"His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It's a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can't imagine Haitian literature ever existing without."
"He is not only a major Haitian writer, he is probably the major Haitian writer, forever."
—Jean Jonassaint, Syracuse University "The book is a literary and linguistic treasure that allows anyone interested in that period to delve into the complexity of Haitian history, culture, language, religion as well as issues of class, gender, identity, and power."
—Cécile Accilien, Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies, University of Kansas In Dézafi, translated by Asselin Charles and published by the University of Virginia Press, Frankétienne invites readers into the heart of rural Haitian communities, to join in their adversity, to stumble through a story that at times feels intentionally vague and intensely intimate, to fall down along with the characters and to pick themselves back up again as the narrative progresses.....Even though Frankétienne collapses certain novelistic elements in on themselves, there are storylines, threads, and traces of characters that by the end of the story accumulate into a powerful commentary on the aftershocks of US imperialism in Haiti or the austere squalor of a country nearly two decades into a dictatorship.
—Reading in Translation The New York Times once called Frankétienne 'the father of Haitian letters,' and even though he was absolutely preceded by women and men of powerful literary stature, the English translation of Dézafi demonstrates his devotion to the poetics of the Haitian quotidian in the language of the Haitian people.
—Reading in Translation The linguistic and stylistic impermeability of Dézafi is as integral to the text as is the plot. Charles manages to attend to both in his translation, using footnotes to make proverbial phrases legible to a non-Haitian readership, without compromising the text's deliberate opacity.
—Journal of Haitian Studies
