Mimola or the Story of a Casket

Appearing for the first time in English, Antoine Innocent’s 1906 novel Mimola or the Story of a Casket weaves the story of Mimola, daughter of Madame Georges, who suffers from an incurable nervous disease, with an investigation of the traditions of Haitian Vodou. Desperate to end her daughter’s affliction, Madame Georges goes on a pilgrimage across Haiti to Ville-Bonheur to help her ailing daughter. Along the way, she meets a woman whose son, Léon, suffers from a similar disorder. Will their mothers’ devotion be enough to ensure the children’s recovery? Will the suffering Mimola and Léon embrace Vodou beliefs and implore the African divinities for mercy? Expertly translated from the French and including critical materials by Susan Kalter, Mimola brings Innocent’s important fin de siècle novel to Anglophone readers. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Antoine Innocent (1873-1960) was a Haitian journalist and novelist. Together with Frédéric Marcelin, Fernand Hibbert, Justin Lhérisson, Jules Domingues, and Amédée Brun, Innocent was a vital member of the fin de siècle literary movement in Haiti known as the “generation of La Ronde,” named for the literary magazine that published their work. Innocent is best remembered for the novel Mimola or the Story of a Casket (1906), a narrative that addresses the theme of Vodou and the cult of the loas—not simply as a folk phenomenon but as the expression of an ancient culture that survives in a historical continuity in turn-of-the-century Haiti. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR Susan Kalter is professor of US and Native American literature at Illinois State University, where she has been faculty since 2000. Her publications include editions of two posthumous volumes by John Joseph Mathews and articles on Mathews, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and the historiography of the Cherokee syllabary. She has translated Pierre Corneille’s Médée into free verse, as well as the first English-language edition of Antoine Innocent’s Mimola. She is currently at work on English-language translations of the short novels of Justin Lhérisson as well as other Haitian, Quebecois, and French Louisianan texts. She teaches courses in American and western hemispheric literatures, Native American literature, and Ethnic Studies. She has served as the chairperson of the Academic Senate at Illinois State since May 2014.