If you're looking for new poetry this weekend, "Unbroken Nostalgia" brings Hilario Batista Félix’s powerful #Haitian Cuban poems to English readers for the first time, exploring diaspora, memory, resistance, and belonging across the Caribbean.
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Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyòl Poetry in Cuba is an original English translation and scholarly edition of the collection Nostalji san pwen ni vigil: pwezi kreyòl nan peyi Kiba (2016) by Haitian Cuban poet, journalist, and language activist Hilario Batista Félix. Batista (1955- ) embodies and expresses Cuba’s cultural and linguistic diversity as a descendant of Haitian migrant workers to Eastern Cuba during the mid-twentieth century; his poems bridge regions usually separated by language—the Spanish and Creolophone/Francophone Caribbean—and vividly depict the distinct heritage of Haitian Cubans and their shared dreams and challenges. Grounded in oral storytelling traditions, Unbroken Nostalgia brings to light the collective memory and complicated hybridity of the Haitian community in Cuba and upholds Haitian Kreyòl as a language of resistance.
