Waiting for the Waters to Rise

Paperback, 368 pages

Published Aug. 4, 2021 by World Editions.

ISBN:: 978-1-64286-073-3
OCLC Number:: 1262662928

(1 review)

Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he’s carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Anaïs comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Anaïs’s Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute—now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Anaïs’s family.

1 edition

Stephanie Jane reviewed Waiting for the Waters to Rise by Maryse Condé

Climate novel

4 stars

Having taken to heart Amitav Ghosh's theories in Uncanny And Improbable Events about climate change themes being excluded in literary fiction, I particularly noted references to its effects on Haiti while reading Maryse Condé's heartbreaking novel, Waiting for the Waters to Rise. First published a decade ago, Condé meshes natural threats to the island with manmade threats to envelop her three protagonists - Babakar, Movar and Fouad - in a perpetual sense of uncertainty and rootlessness. I loved the structure of this novel. Its overall arc of Babakar's attempts to provide a stable home for baby Anaïs and, by extension, himself is interspersed with chapters wher each of the main characters we meet take turns in narrating their own stories of how they ended up in Haiti. Their repeated echoes of forced migration due to war and poverty, opportunity or escape, painted a disturbingly clear picture of how precarious life …

Having taken to heart Amitav Ghosh's theories in Uncanny And Improbable Events about climate change themes being excluded in literary fiction, I particularly noted references to its effects on Haiti while reading Maryse Condé's heartbreaking novel, Waiting for the Waters to Rise. First published a decade ago, Condé meshes natural threats to the island with manmade threats to envelop her three protagonists - Babakar, Movar and Fouad - in a perpetual sense of uncertainty and rootlessness. I loved the structure of this novel. Its overall arc of Babakar's attempts to provide a stable home for baby Anaïs and, by extension, himself is interspersed with chapters wher each of the main characters we meet take turns in narrating their own stories of how they ended up in Haiti. Their repeated echoes of forced migration due to war and poverty, opportunity or escape, painted a disturbingly clear picture of how precarious life can be outside of affluent Western nations, and how little notice these safe nations take of future problems building up elsewhere, particularly across the relatively impoverished global south.

Babakar was an interesting character to choose as a lead for such a deep and thought-provoking novel. A medical doctor specialising in gynaecology and midwifery, his skills are always in demand, yet he is still subjected to discrimination, violence and even imprisonment simply because his Malian origins make him 'other'. In communities where resources are insufficient to fulfil everyone's needs (let alone their wants) being an outsider is dangerous and this frequently seems to result in Babakar's moving on. It took me a while to reconcile this lack of agency with Babakar's central role within the story and, personality, I'm still not sure whether I truly appreciated this dissonance. I often found his enforced passivity infuriating as I read, yet in the days since I finished Waiting for the Waters to Rise I have developed a greater understanding of how his predicament so perfectly fit the novel.