a cheese-filled giveaway + continuing research.
I am VERY EXCITED about this month’s giveaway: three copies of Ann LeBlanc’s amazing scifi transhumanist cheese heist novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese!
I had the marvellous privilege of blurbing this book (that’s me at the bottom of the webpage, talking about cheese microbiomes.) Millions Wayland, who is part of a collective of innumerable iterated copies of one trans woman’s consciousness, discovers that the asteroid where she ages her cheeses has been set on a collision course with a star. Wayland embarks on a quest to rescue her dairy creations, causing tremendous chaos along the way. It was published by Neon Hemlock, a small press which has been putting out really stellar work in the past few years. The book is fun and funny and sexy and delightfully weird, with the protagonists constantly flitting into different bodies and occasionally generating entirely new people.
Anyway! If you’d like to be entered in the giveaway for this book, please fill out this form. I’ll do a drawing for the winners in mid-February.
I have not yet finished The Black Jacobins, but I did want to clarify something from the last newsletter. On the subject of Toussaint Louverture’s literacy, CLR James says:
“Pierre Baptiste became Toussaint’s godfather and taught his godson the rudiments of French . . .”
Louverture used this education to read the works of Abbé Raynal, a French writer and what we would likely describe today as a sociologist with strong abolitionist views.
CLR James then goes on to describe the general’s writing abilities:
“To the end of his days he [Toussaint] could hardly speak French, he literally could not write three words without the grossest errors in spelling and grammar. . . But he dictated in the local bastard French or creole, and his secretaries wrote and re-wrote until he got the exact meaning he wanted.”
While this is the passage what I was referencing, after consideration I’m uncomfortable with how I described Louverture in my last newsletter as having “marginal literacy.” In fact, he was operating with aplomb in a very complex linguistic situation. Up until the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, many thousands of people from central and west Africa were being newly enslaved and brought to the island of Saint-Domingue every year. Today, there are upwards of a thousand different languages spoken in those regions of Africa, most in the (proposed) Niger-Congo language family. While many of these languages have some grammar in common, that doesn’t mean they are any more mutually intelligible than Italian and Russian. A book published before the unified Niger-Congo language family was proposed lists seven different language families present in Haiti when the creole started to form, which should give you some idea of the diversity.
The somewhat simplified explanation I found (thank you Wikipedia) suggests that Haitian Creole was the result of adapting French words for use in a grammatical structure like that used in Fon (now spoken in Benin and Nigeria) or Igbo (now spoken in Nigeria.) I found a widget online for comparing lexical distance between different languages, and while I haven’t figured out the software yet, a quick glance at the most basic 100 words in Fon and Igbo shows very little overlap.
(Languages spoken farther south in Africa, like Kimbundu and Kikongo, would have a stronger impact on Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary and inflection.)
Haitan Creole has been increasingly standardized since the 1940s (and is now under the official jurisdiction of the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen). Today, about 90% of Haitians speak only Creole, even though the state education system operates in French. The fact that Louverture did have a functional knowledge of that language two hundred years ago, in an even more linguistically chaotic time, communicates something significant about his intellectual abilities and intense motivation to educate himself.
In other research news, I’ve started Susan Pinkard’s A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine. I’m still in the chapter where she’s describing the system of humors and the medieval preference for blended flavors and spices, which is to say that western European food was once on more of a continuum with the various Asian cuisines. It’s an interesting contrast to the book I just finished about Chinese regional cuisines, Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop, and hopefully by the time I send the next newsletter I will have more specific observations about how the different food landscapes evolved.
It’s a difficult time for a lot of us, as a new administration that is actively hostile to the existence of queer people, women, people of color, and other marginalized folks flexes their muscles and makes their first attempts at shock and awe. I am reminding myself minute by minute that it is pretty much always better to find something to do or someone to care for than to spend time winding myself up with worst-case scenarios. Some of those scenarios will come to pass, and some of them won’t, but I would rather be up and doing than frozen by fear.
Let us continue to tell stories, investigate real history, and look out for each other as much as we can.
Best of luck,
Sharon