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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: When the Mapou Sings
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WEBSITE: http://nadinepinede.com/
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COUNTRY: Belgium
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PERSONAL
Married Erick Janssen.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Harvard University in 1986; Oxford University, M.A.; Indiana University, Ph.D. Has also earned an MFA.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, translator, and education consultant.
AWARDS:Rhodes Scholar.
WRITINGS
Author’s short fiction has appeared in Haiti Noir, and her poetry has appeared in many anthologies.
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2018, Sarah Hunter, review of Sexism and Race, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2024, review of When the Mapou Sings.
Publishers Weekly, September 23, 2024, review of When the Mapou Sings, p. 56.
ONLINE
Harvard Magazine, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ (December 19, 2024), Lydialyle Gibson, “History and Love in Haiti.”
Nadine Pinede website, https://nadinepinede.com/ (April 4, 2025).
School Library Journal, https://teenlibrariantoolbox.com/ (December 3, 2024), author blog.
Alumni Profiles | 12.19.2024
History and Love in Haiti
Alumna Nadine Pinede’s young-adult novel—in verse
by Lydialyle Gibson
Book cover for "When the Mapou sings" and a photograph of Nadine Pinede
Set in 1930s Haiti, the novel is Nadine Pinede’s young-adult debut. | PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF NADINE PINEDE
When she first embarked on her new book, When the Mapou Sings, Nadine Pinede ’86 thought she was writing a work of nonfiction. A Haitian-American writer, Pinede had always been fascinated by the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s trips to Haiti in 1936 and 1937 and the fieldwork she’d conducted there on traditional folklore and spiritual practices. Hurston wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while living in Haiti; and her anthropological investigations yielded another, stranger book, too: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, a genre-breaking firsthand account of her sometimes shocking discoveries.
But Pinede soon realized there were too many holes in the story. Very few of Hurston’s letters from that time still exist, and her fieldwork notebooks have vanished. Pinede was intrigued by a reference to a young Haitian woman named Lucille—in Tell My Horse, Hurston mentions hiring her as a domestic servant and praises her, but nothing else is known about Lucille’s life. “The more I got into the research, the more I saw that there were just a lot of mysteries and gaps to be filled,” Pinede says. “And that’s an invitation to write historical fiction.”
Nearly two decades (and an M.F.A. and numerous writing workshops) later, the book that has emerged is a young-adult novel that blends politics and magic realism and more than one love story. The narrative is centered on the character of Lucille, a teenager coming of age in 1930s Haiti, in the years after the American occupation. A daughter whose mother died giving birth to her, she is bold, resourceful, and aching for connection. She hears a woman’s voice—her mother’s, she thinks—singing to her from inside one of the sacred mapou trees near her home. She carves figurines from wood, a craft learned from her father, and becomes close friends with a classmate, the beautiful and sweet Fifina.
But when Fifina suddenly goes missing and her mapou tree is cut down, Lucille marches to the home of the village section chief, a powerful and corrupt official, to confront him. That brash act puts her family at risk and sends her fleeing to Port-au-Prince, where she finds forbidden love, encounters some of Haiti’s real-life luminaries—anthropologists, artists, editors, democracy activists—and, eventually, lands in Hurston’s household. The novel’s final section, when Lucille joins the author on her fieldwork in Haiti’s countryside, is a breathless journey through danger, heartbreak, and hope, before winding back toward home.
The novel is written in verse. With its short lines and abundance of white space, narrative poetry can be more accessible and inviting for young readers than text-filled pages of prose, Pinede says, but also: poetry is often better suited for conveying painful emotions and traumatic experiences. A more glancing and indirect art form, “It can be a way of controlling heavy, dark material that would be overwhelming in prose.”
When the Mapou Sings is Pinede’s first plunge into young-adult fiction. A poet, essayist, and short-story writer now based near Brussels, Belgium, she created an independent concentration at Harvard, in literature and social criticism (after the enormously popular Gen Ed course of the same name taught by the late psychiatrist Robert Coles). Later, as a Rhodes Scholar, she earned a master’s in literature at Oxford University, and then a Ph.D. in the philosophy of education at Indiana University. For her M.F.A., at the Whidbey Writers Workshop in Washington State, Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat served as thesis adviser and helped Pinede shape and refine her idea for When the Mapou Sings.
In writing the book, she spent countless hours in archives and libraries, reading histories and biographies, listening to recordings, examining Hurston’s original manuscripts. Pinede’s plot unfolds between 1934 and 1937, a period of tremendous political and creative ferment in Haiti, but one that isn’t well understood—“Even for people who study the history of Haiti,” she says. (Much of what was produced about Haiti around then, such as The Magic Island, by American travel writer William Seabrook, or early Hollywood movies like White Zombie, offered sensationalized versions of the country. Says Pinede, “That’s part of what Zora Neale Hurston was working against in her research.”)
And so, the writer also drew on her own family’s past. Pinede’s parents, Claudette (a science educator) and Eduarde (an engineer), were Haitian exiles from the Duvalier dictatorship, and her great-grandmother had grown up during the American occupation and became a market woman selling goods in Port-au-Prince’s historic Iron Market (an illustration of its iconic red gate now decorates the back jacket of When the Mapou Sings). When Pinede was a child, her mother would tell vivid, dramatic stories about “Grandmè Mimise,” who, Pinede says, was “a woman ahead of her time”: unruly, independent, hard-headed—a survivor. She became the main inspiration for the character of Lucille.
Pinede’s parents had met as students on an academic fellowship in Paris, and Pinede and her younger brother grew up in Canada and the United States. But Haitian culture was deeply woven into their childhoods. “In our house, there was Haitian food; there was Haitian music,” she says. “We had Haitian history books. We had the busts of the fathers of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe.” A home the family spoke French and Haitian Creole, while the children learned English in school. They also traveled to Haiti regularly. “After Papa Doc died”—president and dictator François Duvalier, who died in 1971—“we were able to go visit every summer,” she says. “Things were still repressive, but not as much, and families could be reunited.”
It was a complicated childhood in some ways: she grew up very aware of Haiti’s fraught and often painful relationship to the United States, and recalls sometimes being bullied by other children for being Haitian. But for her and her brother, “There was a lot of pride in the culture,” she says. Pinede’s mother was a great storyteller and keeper of family lore, and she inspired her daughter to write. “Our parents made sure that we had a deep knowledge of Haiti and a strong sense of identity from all facets of our history—because the Caribbean was the original melting pot. Much of it was against our will [because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade], but there is great richness there.”
Pinede often speaks in similar terms: of richness, accumulation, connection. The hyphen in Haitian-American is a bridge, she says, not a wall. She talks that way about When the Mapou Sings, too. The novel is full of historical facts and references to real people and events; their presence deepens the narrative and gives context to the crises that dominate today’s news about Haiti.
But the book not a history lesson, Pinede says. It is a story about people. More than once, Lucille recites the Haitian Creole proverb, “Tout moun se moun”: Everybody is somebody. “Really,” Pinede says, the book is “a story of different kinds of love”: filial and maternal, friendship and romance, the connection to home and to the natural world. “And then there’s the love that develops between Zora and Lucille,” she says, two women who don’t trust each other when they first meet, who find themselves both tied together and pulled apart by history and identity.
Meanwhile, history is a thread that weaves through the story. “It is a continuous presence,” she says. “History, as they say, is never really history. It moves through us today.”
Reasons to be Grateful, a guest post by Nadine Pinede
December 3, 2024 by Amanda MacGregor Leave a Comment
Books can be windows, mirrors, sliding doors, and in some cases, lifelines. And libraries are their sanctuaries.
This Thanksgiving season, I’ve been thinking about all the ways libraries have influenced my life. Entering the US from Canada as the daughter of Haitian immigrants whose country was in a reign of terror, we sought safety. But at school, some of the first words I heard were “You’re the ones who caused AIDS,” and “Do you stick pins in dolls?”
My first sanctuary was the public library, where every visit was an invitation to discovery. I felt like an adventurer leaving for unexplored lands with my hands filled with books. I entered the citywide Read-a-thon and read close to 100 books in a week to win. It felt like a thrilling way to spend spring break.
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Newspaper showing Nadine as the read-a-thon winner.
The public library was also where I was first introduced to the American tradition of volunteerism. I joined Literacy Volunteers of America and tutored people like me, who were not native speakers of English but who wanted to learn the language around them. I met immigrants from many countries and learned about their cultures while sharing my own.
I taught English to mainly Spanish-speaking immigrants. I remember one young woman from El Salvador, a nation also in turmoil like my parents’ homeland, who described seeing her village burned to the ground because some farmers and students had dared protest corruption and abuse of power.
Later, I would learn those government forces were among the many around the world supported and sometimes trained by the US. And yet, her parents, like mine, who fled Francois Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti, saw the US as a sanctuary. History shows us how several things can be true at once. It was in our library that I started to see how connected our histories were, and why our stories matter. It was in our library that I first dreamed of being a writer, adding to a sea of stories that can burst the dams of fear, resisting those who would silence us.
The connections made at our public library also countered the loneliness in school.
I’d been asked by African American classmates, “Why do you talk like a white girl?” (That felt like a rhetorical question.) The first languages that surrounded me, when we lived in the supportive Haitian exile community in Montreal, were Haitian Creole and French. I didn’t learn English until I was 11, when we moved from Montreal to Guelph, Ontario. Back then it was a rural town with only two Black families I can remember. It was also the first place I heard the n-word. I also knew we were Haitian, but to some people, we were something they hated, without knowing the first thing about us. I hardly spoke for a year, until I could say a sentence in English without mistakes. When the teacher picked out my drawing and showed it to the class, I said with pride, “That is our house.”
Fortunately, my parents had taught us to be proud of our heritage and history, but that didn’t always translate into teachable moments. At a Connecticut public school where busing had begun but segregation was still the mindset, I remember avoiding the locker room because that’s where the leader of my bullies threatened to cut off my braids. At one point I turned around and slapped the biggest bully when she tried to yank my braids during a track race, and we were both sent to the principal’s office. Needless to say, that did not go down well with my mother, a lifelong teacher herself who expected straight A’s and no trouble.
Yet my mother was also the one who marched into school when hearing I was put in a remedial class because of my lisp. She made them give me an IQ test, and they put me in the gifted and talented class. I saw less of the bullies, but I was the only chocolate chip in a sea of vanilla.
Nadine and her late mother, Claudette Pinede.
I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere, so I started taking my lunch to the school’s library, where I met the librarian Mrs. Dickerson. She became my guardian angel. She opened a whole new world of belonging, one that was set outside of our home, which was a like a sanctuary of Haitian culture. This extraordinary school librarian brought me anthologies of Black poetry, because she saw how much I loved poetry. I discovered the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. At her suggestion, I wrote a letter of thanks to Gwendolyn Brooks—and she wrote me back! Mrs. Dickerson encouraged me to enter the MLK Essay Contest. The theme was “My Dreams.” An hour later, when my essay was chosen as the winner, it was the first time I’d ever heard people clapping for me.
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Mrs. Dickerson also introduced me to the extraordinary Rachel Robinson, the wife of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who held an annual party at their beautiful Connecticut home for the Jackie Robinson Foundation. In all the ways she could, Mrs. Dickerson was telling me, you belong here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Over the years I’m sad to have lost touch with her, but if she is reading this, I would say, “Thank you for giving me a lifeline.” The power of libraries and librarians can change the world.
This year, The School Library Journal launched a project called, “Reasons to Love Libraries.” Let’s keep counting the reasons to be grateful.
Meet the author
Nadine Pinede, PhD, is a poet, author, editor, translator, and education consultant. When the Mapou Sings, her debut verse novel set in 1930’s Haiti, was recently published by Candlewick Books.
About When the Mapou Sings
Infused with magical realism, this story blends first love and political intrigue with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.
Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream—a gift from the Mapou—tells Lucille to go to her village’s section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family’s at risk.
Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society’s elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer’s son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again—this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille’s new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about—and any chance of seeing her best friend again—as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.
ISBN-13: 9781536235661
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 12/03/2024
Age Range: 12 Years +
Filed under: Guest Post
I write at the crossroads of history, poetry, and fiction, for readers of all ages.
My focus is on belonging and the natural world.
My resume
I’m the daughter of Haitian immigrants who were forced to leave their homeland because of a dictatorship. My mother was no doubt sharing her enthralling tales of Haitian history and family lore when I was in her womb. In our family tree, besides our ancestors from Benin whose stories are lost to us, we have an acclaimed botanist who wrote the first comprehensive book of Haiti’s medicinal plants, an innovative pianist and composer of Kompa Funk, a renowned graphic artist whose stamps are prized by collectors and married the American painter Lois Mailou Jones, a caco resistance fighter against the US occupation of 1915 to 1934, a military leader in the American Revolution, and my late father, an inventor of the push-button telephone and conference call technology. My geneological research was compiled into a gift book I gave my mother for her 80th birthday. My upcoming debut novel from Candlewick, When the Mapou Sings, is dedicated to her, my first storyteller, who encouraged me to write my own.
Second only to my mother, our public library was my treasure trove for stories. Perhaps winning our city’s Readathon, my school’s History Prize and a national poetry award should have been signs. Instead, I worked in higher education and nonprofits as a speechwriter and communications director. My shortest gig ever was one week as a server in a French castle, where I spent more time in the vast library than mixing Kir Royals.
Much happier stints were funding human rights and environmental activists, like the first Haitian winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste. I also enjoyed serving as artist facilitator for a nonprofit that helped artists with disabilities.
My own invisible disabilities are fibromyalgia and endometriosis. Lady Gaga and Frida Kahlo have made fibromyalgia more visible. For decades, I also had undiagnosed endometriosis. Author Hilary Mantel and millions of other women have and continue to suffer from it. Important similarities between fibromyalgia and endometriosis include how extreme their impact can be on the quality of life of patients and their families, how they both mostly affect women, and how research on both is severely underfunded.
I started out publishing essays and journalism until Haiti’s earthquake in 2010. In the aftermath of this devastating catastrophe, both natural and human-made, I turned to poetry. I wrote An Invisible Geography, poems of place and exile. My poetry has been anthologized and featured on NPR. I’m honored that it’s been used in poetry workshops in hospice and other places beyond the classroom. Now I’m also an anthologist. The Earth is a Living Thing: Black Poets & the Natural World was inspired by Christian Cooper and features the youngest Presidential Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, Nikki Giovanni, Ross Gay, Langston Hughes, and many others. It will be a beautifully illustrated book published in 2026 by Chronicle with art by Leila Fanner.
I live with my husband Erick Janssen near Brussels, within sight of a primeval forest adapting to climate change, its remarkable history unfolding in silence.
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Bio
Nadine Pinede, PhD, is a poet, author, editor, translator, and education consultant. Her prose and poetry focus on themes of place, exile, belonging, and the natural world. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Nadine is the first Rhodes scholar of Haitian descent and earned her doctorate in Philosophy of Education. Author of award-winning informational books, her fiction appears in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat, and her Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has been widely anthologized. Nadine’s debut young adult novel in verse When the Mapou Sings was published by Candlewick Press in December 2024. It draws on Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Haiti from 1936-37, her mother’s family stories, and her own work with Haiti’s first Goldman Environmental Prize winner. Her anthology Earth is a Living Thing: Black Poets & the Natural World, inspired by the Christian Cooper incident, will be published by Chronicle Books. Her illustrated biography of the trailblazing artist Elizabeth Catlett is also forthcoming, from Enchanted Lion Books.
Sexism and Race.
By Duchess Harris and Nadine Pinede.
2018. 112p. illus. ABDO/Essential Library, lib. ed., $37.07 (9781532113086); e-book, $41.95 (9781532151965). 305. Gr. 8-11.
With the controversies surrounding the planning of the 2017 Women's March as its launchpad, this installment in the Being Female in America series (6 titles) cogently lays out the history of the intersections of race and gender and highlights the many inequalities women of color still face today. Harris and Pinede uses lots of stats and figures, and while that might initially dissuade some readers, it makes their argument--that women of color uniquely face systemic discrimination in everything from wages to health care to representation in government and more--even more convincing. The scope of this issue is dizzying, and while the coverage is, subsequently, not comprehensive, the authors nonetheless provide readers with a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the issues. Factoid-filled sidebars and discussion-fueling critical-thinking questions round out this timely, informative, and necessary volume.--Sarah Hunter
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Hunter, Sarah. "Sexism and Race." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A533094525/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a2c55d4. Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.
Pinede, Nadine WHEN THE MAPOU SINGS Candlewick (Teen None) $19.99 12, 3 ISBN: 9781536235661
Sixteen-year-old Lucille comes of age in 1930s Haiti.
Following the death of her mother during childbirth, Lucille has been cared for by her woodworker father and maternal aunt. Lucille can hear the sacred mapou trees sing, although a teacher chides: "The Church or the spirits, / you can't serve them both." Lucille and best friend Fifina dream of opening their own school for girls, one that centers nature and creativity, but ongoing conflict in Haiti poses an obstacle. When Fifina vanishes, Lucille learns she's been taken by the section chief as his second wife. Then, the section chief cuts down Lucille's favorite mapou tree, and she confronts him. Fearing for her safety, Papa and Tante Lila send her to Port-au-Prince. As a servant to a wealthy Haitian family, Lucille takes steps toward adulthood; she also falls for her employer's son and is sent away again, becoming a servant to charismatic American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Lucille learns that activism comes with sacrifice--and even mortal danger. The book's slow pace demands patience from readers, and the resolution feels rushed, but Pinede's beautifully written debut sharply observes class divisions and encourages readers to ask critical questions about dignity. Lucille's optimism is rooted in the purpose she derives from loved ones and a cultural inheritance that values nature over material wealth. The well-drawn characters, strong dialogue, and surprising twists add depth.
A rich, lyrical story that shows the high cost young women pay for daring to dream of a better life. (historical notes, bibliography, sources)(Verse historical fiction. 13-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Pinede, Nadine: WHEN THE MAPOU SINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504509/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b41d408. Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.
When the Mapou Sings
Nadine Pinede. Candlewick, $19.99 (432p) ISBN 978-1-5362-3566-1
Debut author Pinede's historical verse novel centers a 1930s Haiti filled with magic, cultural tradition, and danger. Inspired by the music of Haiti's tall mapou trees ("I hear a woman's voice singing"), 16-year-old Lucille and her best friend Fifina dream of opening a school where they can teach girls "the songs of the trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, the sun, moon, mountains, clouds." The author juxtaposes the grounding magic of nature with ongoing civil unrest throughout Haiti: after Fifina is taken by a section chief, an authority figure who often abuses their power, Lucille's beloved mapou also goes missing. When she discovers the tree at the section chief's home and is subsequently sentenced to exile, Lucille immerses herself in the world beyond her village, where she begins working for affluent Madame Ovides and falls for her son Oreste, a young burgeoning revolutionary. Historical figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, depicted in Pinede's vibrant text, become key players in Lucille's life. While the ending of this lengthy, densely packed tale feels abrupt, culturally rich descriptions and examinations of occupation and class division, as well as the perceived differences between spiritual and material wealth, make this a thought-provoking read. Ages 14-up. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"When the Mapou Sings." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 36, 23 Sept. 2024, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810712208/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1e5e4a05. Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.