemmers is an associate professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He is the author of American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation and the coeditor of Yours in Filial Regards: The Civil War Letters of a Texan Family.

Jeanne Jégousso is an assistant professor of French at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She is the coeditor of Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is the author of multiple academic works and novels, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press, 1997), From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba & the Dominican Republic, and What Storm, What Thunder.