Unseen Worlds: Interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

It is my pleasure and privilege to introduce Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell. She is an LDS Haitian-American poet, painter, and short story writer. She is as brilliant as she is charming.

Her latest book is the memoir, Unseen Worlds: Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-Day Saints (Calumet Editions, 2018). It is an intriguing story of spiritual life from her Eurocentric, Catholic upbringing in Haiti to a quest that brought her in contact with Vodou priests, Catholic monks—even a pope—as well as bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ, and its young missionaries. It has received praise from The Boston Globe, among others.

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As a Haitian-American, how has your roots and childhood informed your writing and artistry as an adult?

For all of us, our roots are everything that is deep in the development of our sense of self. Childhood is when we are most ourselves and where we generate our first sensations and emotions, free of familial, social, cultural imperatives that later become so tightly intertwined with our inner self as to direct our thought patterns and choices. My most immediate sense of self was drawn and formed from the unique cultural and physical context of a Caribbean island.

Childhood is also the inexhaustible well whence we draw the most powerful and the freshest emotions that can be used for our creative work. Somewhere in us, we do remember that freshness, each child having his or her own incomparable quality. Artists naturally have, or evolve a way of going back to that original inner space and quality of being. Childhood is the time when we define for ourselves what trees, dogs, friends, or the feel of the land are. Cezanne made Mount Sainte Victoire his own when he was an adult. No other painter would attempt that subject; but Cezanne also grew up near that mountain. Van Gogh made sunflowers his own, and a pair of old boots; I am not sure what private connotations they had for him, but I believe that they must be somehow connected to his childhood, hence the power of those images.

As for my writing, it seems that what I write about Haiti is what people feel is the most compelling. I may find that some of my other writing is best, and it may be so, but there is an untranslatable emotion that people feel when I draw my subject from times in Haiti. I forget which famous writer said that past twenty years old, everything we do or create is a recall and a remake.

In Unseen Worlds, I speak about my early attraction to the divine world. And there again, one might understand the adult I am from the stuff of childhood. As a little girl, I was fascinated by the lives of Saints. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read about them. They seemed larger than life. Miracles impressed me. For the love of God, saints were able to suffer torture and face death with calm. Their words and lives spoke of something greater all around us, invisible yet present. They alluded to an indescribable paradise that awaits us. I was charmed, I was tempted, I wanted to follow them. It is no wonder that I later joined the “Latter-day Saints.”

Vodou is also a subject in my book. I worried a little about reactions to that part of my past. But there is no avoiding Vodou once you grow up in Haiti. It permeates everything with mystery. Magic filled the air we breathed. Vodou is a religion that began in Haiti when African slaves brought their gods, devotional practices and native traditions with them as they were forcefully transported on slave ships. Slaves were forbidden to worship their gods, but they cleverly got around restrictions imposed by French colonial masters by equating their various deities with Catholic Saints. They used symbols and imagery that African gods and saints had in common in order to secretly carry on with their ancestral devotions.

I approached Vodou to study it only as an adult, as a Berkeley University anthropology graduate. I grew up a strict Catholic. The wife of a Seventy told me that at first she was taken aback to see the subtitle that alludes to Vodou spirits, but then, while reading the book, she decided that I have the fearlessness of a true seeker—I searched and searched, and once I found, I acted on it.

There are several reviews of the book posted on Amazon. In one of them, Michael Kruger, a Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ wrote that, “This book sheds a much needed light on a misunderstood people.” I loved that sentence because he could be referring both to Haitians and to Latter-day Saints. I don’t know which he had in mind.

For those in our readership unfamiliar with your work, please share with us your literary background, influences, and the reason why you write.

My early childhood was in Haiti, in a French and a Creole-speaking environment. My adolescence was in France, and part of it spent in a boarding school in Saint Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. It is not until my twenties that I came to an English-speaking environment, had to learn another language, and re-invent myself. I wonder if immigrants or exiles like myself—people accustomed to re-inventing themselves in new cultures and thought patterns—are not people easier to convert than those people firmly rooted in their environments of origin. Going to France, and even though my mother’s whole family was there, was a shock to my sense of self. In a way, I had to relearn myself in relation to a new people who reacted to me as foreign, as different from them. It set me apart. It was lonely but I got used to it. Perhaps that very loneliness and sense of not quite fitting became part of my sense of self.

That being said, French was the language of my school education and the language spoken at home. It was clear from the start that I had a love for words, and for reading. French literature was my first exposure to literature, and it is through French writers that I developed a love for reading. No one equaled Marcel Proust in my admiration for the quality of language, while Guy de Maupassant taught me about short stories. Honoré de Balzac was formidable. Of course, Rimbaud and Verlaine were the poets I loved and wished I could equal. And of course, I have acquired new loves in English literature both in fiction and poetry. T.S. Eliott is unsurpassed.

I wrote my first poem as a child of seven maybe. It was about sunlight over the water of a stream running in our garden, and the tadpoles swaying in it. So I can say that I write because I learnt how to read, and to go from one to the other came naturally. I probably write because I found pleasure in it—delight in describing beauty around me and the feeling this very beauty arose in me; there probably is also, unconsciously, a certain cleansing, a certain shedding that come from articulating one’s experience. Flannery O’Connor (a great love of mine!) wrote, “I write to discover what I know.” There is unfathomable truth in that. All writers have expressed the sense of wonder to see what they wrote and create—realize what was hidden deep within the mind and the heart, bring it to light in an unusually beautiful form that redeems even the worst ugliness we have experienced or felt.

You are a multi-faceted artist, from writer and editor to painter. Your work spans genres, from memoir to poetry to short stories. How do you move between genres? That is, how do you pick which genre is the most suitable venue for what you have to say?

Both genres are separate in that one is not illustrative of the other. They are similar in that both creative forms stem from the same spirit—mine. They probably express the same character and concerns. One uses a visual vocabulary while the other uses words. My visual sense most probably informs the way I write and some of what I write, but I don’t think that the writing informs the visual.

I don’t decide on the suitable venue for what I have to say because I don’t decide what I have to say ahead of time. It presents itself. It was most obvious when I only wrote poetry. And then stories came from poems that needed more information; again the writing showed what was needed. And once you look, “What you know” presents itself. So most of what I write comes of itself, at least at the beginning. Once the process has started I become more or less conscious of what is going on.

I have sometimes written upon request, but it has not been often. The prologue story, “St Bernadette at Night,” published in my Iowa prize-winning collection, The Company of Heaven, came from a request to write about my first experience of reading for an anthology that never came to be. The anthology was supposed to be a collection of very short stories on that question, and gathered from a wide selection of writers. I wrote mine overnight. Perhaps it wanted to come out, and “divinity” sent out a request. I never heard from them again. I did not inquire either because I soon realized it fit well as a prologue story.

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Tell us about your latest book, Unseen Worlds: Adventures at the Crossroads of Vodou Spirits and Latter-Day Saints (2018, Calumet Editions).

When I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my bishop, knowing that I am a writer, suggested that I keep a journal of my conversion experience. I followed his advice. Every morning, before I was completely awake, yet no longer asleep, I would grab my computer and start writing; I put down whatever came to mind; I did not have an agenda. This was also the time when I began reading The Book of Mormon for the first time. I had joined the church in a sort of leap of faith. I soon realized there was a kind of magic operating inside me. I paid attention to the rise and change of feelings in me.

After several months, I read all that I had written. I was astonished. The unconscious had worked as a kind of conductor, and there was visible order there. I saw the potential of a book. Yet things were missing for it to be whole. So I spent the next few months adding sections. This led me to look back in my life. I began to meditate over my past, about the present and the new people it had brought me, and pondered about the future ahead within that new spiritual space. It is one thing to be moved by the theology, it is another to fit within the subculture that people have developed around it. I am a foreigner, an older woman without children, the only member of the church in my family—it was not an obvious fit. But no matter, I loved it all. The book took five years to be shaped in its present form.

I find that members of the Church of Jesus Christ are more than a religious people. They are mystics. They look for their own relationship with God. As a former Catholic, I had been taught to be dependent on the priest to direct me and interpret my emotions and needs. In the experience of writing this book, I grew with the people I became close to, and alongside the book.

This is however not a book about the Church of Jesus Christ, or about being a member of the church. This is my story. Joining the church is part of the whole.

Unseen Worlds is divided into two sections. The first one is called “Innocence” and the second one is called “Choice.” “Innocence” starts with childhood, and then recounts those parts of my life where I went from one thing to another, not really understanding what I was after, besides wanting to find God. I asked the usual questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Interestingly enough, life does somehow direct us. “Choice” is the section where the experience of conversion starts.

The book has been well received. A Boston Globe review called it “bewitching and memorable.” Other reviews all seem to agree that it is an intriguing, dynamic, wide-ranging story of my spiritual life, going from my Euro-centric, Catholic upbringing in Haiti to a quest that brought me into contact with Vodou priests, Catholic monks—even a pope—as well as bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ, and its young missionaries. Woven in between all the family and personal stories is the history of Haiti that includes my famous martyred godfather, a kind of Christ figure in my life, who died trying to free the country from dictatorship.

But a memoir is not a history of a whole life. If it tried to, it would be disjointed. I think that a life is a series of puzzles, not just one big one. A memoir therefore must select slices of a life, experiences that reveal themselves to be connected to each other by a common thread and within a particular theme. This connective process in one’s life is unconscious while it is going on, but a later introspection will show that there had been a divine conductor all along. So, I had to evaluate where I was going, but also where I had come from. I was inevitably brought to perceive the links between different parts of my existence. I connected the dots.

What do you see as the role of LDS writers in the larger world of literature?

Such a vast question! And as a relatively new member of the church, I don’t feel qualified to answer it in any meaningful or original way. Perhaps I could only say that the role of LDS writers in the larger world of world literature is not so different from the role of LDS people in the world at large. We are a missionary people. We want to share what we have because we value it, and also because we want it to be valued by others.

Literature is a kind of missionary tool. It influences people because it can touch their hearts. The heart is the most powerful entryway into a person. Dictators throughout the world have understood this, have shown their mistrust of it, have banned some of it, have destroyed a lot of it, or have used it for their benefit.

A simple way perhaps to answer the question is to say that since literature shows the heart of a writer, an LDS writer will help demystify the people that the world still largely thinks of as “the Mormons.” In expressing her/his dreams and disappointments, in describing her/his experiences or failures, the LDS writer can show the world that we are people, not freaks; that we suffer all that people suffer; that we make choices based on profound reasoning. The LDS writer can do what any writer from any part of the world does—namely enlarge the world’s knowledge about a particular culture, expand the world’s sensitivity to, and acceptance of a people who are distinct yet the same. In this way, the LDS writer can help fight the human tendency towards marginalization of those who appear foreign, and counteract world racism.

What are you writing next?

I have a novel-size manuscript ready for publication. It is called House of Fossils. More than writing something new, I might be busy with this one for a while. Yet I am not sure that I am ready to embark on a new publication just yet. My time has been swallowed with the demands from presenting and promoting Unseen Worlds to readers. It has drained my inner space. Still, a few days ago, something presented itself. I have been doing a lot of genealogy work since I converted. I finished my father’s side and am now working on my mother’s. All in all, I may have done ordinances for nearly 400 of my ancestors. My mother’s line goes farthest, and well into the 11th century. I had no idea. A cousin of mine in France sent me the charts, not knowing what I would use it for. A knight of Malta, staunch Catholic, he might not have sent it to me had he known how I would use it. It has been a great gift. The dead keep me company. I feel connected and less alone in the world. The working title of what I started writing is “Blessed Art Thou Among Women.” I hope it makes you smile…

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If you could interview any author from any time period, who would it be and why?

I would choose 1Nephi, the good child, the immigrant exile, the faithful one, and obedient. I choose him also because he would understand how I feel, and he could teach me how to overcome loneliness, the loss of one’s roots, and develop the courage to trust in the unknown. He knew what it was like to be a stranger to the land he has come to live in, and the land of the spirit to which he aspires, and whose laws he chose to obey. America is my foreign land whilst the church I have joined is my spiritual land.

At this point of my life, I am more interested in the quality of the person than the author. The best of what authors have to say is already in their books. I am more often passionate about a book rather than an author. Writers are uneven in their publications. Rather than someone I would interview, I am drawn to someone I could sit with, not talking; sit in the quality of a being; feel that person, rather than learn about that person. Let their eyes radiate inside me. I have outgrown the authors I loved, even whilst I still love them. I have learnt from them what I was meant to. I am more interested in becoming what I am not. I am already an author, so that is dealt with. What I am not is a selfless, perfected being in Christ.

1Nephi is such a perfected being. His presence would enrich me perhaps more than his words if I were to interview him. Authors are often people with huge egos. Their beings could prove disappointing. 1Nephi does not write out of vanity or some sort of neurosis of the self. Many brilliant writers do, and thus misuse the gift of tongues. From them we get much “philosophies of men.” On the other hand, 1Nephi writes, “I am not particularly interested in giving a full account of all things… because I need the room to write about the things of God.” (1Nephi 6:5). This moves me.

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An excerpt from Marilène’s upcoming book, House of Fossils.

In the Year 2004…

HOPING for the fog to lift, I entered the house in Spencer’s Island and set my luggage down. The wooden walls smelled of the sea, and mist seemed to hover just below the ceiling in a sparsely furnished room. Subdued hues of a late afternoon light filtered through windowpanes, and shimmered like silk floating over silence.

The silence came from fossils. They appeared to be waiting, standing in great number and order like an army maintained by a sharp-edged sense of time the color of slate. They were of all sizes, stiffly born on every shelf and flat surface or propped up in rigid alignment against the walls.

A petrified branch, lone remnant of some immemorial tree, ran across one side of the living room as if a spirit had once taken form in it and remained confined in matter for a boundless expanse of time. A wide, cut section of a fossilized tree trunk was stationed next to a solid-oak table that looked flimsy in contrast, despite its heavy legs. On an aged writing desk-table set in a corner, a high pile of yellowed books loomed over a delicate display of smaller fossil fragments. The spine of the hardbound book at the bottom of the pile read ”Design and Construction in Tree Drawings.”

I sat down.

It felt as if I was in the presence of a long lost friend whose features I was gradually being brought to recognize, not as much by sight as is commonly experienced, but with other senses…

… Saul and I stood in the small house filled with fossils, getting acquainted. After we agreed on the rent, we quickly found ourselves involved in a long, easy conversation that had recurring inner movements like the roll of waves outside. We spoke softly, exchanging confidences.

Strangely then, during that very first meeting, Saul and I revealed things that we might never tell friends, as if there were realms of the heart that people more easily open to a passing stranger in whose eyes we think we recognize the profound kindness and timeless patience we imagine exist in the infinite, thus finding words for inner substance that had pressured us imprecisely until then. We become charmingly articulate, suddenly keenly conscious of the perilous structures of thought that had built up in the organic secrecy of our being. It’s as if ghost stories heard in childhood occupy rooms in the mind where creatures remained trapped in an unsettled, inaudible existence, needing to be exhibited to light that would both disclose and disintegrate them. We leap at the opportunity to speak freely to an anonymous person in whose eyes we see our image reflected, and draw out of our inner sanctum the many beings through which we want to be construed and prefer to be remembered. And so, for someone we will never see again, we extirpate with inscrutable earnestness the hitherto inarticulate refinement of our unique soul.

We thereafter feel strangely confident that our secrets are safe because they are revealed to people for whom they mean little and by whom they will quickly be discarded as irrelevant to their own lives, or perhaps they will be guarded in unconscious layers of the mind in the same way children hide things under the mattress.

It may also be that, for certain thoughts to transform us, it only matters that they occur once. A lesson may be drawn from the spider that continuously recreates its web with new thread; the old thread, like an old thought, hangs until the wind blows it away elsewhere; the creature thus endlessly re-invents the way it is attached to the world and maintains its balance over it.

“You’ll find here what exists nowhere else,” Saul finally said…

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Marilène was born and raised in Haiti and has also lived in France. She studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with an M.F.A.. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Tanbou, and Ploughshares as well as numerous anthologies. She has donated paintings to the National Center of Afro-American Artists.

Her awards include the 2000 Crab Orchard Review Poetry Prize and the 1993 Grolier Poetry Prize. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bunting Institute, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and the Center for the Study of World Religions, all at Harvard University, as well as from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In May 2018, she was awarded the NAACP Award of Excellence for Outstanding Commitment in Advancing the Culture and Causes of Communities of Color.

For more information about Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell visit her blog here.

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