Maurice Sixto (1919-1984) was a pioneer of Haitian storytelling in the genre known as Lodyans, folk tales with a mordant point or deep insight into Haitian culture and mores.
I’ve listened to one of his more famous stories, Restavèk, which is about the treatment of poor children in Haiti who were sent to more prosperous relatives so these children could be supported but in many cases, these situations turned out to be traumatic for the children.
This past week one of my instructors (Jean Junior, say “hi!”) gave me a set of audio files to listen to, narrated by Maurice Sixto himself. We are going to have a meeting later this week to talk about the stories, so I did my best to understand them.
The first one is the story of a young boy (I think) who is fated to do great things (I think). It’s only the first section of a very long book “Zabèlbòk Berachat; Bòs Chaleran,” which is one of his seven published books.
Well, I knew nothing of this when I started other than the name, which I recognized. So, I just went in and began listening…and almost immediately got lost. Not only am I still a young pup in learning Haitian Creole, but the author also speaks in a dialect that I can almost understand.
It didn’t matter if I listened to it again—I still didn’t understand it to the point of getting the gist of the story.
So, I transcribed it…slowly…word by word or syllable by syllable. Hard work! I didn’t do too too badly, but when I look at the result, it’s incomprehensible.
One key to good transcription is to know the language well enough to guess the meaning of a word that isn’t pronounced clearly. Well, Misye Sixto pronounces them clearly enough, but not as a word that I recognize! So when I tried to transcribe the name of the main character, not knowing it was a name, I just wrote down syllables of what it sounded like. “Zabèlbòk Berachat” became “za bèl bò ka bèl rachat,” which is just nonsense syllables.
Here is the side-by-side comparison of my transcription next to the transcription of my instructor, Jean Junior. Note that in some cases I split or combined sentences because I just didn’t understand what was being said, so I sometimes just split or combined based on the rhythm of the phrasing.
You won’t get any sense from my transcript, but Jean Junior’s story is comprehensible to a point, even though there are words I still don’t understand:
And here is the story, courtesy of Google Translate, because there are just a ton of words I don’t know yet, and idioms that I don’t understand. Even Google Translate doesn’t know a few of them!
Maurice Sixto Story Number 1
This is the story of Zabèlbòk Bèrachat.
When his mother took him to the small room at the back of the high school, he was going to be three months old.
The mother was going to seek further life. She took him to hand over to her godmother. It was the greatest gift she could give to this wife because she had no children. But the boy was fussy. It was kind of stupid. He was giving a little cry…all the time. Neighbors said, “It’s gas, give him some majolnir tea, carry him on your shoulders!”
But the godmother is a little worried, because she sees the crying of the yinyan like a small rain of yinyan… continues. One day at midday, there was a woman who lived below them, a woman from the North. She appeared to them, with handkerchiefs of all colors in her arms, handkerchiefs of all colors tied around her head. She is singing, saying “he is Brother Ti Jan’s horse.” Everyone says, “The woman is an angel!”
She asked for a bottle of red wine…to treat the boy. They gave it to her immediately. She bathed the boy. Entering the yard, she took a leaf… little Malkadi Apple. It presents the boy in four (4) faces. She said, she changed his baptismal name and called him Zabèlbòk Bèrachat. And it will be his misfortune if he changes his name until he enters the grave. When she finished, she said it was a Makanda who was going to eat him. Now, she gave it to all who would want to make a joke with him, to chow down their throats.
Well, there is a lot to unpack here, and while the story is interesting, it’s difficult for me because I don’t understand some of the references to the local customs.
Stay tuned for what I learn when I meet again with my teacher!