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The Roving Tree. By Elsie Augustave. New York: Akashic Books/ Open Lens, 2013. ISBN 1617751650 300 pp. $15.95.
Review by Marsha Jean-Charles
The Roving Tree is a novel about a timeless topic: love. This love, however, is both dynamic and borderless. Elsie Augustave artfully creates a fictional narrative that elucidates and personalizes matters of dyaspora identity formation, interracial and transnational adoption, Black romantic and spiritual love across boundaries, and the Vodou cosmological tradition. In so doing, Augustave invites readers to navigate the complexity of being a Black Haitian woman-Iris Odys-in Duvalicr's Haiti, Black Power America, and post-independence Zaire.
Beginning at the end of Iris's life, the novel itself is a two-part story that she writes to her daughter as her last wish, a wish granted to her by the West African deity Aida Wedo. By way of the tale she authors, we enter the novel and begin again in part 1. Iris Odys is a child born of rape and into financial poverty; her mother agrees to her adoption so that Iris can experience a world in which her very existence is not threatened by misogynoir. Once Iris embarks on a plane to New York to live with her progressive, upper-middle-class white family, she herself starts...