Workshop of Silence - (Global Black Writers in Translation) by Jean D'Amérique

About the Book

A bilingual side-by-side poetry collection with dexterous word play and diasporic flashpoints

Book Synopsis

Workshop of Silence, a book of poems by the Haitian writer Jean D'Amérique, was published in France by Cheyne éditeur in 2020. Across all of D'Amérique's work, and especially in this third collection, he bridges the political and the personal, the aggrieved and the hopeful, the local and the global. The first three poems of Workshop offer a helpful overture. The first describes where the speaker's poems come from ("gnaw[ed] nights sprung from guts"); the second imagines a world where tenderness alone can pay for groceries; and the third laments the inattention of "developed nations" toward places like Aleppo and Gaza, which are "married by force to the evening of bones." Hope and horror, impatience and dreamy languor trade places throughout the book, as D'Amérique asks how poetry can be made of and resist silence, and how poems can be products of and inspirations toward hope and resistance even in the face of overwhelming, and sometimes violent, indifference.

Though D'Amérique's poems grow out of soils strewn with stones and splotched with blood, they also grow out of play, one of the more daring and dangerous modes there is ("being happy is worth the price" he says in "worth the price"). Produced in a bilingual edition, with a side-by-side translation by Conor Bracken as well as a critical introduction, Workshop of Silence preserves and approximates this spirit of play and scrutiny so that the sound of the translation bears as much semantic heft as the signifying content of the words. This leads, oftentimes, to choices that may seem odd or tangential, but ultimately highlight D'Amérique's experimentation with the French language in and on poetic form--the puns, the intricate play of assonance and consonance, the rhymes and kennings, the lineation and inversions. These all serve to recalibrate a reader's relationship with the language he is writing in, one that has been used for centuries to subjugate people throughout the Global South. The more we recognize language as a mighty and strange substance that can be manipulated to do weird things and to effect arbitrary outcomes, the more we can both revel in its potential and question what it has led us to take for granted.

Review Quotes

"Equal parts elbow grease and incantatory shine, Jean D'Amérique's Workshop of Silence is committed to the messy work of life, devising ways to 'unfold the sky' and move beyond the (dis)illusions of borders. Those borders may be between life and death, between varying states of the Global South and North, or between dreams and nightmares. These poems refuse to give in to despair, even in the face of neocolonial violence 'high on wrath.' But the secret gleam of D'Amérique's stunning third collection is its subtle sense of (word)play--its skill in unlatching the everyday and its language--opening us to its verve and surreality. Conor Bracken's ambitious, musical, and luminous translation is a dazzling invitation to D'Amérique's voice. When these poems call us to 'grab hold of your wound and bandage the world, ' I'm viscerally certain it's 'worth the price.'"
--Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness: Poems

About the Author

Jean D'Amérique (b. 1994 in Côte-de-Fer, Haiti) is a poet, playwright, and novelist. He splits his time between Paris, Brussels, and Port-au-Prince. He has published several collections of poetry: Petite fleur du ghetto (Atelier Jeudi Soir), recipient of a special mention from the Prix René Philoctète; Nul chemin dans la peau que saignante étreinte (Cheyne), Prix de Poésie de la Vocation; Atelier du silence (Cheyne); and Rhapsodie rouge (Cheyne). Author of several plays, he has received the Prix Jean-Jacques Lerrant des Journées de Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre for Cathédrale des cochons (Éditions Théâtrales) and the 2021 Prix RFI Théâtre for Opéra poussière. His first novel, Soleil à coudre, was published by Actes Sud and in English translation by Other Press.

Conor Bracken (b. 1987 in Boston, USA) is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press) and The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me (Diode Editions). He is also the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center) and Jean D'Amérique's No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse), which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His work has received support from the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf, the Frost Place, Inprint, Cornell's Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives in Ohio, where he is an assistant professor of liberal arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art.