Gardens of Love and Loss
Review of Ida Faubert, Island Heart, translated by Danielle Legros Georges
by Mathilda Stock
Nearly eighty years ago, Haitian French poet Ida Faubert completed her first of two collections, Coeur des îles, a collection preoccupied with the different forms that love can take and, more specifically, the female experience of them. In 2021, Boston poet laureate Danielle Legros Georges published her translation of Faubert’s work, bringing the underrepresented poet to an anglophone audience. The collection’s main interest lies in different manifestations of love: the romantic, the platonic, the motherly, and love through grief, all depicted through natural motifs. As Legros Georges explains in her introduction, these poems from a prior century possess a keen relevance today. Faubert’s representation of feminine sensuality and perceptive comments on race and gender lift her work out of the narrow space to which it was relegated by the “white European imagination” (12–13).
Faubert’s habitus is one of blurred expectations and coalesced political identities. Born in Port-au-Prince the daughter of a Haitian president and a French woman and raised in a convent school during France’s Belle Epoque, she cannot easily be reduced to a simple demographic category (10). “Biracial, bicultural and privileged,” she challenges the social expectations of both Haiti and France. Legros Georges recovers her now as “one of Haiti’s great women poets” (14).
Island Heart surpasses expectations in its expression of intrinsically human qualities and experiences, such as love, loss, melancholy, and pleasure. The collection can be broken into three sections. The first is occupied with blissful yet transgressive love, the second with true love that cannot last, and the third with loss and grief.
In the first section, sensuality lies at the centre of each poem, daring us to think across limits. Several poems take place in obscure gardens under the veil of the night. “Tropical Night” depicts the speaker sinking into and becoming one with nature. “Evening” celebrates united silence among isolated lovers. “Dusk” embodies uncertainty and yearning, perhaps even an identity crisis. “I Would Like to Remain…” also features a nighttime garden. In this suite, love is not only strongly connected to the sensuality of the dark but also to the secrecy and indiscretion of the garden with its amatory and Biblical associations. Contrastingly, poems such as “Spring Morning,” “To No Longer Think…,” and “Sweetness” take place in gardens during the day, where spring comes as a revelation of love, and the speaker’s need for the latter is strikingly apparent. This contrast between illicit yearning and plain necessity lends the poems sapphic overtones. Female sensuality is celebrated, and the lovers’ gender is not clear. (The introduction duly nods to Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s work in this respect, 12). The stand-out poem in the first section, however, does not fall into either of these two categories. In “Pleasure,” the speaker is pleasure itself, personified: “I will say … / Intoxicate yourself with me, I am Pleasure.” The speaker’s bold claim to (presumably female) sexuality contrasts the prim expectations often set out for women.
“Halt” models the freedom for which the second section grasps: “The sun dies on the horizon. Now, already, all is fading / Our garden, our home. / But in my soul, hope keeps watch.” The poem seems to aspire to the free disclosure of non-traditional love, whether it be sapphic or other. It ends, “I am happy all the same / Because the moment I awaken / I find myself on your heart.” The remainder of this section offers lamentations on love. Faubert’s imagery is arresting. “My dream has folded its injured wings. / Yet the air is full of piercing perfumes” (“Absence”). “When you see me crushed at your feet / Collect, bare-handed, my poor beating heart” (“Love”). “Discouragement,” at the end of section two, is the most desperate so far:
Sustain me, defend me. I suffer …
At times I feel an abyss half-opens
Beneath me. I am afraid
I walk into the dark night
With no star guide.
The lines mark a return to the dark, natural landscape, but now the speaker is alone.
The final section opens with “Death Knell,” a lamentation and a refusal to believe that the deceased has passed on. The poem personifies pain: “My sadness grows within me / Here is Pain approaching.” As in “Pleasure,” the personification distinguishes this poem. Generally, the poems in the third section are less linear and offer depictions of the grieving process. “For Jacqueline” commemorates Faubert’s daughter, who passed away in infancy: “Speak softly! The little one is dead.” The theme of grief is further reflected in works such as “Nirvana” and “The Empty House,” which lament having to live on without the lost one. “The Tall Chestnut Tree” metaphorically transforms the lost daughter into a struggling sapling, and “The Portrait” deplores the preserved youthfulness of a painting of her daughter. The final poem, “To My Muse,” conflates the three sections into what reads to me as a lamentation that the deceased will never reach the sensuous garden of love that the speaker explored in the first two sections. There is, however, an end to the winter of grief that the speaker experiences:
Smile at the approaching spring, my Muse
Take on the perfumes diffused on the trails
Let your light veil swing over the bushes
And lay your cool hands on the roses
The garden is filled with the perfumes of the love circulated by those who loved the deceased; the roses recall those on which the daughter’s body rested in the fourth stanza of “For Jacqueline.”
Danielle Legros Georges’ fine translations maintain the form of Faubert’s poems, albeit foregoing rhyme. In her translator’s note, Legros Georges explains wanting to preserve the “inherent musicality” of the works and effectively convey Faubert’s “artistic sensibilities.” She also states that she was partially moved to this project by the devastating 2010 earthquake, “a decisive demarcator of Haitian time” (8). This context and the knowledge that Faubert has largely escaped critical attention justifies turning to her work now. As we look forward to a future holding more diversity and representations of marginalized identities, it is important to also look back to artists whose work was ahead of their time. Faubert’s poems, in their representations of female sensuality, love, and loss, voice a humanity that is poignant to a wide audience today. Her imagery holds the attention, asking us to add poetry, too, to the garden of pleasures explored. Nearly a century after its original publication, a skilled translator has brought this poetry to life again, revealing the bicultural, biracial, and possibly bisexual love that it cultivates.
Works Cited
Faubert, Ida. Island Heart. Translated by Danielle Legros Georges, Subpress, 2021.
Mathilda Stock grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She is an undergraduate student at McGill University, where she majors in English literature.
13 June 2023