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Youma : the story of a West-Indian slave 1890 [Hardcover]
eng, Pages 214. Reprinted in 2015 with the help of original edition published long back[1890]. This book is in black & white, Hardcover, sewing binding for longer life with Matt laminated multi-Colour Dust Cover, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, there may be some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. (Customisation is possible). Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions.Original Youma : the story of a West-Indian slave 1890 [Hardcover] Hearn, Lafcadio,
- GenresHistorical Fiction
214 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1890
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About the author
Lafcadio Hearn
1,509 books460 followersGreek-born American writer Lafcadio Hearn spent 15 years in Japan; people note his collections of stories and essays, including
Kokoro
(1896), under pen name Koizumi Yakumo.
Rosa Cassimati (Ρόζα Αντωνίου Κασιμάτη in Greek), a Greek woman, bore Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν in Greek or 小泉八雲 in Japanese), a son, to Charles Hearn, an army doctor from Ireland. After making remarkable works in America as a journalist, he went to Japan in 1890 as a journey report writer of a magazine. He arrived in Yokohama, but because of a dissatisfaction with the contract, he quickly quit the job. He afterward moved to Matsué as an English teacher of Shimané prefectural middle school. In Matsué, he got acquainted with Nishida Sentarô, a colleague teacher and his lifelong friend, and married Koizumi Setsu, a daughter of a samurai.
In 1891, he moved to Kumamoto and taught at the fifth high school for three years. Kanô Jigorô, the president of the school of that time, spread judo to the world.
Hearn worked as a journalist in Kôbé and afterward in 1896 got Japanese citizenship and a new name, Koizumi Yakumo. He took this name from "Kojiki," a Japanese ancient myth, which roughly translates as "the place where the clouds are born". On that year, he moved to Tôkyô and began to teach at the Imperial University of Tôkyô. He got respect of students, many of whom made a remarkable literary career. In addition, he wrote much reports of Japan and published in America. So many people read his works as an introduction of Japan. He quit the Imperial University in 1903 and began to teach at Waseda University on the year next. Nevertheless, after only a half year, he died of angina pectoris.
Rosa Cassimati (Ρόζα Αντωνίου Κασιμάτη in Greek), a Greek woman, bore Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν in Greek or 小泉八雲 in Japanese), a son, to Charles Hearn, an army doctor from Ireland. After making remarkable works in America as a journalist, he went to Japan in 1890 as a journey report writer of a magazine. He arrived in Yokohama, but because of a dissatisfaction with the contract, he quickly quit the job. He afterward moved to Matsué as an English teacher of Shimané prefectural middle school. In Matsué, he got acquainted with Nishida Sentarô, a colleague teacher and his lifelong friend, and married Koizumi Setsu, a daughter of a samurai.
In 1891, he moved to Kumamoto and taught at the fifth high school for three years. Kanô Jigorô, the president of the school of that time, spread judo to the world.
Hearn worked as a journalist in Kôbé and afterward in 1896 got Japanese citizenship and a new name, Koizumi Yakumo. He took this name from "Kojiki," a Japanese ancient myth, which roughly translates as "the place where the clouds are born". On that year, he moved to Tôkyô and began to teach at the Imperial University of Tôkyô. He got respect of students, many of whom made a remarkable literary career. In addition, he wrote much reports of Japan and published in America. So many people read his works as an introduction of Japan. He quit the Imperial University in 1903 and began to teach at Waseda University on the year next. Nevertheless, after only a half year, he died of angina pectoris.
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March 13, 2020
Youma is to Martinique what Chita is to New Orleans ~ a love letter from Lafcadio Hearn.
After a decade in New Orleans, Hearn went to the West Indies as a correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. He fell in love with the beautiful island of Martinique and lived there from 1887 to 1889. During that time, he did what he does best. He observed everything with the eye of a lover, perceiving every nuance of character, every hidden beauty, every mundane wonder. He produced two books from this chapter of his life: the poetic travelogue, Two Years in the French West Indies, and the novel, Youma.
Like Chita, Youma is rich with Hearn’s picturesque descriptions of an exotic landscape and his astute rendering of the language and legends of the people who live there. Both novels tell stories of young women orphaned in early childhood. Both use historical events as the background against which the stories are told. And both subtly extol the life of harmony with nature in contrast to the artificial and alienating ways of refined society.
There are also meaningful differences between the two novels. Chita is an impressionistic sketch of Last Island with the girl Chita but a small figure within the vast landscape. Youma is a traditional narrative with Martinique as the geographical, historical, and cultural setting. These differences are reflected in the subtitles of the books— Chita: A Memory of Last Island and Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave.
Chita is not really about Chita. It is about Last Island. And it is not really a story. It is too poetic, too dreamy, too abstract to be a story. It is, as Hearn calls is, a memory. In contrast, Youma is about Youma. It is a story and it is her story. It reads like hagiography, like the golden legend of a martyred saint.
Youma is also a personal book ~ a window into the soul of Lafcadio Hearn. And that is how I like to read it.
In Chita, Carmen prays before “a little waxen image of the Mother and Child, —an odd little Virgin with an Indian face” (Chita 70). Later Hearn calls this image, “Señora de Guadalupe” (Chita 134). Perhaps he has forgotten that Our Lady of Guadalupe is not depicted with the Christ Child. But, no matter. Our Lady of Guadalupe, that Mexican apparition of the Immaculate Conception, will grace Youma.
When Carmen introduces her Mexican Madonna to Chita, the toddler betrays her social background by telling Carmen that “she wanted to say her prayers to a white Virgin” (Chita 134). But Chita soon comes to love the dark-skinned Virgin and as the years go by she grows to be a beautiful sun-tanned child of nature.
All of this makes sense when one looks at Hearn’s own childhood. Like Chita and Youma, he was an orphan. But his parents did not die. They abandoned him. First his mother, when he was six years old. Then his father, when he was seven.
It was the loss of his mother and all that she represented that deeply affected the intelligent and sensitive boy. He did not resent her abandonment. On the contrary, he understood her need to escape from her dreary environment. For his mother Rosa was a dark-skinned Greek beauty with gypsy blood and a love of blue skies, clear waters, and the glorious sun. Transplanted from her sunny Mediterranean island to her husband’s home in Dublin, she withered like a tropical flower in a cold northern climate. So she fled.
Hearn immortalized her in his two novels. First subtly in Chita and then unambiguously in Youma. In a letter to his younger brother James he says of their mother:
“And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face—with large, brown eyes like a wild deer’s—that used to bend above your cradle” (Bisland 9)? *
In the letter, he describes himself as having two souls: one from his Anglo-Irish father, the other from his Greek-Romany mother. He says: “Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul ... came from Her” (Bisland 10). Notice the capitalized ‘Her.’
In the autobiographical fragment, “Dream of a Summer Day,” written late in his life, he reminiscences about his early childhood as a “magical time” when “the sky was very much more blue” and “the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which there are no names at all” (Bisland 4). And over this infant paradise reigned “One who thought only of ways to make me happy” (Bisland 5). Again, notice the capitalized ‘One.’
In another autobiographical fragment, “My Guardian Angel,” the beautiful dark-skinned mother of his childhood idyll becomes the image of the Virgin Mother, just as it did in Chita.
“To the wall of the room in which I slept there was suspended a Greek icon —a miniature painting in oil of the Virgin and Child, warmly coloured, and protected by a casing of fine metal that left exposed only the olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. But I fancied that the brown Virgin represented my mother—whom I had almost completely forgotten—and the large-eyed Child, myself” (Bisland 16).
Thus is Carmen’s Mexican Madonna an image of Rosa. And Chita, grown up, a young woman, vigorous and healthy, brown and free, living in harmony with nature, is Rosa in her sunny island home. Rosa in the beginning, celestial and pure, like Our Lady of Guadalupe.
These images that are presented separately in Chita are united in Youma. Youma is both the orphaned child who longs for a mother and the mother of an orphaned child. She is the idealized Madonna of Hearn’s reminiscences. She is the Immaculate Conception who crushes the head of the serpent beneath her heel and the Virgin Mother who shelters the child Mayotte under her mantle.
When Youma dreams of her mother, it could be Hearn dreaming of Rosa.
“ ... her mind wakened to the fancy of a voice calling her name,—faintly, as from a great distance, —a voice remembered as in a dream one holds remembrance of dreams gone before.
Then she became aware of a face,—the face of a beautiful brown woman looking at her with black soft eyes, —smiling under the yellow folds of a madras turban, —and lighted by a light that came from nowhere,—that was only a memory of some long-dead morning. And through the dimness round about it a soft blue radiance grew,—the ghost of a day; and she knew the face and murmured to it:— ‘Doudoux-manman‘” (Youma 130-131).
When Youma strains against an artificial environment that constricts her like the coils of a serpent, it could be Hearn again.
“... the Creole ladies remained almost cloistered in their homes from Sunday to Sunday, scarcely leaving their apartments except to go to church ...” (85).
“... the white women of the colonies could adapt themselves without pain to this life of cool and elegant seclusion. But Youma was of the race of sun-lovers. The very privileges accorded her, the very training given to her as a sort of adopted child, had tended rather to contract her natural life than to expand it” (86).
“She suffered so much from the weariness of physical inaction;— she was so tired of living in shadow, of resting in rocking-chairs, of talking baby talk,—just as in other years she had been tired of dwelling behind closed shutters, and broidering and sewing in a half-light, and hearing conversations which she could not understand” (87-88).
This is Hearn motherless in a strange land where he is forever alien, where his language is foreign, his ideas peculiar, his nature misunderstood. But this is also Rosa, straining against the gloom that must have seemed part and parcel of the marriage from which she made her escape.
Chita is Rosa in Greece. Youma is Rosa in Dublin. But Youma is an idealized Rosa. A Rosa who sacrifices herself for her child, for Mayotte, little Mayotte, who is Lafcadio at six years old. A courageous Rosa who stands with her foot upon the serpent’s neck, who stands radiant in golden light, wrapping her foulard around the frightened child’s head
“Little Mayotte looked up one moment into the dark and beautiful bending face, — and joined her slender hands, as if to pray” (191).
Chita and Youma and Mayotte ~ all motherless children ~ just like Hearn. I believe Hearn longed all his life for “the dark and beautiful bending face” of his long lost mother. I also believe this is the reason he wrote so beautifully and so lovingly of the Virgin Mother despite his rejection of the Catholic faith imposed on him by his dour grand aunt.
On its surface, Youma is a combination of cultural studies, history, and poetic prose. The novel includes lush descriptions of Martinique, its people, and its folkways, and it culminates in a dramatic account of the slave revolt of May 1848 which left over a hundred people dead. But to readers of the autobiographical fragments, it is so much more. It is more beautiful, more moving, more melancholy. Hearn loved Martinique because it reminded him of his idyllic childhood home and he created Youma to be the “One” who reigned above it all with beauty and courage and maternal goodness.
Note
* Hearn, Lafcadio. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn including the Japanese Letters, Volume One, edited by Elizabeth Bisland (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008).
After a decade in New Orleans, Hearn went to the West Indies as a correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. He fell in love with the beautiful island of Martinique and lived there from 1887 to 1889. During that time, he did what he does best. He observed everything with the eye of a lover, perceiving every nuance of character, every hidden beauty, every mundane wonder. He produced two books from this chapter of his life: the poetic travelogue, Two Years in the French West Indies, and the novel, Youma.
Like Chita, Youma is rich with Hearn’s picturesque descriptions of an exotic landscape and his astute rendering of the language and legends of the people who live there. Both novels tell stories of young women orphaned in early childhood. Both use historical events as the background against which the stories are told. And both subtly extol the life of harmony with nature in contrast to the artificial and alienating ways of refined society.
There are also meaningful differences between the two novels. Chita is an impressionistic sketch of Last Island with the girl Chita but a small figure within the vast landscape. Youma is a traditional narrative with Martinique as the geographical, historical, and cultural setting. These differences are reflected in the subtitles of the books— Chita: A Memory of Last Island and Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave.
Chita is not really about Chita. It is about Last Island. And it is not really a story. It is too poetic, too dreamy, too abstract to be a story. It is, as Hearn calls is, a memory. In contrast, Youma is about Youma. It is a story and it is her story. It reads like hagiography, like the golden legend of a martyred saint.
Youma is also a personal book ~ a window into the soul of Lafcadio Hearn. And that is how I like to read it.
In Chita, Carmen prays before “a little waxen image of the Mother and Child, —an odd little Virgin with an Indian face” (Chita 70). Later Hearn calls this image, “Señora de Guadalupe” (Chita 134). Perhaps he has forgotten that Our Lady of Guadalupe is not depicted with the Christ Child. But, no matter. Our Lady of Guadalupe, that Mexican apparition of the Immaculate Conception, will grace Youma.
When Carmen introduces her Mexican Madonna to Chita, the toddler betrays her social background by telling Carmen that “she wanted to say her prayers to a white Virgin” (Chita 134). But Chita soon comes to love the dark-skinned Virgin and as the years go by she grows to be a beautiful sun-tanned child of nature.
All of this makes sense when one looks at Hearn’s own childhood. Like Chita and Youma, he was an orphan. But his parents did not die. They abandoned him. First his mother, when he was six years old. Then his father, when he was seven.
It was the loss of his mother and all that she represented that deeply affected the intelligent and sensitive boy. He did not resent her abandonment. On the contrary, he understood her need to escape from her dreary environment. For his mother Rosa was a dark-skinned Greek beauty with gypsy blood and a love of blue skies, clear waters, and the glorious sun. Transplanted from her sunny Mediterranean island to her husband’s home in Dublin, she withered like a tropical flower in a cold northern climate. So she fled.
Hearn immortalized her in his two novels. First subtly in Chita and then unambiguously in Youma. In a letter to his younger brother James he says of their mother:
“And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face—with large, brown eyes like a wild deer’s—that used to bend above your cradle” (Bisland 9)? *
In the letter, he describes himself as having two souls: one from his Anglo-Irish father, the other from his Greek-Romany mother. He says: “Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul ... came from Her” (Bisland 10). Notice the capitalized ‘Her.’
In the autobiographical fragment, “Dream of a Summer Day,” written late in his life, he reminiscences about his early childhood as a “magical time” when “the sky was very much more blue” and “the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which there are no names at all” (Bisland 4). And over this infant paradise reigned “One who thought only of ways to make me happy” (Bisland 5). Again, notice the capitalized ‘One.’
In another autobiographical fragment, “My Guardian Angel,” the beautiful dark-skinned mother of his childhood idyll becomes the image of the Virgin Mother, just as it did in Chita.
“To the wall of the room in which I slept there was suspended a Greek icon —a miniature painting in oil of the Virgin and Child, warmly coloured, and protected by a casing of fine metal that left exposed only the olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. But I fancied that the brown Virgin represented my mother—whom I had almost completely forgotten—and the large-eyed Child, myself” (Bisland 16).
Thus is Carmen’s Mexican Madonna an image of Rosa. And Chita, grown up, a young woman, vigorous and healthy, brown and free, living in harmony with nature, is Rosa in her sunny island home. Rosa in the beginning, celestial and pure, like Our Lady of Guadalupe.
These images that are presented separately in Chita are united in Youma. Youma is both the orphaned child who longs for a mother and the mother of an orphaned child. She is the idealized Madonna of Hearn’s reminiscences. She is the Immaculate Conception who crushes the head of the serpent beneath her heel and the Virgin Mother who shelters the child Mayotte under her mantle.
When Youma dreams of her mother, it could be Hearn dreaming of Rosa.
“ ... her mind wakened to the fancy of a voice calling her name,—faintly, as from a great distance, —a voice remembered as in a dream one holds remembrance of dreams gone before.
Then she became aware of a face,—the face of a beautiful brown woman looking at her with black soft eyes, —smiling under the yellow folds of a madras turban, —and lighted by a light that came from nowhere,—that was only a memory of some long-dead morning. And through the dimness round about it a soft blue radiance grew,—the ghost of a day; and she knew the face and murmured to it:— ‘Doudoux-manman‘” (Youma 130-131).
When Youma strains against an artificial environment that constricts her like the coils of a serpent, it could be Hearn again.
“... the Creole ladies remained almost cloistered in their homes from Sunday to Sunday, scarcely leaving their apartments except to go to church ...” (85).
“... the white women of the colonies could adapt themselves without pain to this life of cool and elegant seclusion. But Youma was of the race of sun-lovers. The very privileges accorded her, the very training given to her as a sort of adopted child, had tended rather to contract her natural life than to expand it” (86).
“She suffered so much from the weariness of physical inaction;— she was so tired of living in shadow, of resting in rocking-chairs, of talking baby talk,—just as in other years she had been tired of dwelling behind closed shutters, and broidering and sewing in a half-light, and hearing conversations which she could not understand” (87-88).
This is Hearn motherless in a strange land where he is forever alien, where his language is foreign, his ideas peculiar, his nature misunderstood. But this is also Rosa, straining against the gloom that must have seemed part and parcel of the marriage from which she made her escape.
Chita is Rosa in Greece. Youma is Rosa in Dublin. But Youma is an idealized Rosa. A Rosa who sacrifices herself for her child, for Mayotte, little Mayotte, who is Lafcadio at six years old. A courageous Rosa who stands with her foot upon the serpent’s neck, who stands radiant in golden light, wrapping her foulard around the frightened child’s head
“Little Mayotte looked up one moment into the dark and beautiful bending face, — and joined her slender hands, as if to pray” (191).
Chita and Youma and Mayotte ~ all motherless children ~ just like Hearn. I believe Hearn longed all his life for “the dark and beautiful bending face” of his long lost mother. I also believe this is the reason he wrote so beautifully and so lovingly of the Virgin Mother despite his rejection of the Catholic faith imposed on him by his dour grand aunt.
On its surface, Youma is a combination of cultural studies, history, and poetic prose. The novel includes lush descriptions of Martinique, its people, and its folkways, and it culminates in a dramatic account of the slave revolt of May 1848 which left over a hundred people dead. But to readers of the autobiographical fragments, it is so much more. It is more beautiful, more moving, more melancholy. Hearn loved Martinique because it reminded him of his idyllic childhood home and he created Youma to be the “One” who reigned above it all with beauty and courage and maternal goodness.
Note
* Hearn, Lafcadio. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn including the Japanese Letters, Volume One, edited by Elizabeth Bisland (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008).
February 4, 2020
Racist BS masquerading as woke. There are some decent antislavery arguments here, but the racism is too vile for me to even go above the minimum one star this site forces you to give.
July 20, 2021
I was really enjoying this book. It was my first time experiencing a Lefcadio Hearn story with actual well developed and evocative characters, but even setting aside my deep dive into Hearn, it's just generally a well written story with an interesting premise that gives a snapshot of a certain time and place in history. It manages to capture nuance about slavery that really resonates. A nuance that I'm not sure could successfully be pulled off today.
And then it just suddenly ends, and on a really depressing note at that. This felt like the first fifty pages of a much longer story, a great introduction that sets the scene and establishes the goals and things of importance to the characters...and then it just ends. I was so ready for this story, for Youma to face the trials brought on by her paradoxical existence in a new world, but then it just ends. And that just really sucks.
And then it just suddenly ends, and on a really depressing note at that. This felt like the first fifty pages of a much longer story, a great introduction that sets the scene and establishes the goals and things of importance to the characters...and then it just ends. I was so ready for this story, for Youma to face the trials brought on by her paradoxical existence in a new world, but then it just ends. And that just really sucks.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews