Haitian Laughter (French Edition)

Haitian Laughter is constructed around the "lodyans", a narrative genre that has blossomed in Haiti as an art of miniatures. The substantial reduction in scale that presides over their creation allows only the significant features to remain, like a medieval illumination, a Japanese bonzai, or simply a small-sized map of an immense territory. This makes each miniature a "dwarf-sized saga" which lets us glimpse the excessive dimension of the original of which it is a reduced model. The "lodyans" is thus the Haitian art of brevity. Shooting off "lodyans" is a ritual of the meaningful moments of Haitian life which is punctuated by thousand-words story for laughing, smiling, grinning, grimacing. The "lodyans" is the daughter of the cane fields, just as the blues are the daughter of the cotton fields. In this book, Haitian Laughter, Anglade provide 100 miniatures for the curious reader to enjoy one a day. (Bilingual English and French) English translation by Anne Pease McConnell