ENG - Himes's underlying inspiration: The Trees, by Percival Everett

This novel by Percival Everett, published in 2022 in the United States (and covered with awards) has just been translated into French under the title Châtiment.

The French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné devotes a warm review to it (March 13, 2024), as a counterpoint to the review of a novel by Richard Wright, without ever, however, mentioning what jumped out at me: the link with Himes.

 

Indeed, in chapter 8 of the novel, a couple of black inspectors from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) appear. Jim Davis and Ed Morgan remind us of Gravedigger and Ed Coffin: same friendship between the two men, same relaxation, same distance from their theoretical mission. The fundamental difference is that they are police officers in Mississippi and that they are confronted with local police officers (sheriffs) whose racism is consubstantial. We can even notice the resemblance with the late appearance of the two police officers, in A Rage in Harlem / For Love of Imabelle. We will measure the distance traveled since Himes's story and his improbable invention of two black police officers, powerful and resolute, in the Harlem of the 1950s. Alongside Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, we also find a black FBI agent and Asian police officers from California, all aware of their origin and their identity.

 

The evocation of Himes can also be read in the plot. Like Plan B, the last, unfinished novel in the Harlem cycle, The Trees recounts a scheme conceived by a mind of exceptional foresight and resolution, which exceeds its author's intention and degenerates into an uncontrollable war between races. Next to all the white victims, murdered and castrated, is the body of a young black man, lynched a few decades earlier, probably Emmet Tyll, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1955.

 

A must read!

ENG - In Harlem nobody knows Chester Himes

The 110th street that borders Central Park on the north is now called Central Park North. This is where the Democratic politician Casper Holmes lived in All Shot Up. From his window, he could see the children of the black bourgeoisie of Harlem ice-skating in the park. I interview passersby. They are interested when I tell them about Himes but have never heard of him.

I continue towards the north of Manhattan. In Washington Heights, Edgecombe Drive (now Edgecombe Avenue) overlooks the Harlem River and the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to the east. This is where two historic buildings of Harlem - the 409 and the 555 - are located, the latter also known as Roger Morris.

These two buildings are quite present in several novels of Himes: in The Crazy Kill, "[Johnny Perry] and Dulcy, along with other well-heeled Harlem pimps, madams and numbers bankers, lived on the sixth floor of the flashy Roger Morris apartment house”. In The Big Gold Dream: "Without hesitation, Dummy entered the ornate lobby of the Roger Morris Apartment House, better known as 555. In its day, it had been a very pretentious apartment dwelling for upper income whites, but now it was occupied for the most part by successful colored racketeers, jazz musicians, madams and current prize fighters."

Today, like the 409, the Roger Morris has lost much of its grandeur. The building has become middle class. The beautiful, somewhat weathered lobby remains. I speak with a resident: he does not know Himes.

Melvin Van Peebles wrote in 1993: “Despite the fact that Chester, this literary giant, had been publishing essays, short stories, and novels for over a quarter of a century, I, a black American, had grown up, gone to college and never once heard his name mentioned in the myriad literature courses I had taken. This spoke volumes about the walls of prejudice and the barriers of racism.” (Preface to Yesterday will make you cry).

New York, November 2011

ENG - Dallas lone shooter: reminiscence of Plan B?

A black sniper was responsible for the death of five police officers in Dallas, on the 7st of July, 2016.

A picture of the sniper, Micah Johnson, extracted from his Facebook account, shows some ancient attributes of black radicalism: the Pan African flag, popular during the 1960's, the clenched-fist salute of the black athletes in Mexico and a Black Power drawing.

In Himes' last novel, left unfinished, Plan B (1964 - chapter 8), two white policemen are patrolling in Harlem.

"Give them a burst from the siren', said Pan.

Instead, there was a burst from an automatic weapon from the front window of a third-floor tenement and the windscreen of the police cruiser exploded in a burst of iridescent safety glass. Not to mention the fact that Pan and Van were riveted to their black plastic seats by a row of 7.62 caliber rifle bullets that passed through their diaphragms."

At first sight, the conclusion is different. Micah Jones was killed by a tele commanded robot, the sniper in Plan B by a 105 mm tank cannon but Himes emphasizes the inhumanity of the tank: "No human life was visible within it. It was shaped like a turtle with an insect's antenna. It moved on rubber-treated caterpillar tracks. It didn't make any noise. It came quickly and silently, as if it knew where it was going and was in a hurry to get there."

Of course, the current situation is also different, with a black president,  a black chief of police in Dallas, the importance of social networks and the public recognition of police brutality against black people. Still the modus operandi both of the killing and of the elimination of the sniper takes us back to the racial wars of the 1960's and to Himes' power of imagination.

ENG - Translating Chester Himes

One of the labels in this blog is Translation. It may be surprising for the English-speaking readers who are not familiar with the translations of Chester Himes in French, Spanish, Portuguese, or other languages, nor aware there might be a problem about these translations.

For the French, it is of crucial importance. Himes' novels were read in France and in French through the mediation of a team of translators, who though they sometimes were not professional translators (or more accurately because they were not professional translators) had be chosen by Marcel Duhamel. Duhamel himself, the director of the famous Série Noire, the Gallimard collection, was a well-known translator without an academic education.

The situation of Himes in relation to the Série Noire is particular: Himes' novels were not translated into French after being published in English. They were written for the Série Noire and Himes worked - in a certain way - on commission. Thus there were less cuts in Himes' novels than in some other authors' works. In his introduction to the English edition of the first three novels of the Harlem domestic novels, Melvin Van Peebles shows Himes' work method: "He pointed to the two neat piles on either side of the typewriter and explained that before he started one of his 'detective stories' or 'action novels' as he insisted on calling them, he would count out 220 pieces of carbon paper and 440 pieces of typing paper. He would then place a sheet of carbon paper between every two sheets of typing paper so that way he would have an original and a copy of each page that he completed. He would then put the untouched pile on the right hand side of his typewriter and begin to bang away. After he finished typing a page he would put it down on the pile at his left. (…) 'When the pile on the right hand side begins to get low I know it's time to start winding the story up."[1]

Still Himes wrote in English and had to be translated. The language the Série Noire translators produced, meant to be an equivalent of Himes' language, highly contributed to the success of his novels in France. It draws upon the Parisian slang (argot). In the issue of 813 dedicated to Chester Himes, the French translator Pierre Bondil acknowledges that Himes is not easy to translate but reports the over-use of Parisian argot to render the black vernacular, and numerous treasons of the style and rhythm of Himes' language.[2]

It is no use criticizing these translations. They belong to a general cultural era (ignorance of the American culture and particularly of the African American culture;  distrust regarding America in the cold war period). They also belong to a certain cultural and economical context of the Série Noire itself.

Gallimard revised these translations in 2007 (Quarto collection). Still a totally new version, with different fundamental choices is something to dream about.

Portuguese and Spanish translations of the titles of several novels have been reviewed in this blog. As one can see with the different versions of The Heat's On, unlike the French version they were translated from the titles Himes chose for the later American publication of his books.

[1] Chester Himes, The Harlem Cycle, volume 1, Edinbourgh, Cannongate Books, 1996.
[2] Special issue of 813 dedicated to Himes.

ENG - Special issue of 813 dedicated to Chester Himes

The latest issue of 813 (N° 122) is a special issue devoted to Chester Himes and coordinated by Bernard Daguerre. It includes, next to a presentation of Himes and his first novels by James Sallis, his biographer, and to several tribute texts (Montalban, Christiane Rochefort, Claude Mesplède) and fictions inspired by Himes (Jake Lamar and Marc Villard) several new studies. "The end of the Free State of Harlem" is devoted to the last two novels, Blind Man With a Pistol and Plan B (Sylvie Escande). "Gravedigger and Coffin Ed in French: translations worth burying" is a thorough survey by Pierre Bondil on Himes’ translations in the Série Noire (Gallimard). In "The Apocalypse according to Chester ..." Xavier Dazerat considers Himes’ last novel, Plan B, as the inevitable culmination of all his previous works and focuses on the forms that politics take in the novel. In "The chains of secrecy", Ruth Fialho, shows that the white predator’s perverse secrets in The Real Cool Killers are open secrets, which testify about the disintegration of the black community and the abandonment of its women. "A garden without flowers" is an investigation of François Darnaudet about the mysterious novel co-written by Himes and Willa, the woman he met on the ship that brought him to France in 1953.

Other articles tell the incredible story of Himes’ cabin-trunk, perhaps more founded than that of his typewriter as told by Dany Laferrière, and examine the successful adaptations of two of Himes' novels in comics (Frédéric Prilleux). A detailed inventory of the controversial adaptations of his novels to the screen (François Guérif and Jeanne Guyon) can also be found.

This issue of 813 has achieved its objective and improves the knowledge of Himes and his work. It even opens up new avenues and fosters debate and new questions.

813 draws its title from a novel by Maurice Leblanc (1910) featuring Arsène Lupin.