THE GARDEN OF BROKEN THINGS

The author of My Mother’s House (2020) asks if we can escape the damage we inherit.

When her teenage son, Miles, starts misbehaving, Genevieve’s fears for his safety in New York become unbearable. She can’t seem to make him understand that Black boys don’t have the luxury of screwing up. In an effort to make him more mindful of everything he has—and everything he has to lose—she decides to take him to her family’s ancestral home. She's surprised to find herself echoing the parents she heard threatening their children with exile to Haiti if they didn’t behave when she was a girl herself, and this sense of inevitable recurrence is one of the driving themes of this novel. In addition to wanting to save her American son, Genevieve wants to rescue her cousin Ateya’s daughter, just like Genevieve’s mother wanted to rescue Ateya, and Genevieve’s grandmother wanted to rescue Ateya’s mother. Ateya abuses little Ti’Louse as brutally as her father abused her. This is a novel about generational trauma on a personal scale, but Momplaisir also depicts the entire country of Haiti as a victim of generational trauma wrought by wave after wave of colonizers. The precarious nature of Haiti’s civic institutions is laid bare by the massive earthquake that devastated the island nation in 2010. Both Genevieve and Ateya survive the initial cataclysm, but their very different fates are defined by their disparate wealth, status, and personal history. As she did in her debut, Momplaisir uses the tropes of magical realism to confront complex and troubling topics while relying heavily on exposition. And, here, the text is repetitive at both the micro and the macro levels. She piles metaphor on top of metaphor and shares the same elements from her characters’ pasts over and over again, to the point of inuring the reader to the physical and emotional violence she describes.

Momplaisir has important stories to tell, but she tells them in a style that dulls their impact.