[NYRB; 2025]
The Harmattan Winds was first published in 1986, in French, when its French-Canadian author was only twenty-three. It won the prestigious Prix Molson (now Prix Ringuet) a year later, and the Prix Canada-Suisse the year after that — an auspicious start for the debut author, who went on to write several more award-winning books for both children and adults. (He also worked as a clown and a cucumber picker, and earned degrees in science and film, according to the book’s back flap bio.) The novel is focused on two young boys of indeterminate age. One, Hugues Francoeur, is white; the other, Habéké Axoum, is Black. Both are adopted, which provides the initial impetus for their friendship and perhaps for their increasingly disturbing antics. They struggle with the common tension between wanting to both fit in and stand out. Their difficulties are heightened by the circumstances of their orphanhood: Habéké has come to Canada escaping famine in Ethiopia, and Hugues’ adoption is a secret he is not supposed to know. Hugues is our narrator; everything we learn is filtered through his voice and his memories, as much desperate for control as for belonging. As in most tragedies, the events of the novel come full circle, ending with the orphaning of another child.
I think of myself as a good reader. Good in the sense that I read a lot, and quickly, and good in the sense of perspicacious, careful. I also think of myself as an opinionated person. So it was with some bemusement that I read The Harmattan Winds in the new translation by Donald Winkler, and found myself unable to pass judgment. Did I like it? Did I know what it was like, in the sense of comparable novels? On one level I was delighted by its imagination and its surprises. On another, troubled, and uncertain of the author’s goals. A lot of my bemusement seemed due to the novel’s unreliable narrator. Unreliability is often a thrill: I love that sudden recognition that your guide through a text cannot be trusted; it feels like solving a mystery ahead of the plot. Trudel’s investment in capturing the logic and experience of childhood, with all its fantasies, cruelties, and misunderstandings of adult dynamics, was also compelling. But this also added to my perplexity. The childlike narration made it strangely sealed off and inaccessible. I found myself wishing for some external commentary on the events, from another character or at the very least from another reader. So much time inside such a limited subjectivity also made me question my own. Was I right to read Hugues as pathological, even psychopathic? Or was I just reading into the novel’s silences with an inappropriately contemporary mindset? After much reflection, I still don’t trust that I know what Trudel wants us to think. I have made up my mind about what kind of book I think this is — tragic, intentionally provocative, a portrait of childhood trauma and the cycle of abuse. But the book resists this conviction too: is this a ”good” reading?
The Harmattan Winds opens with a description of our narrator Hugues’ dinner plate:
The broccoli on my plate are elms, the mashed potatoes a castle, and the brown sauce is the moat’s muddy water. The sauce’s beans are crocodiles to scare off your enemies. In the castle there’s a radish that rules the kingdom, and a tower where a small marinated carrot I adore is being held captive. Me, I am Goodness and Justice, and I want to kill the radish because he’s rich and the peasants are dying of hunger. [. . .] I often root around like that on my plate, despite my age, and people keep giving me odd looks because their eyes aren’t sharp enough to see my kingdom.
The reader discovers, in this first chapter, that the action of the novel will take place entirely in the past. The adult Hugues who makes castles out of his dinner is our narrator, but this is in fact the only moment when we hear from his adult self. We never learn how old he is in this present time, where he is living, or what has happened since the final events of the novel. As I read, I kept wondering about this opening, which slowly transformed from a self-aware wink to sinister foreshadowing in my mind. Was Hugues in an institution, perhaps a prison or a mental hospital? Was this pride in his imagination actually the indication of a psychic break, or — worse — a con, a way to plead insanity to excuse himself of his crimes?
Hugues and Habéké find themselves in trouble, in the early part of their friendship, for fairly banal misdeeds. They steal a pot from Habéké’s adoptive mother for a ceremony of their own devising and melt the handle. She demands that they provide the money to replace it, which they easily procure, The Parent Trap-style, by selling fish and painted shells to indulgent neighbors. They try to dig to China, to the dismay of Habéké’s adoptive father, who makes them fill the hole again. Other misdeeds seem of a stranger, darker sort, as when they accidentally kill a bird with a thrown stone, try to bring it back to life with an electric shock, and then crucify and disembowel it as part of a ceremony to release its spirit.
The faintly disturbing episode of the bird goes unnoticed and unpunished, but it seems to set the stage for later events. In one of Habéké’s increasingly elaborate shamanic performances, the boys accidentally burn down a shed. Habéké is temporarily caught inside, leading to a stay in the hospital where he meets a dying girl named Nathalie. The boys resolve to save Nathalie by kidnapping her and taking her to Habéké’s family cottage, where they minister to her with invented potions. This escapade has severe consequences, although interestingly only (again) for Habéké, who is sent away to a reformatory for a year. On Habéké’s return, Hugues convinces his friend to help him save another woman, this time a friend of theirs from school named Odile, who has married a man the boys find unsuitable. (They call him “the Oaf.”) The novel ends with the disastrous consequences of this last quixotic quest. Hugues kills the Oaf, and Habéké and the kidnapped Odile are presumed dead, after their barrel breaks open in the river rapids during their escape. The narration ends with an unrepentant Hugues left on the river bank with Odile’s orphaned child. Thus the question of crime and punishment, and my constant wonder about where, exactly, the adult Hugues has written this novel from. Has he finally been held accountable for all of these misdeeds? Or has he let his beloved friend Habéké once again take all the blame?
Hugues’ narrative voice throughout the novel is vibrantly alive, perpetually caught in the eddies of children’s logic and its imitative pomposities. It is charming and persuasive, like a magician’s misdirecting patter. Hugues’ penchant for flowery description and melodrama appear to be shaped by the only adult figure he engages with and his “only other friend”: the poet Gustave Désuet, whose book of florid love poems Hugues convinces his adoptive mother to buy him at a flea market. (This single adult influence is, thus, an absent and purely textual one.) Désuet’s overwrought poems are interspersed throughout the novel; the book clearly serves as a kind of bible for Hugues. He takes the poet’s words (which he admits he doesn’t always understand) as koans that can illuminate the moral dramas and romantic disappointments of his young life. Désuet’s poetry also serves to emphasize Hugues’ overwhelming desire for love and belonging. Désuet “said that the infirm, the obese, the sick, the poor, the unhappy, the old, and the wanton are like all of us, they also want to feel desired,” Hugues tells the reader. “This is important, because if you do not feel wanted, you’re an island so small that you are not on any map.”
There is a way to read all of what occurs in the novel through the lens of childhood trauma, of a lost and abandoned child who lashes out in pain and misunderstanding, wanting only to be loved. Certainly that is the interpretation that Hugues spends most of his energy in presenting to us. He begins the novel (after the memorable castle dinner) by recounting his discovery in early childhood that he was abandoned in a shopping cart at six months of age. He overhears his adoptive parents discussing whether or not to tell him the truth one night. His adoptive mother wants to come clean, but his father wishes to keep the adoption a secret. The father ultimately wins the argument. This knowledge produces in Hugues a feeling of life-altering alienation. “Yes, truly,” he tells us, “to receive such news at such a tender age dealt a fatal blow to my present person, still waiting to be born.” Out of this sense of exile he seeks out Habéké, “the most uprooted of us all,”whose difference as an African refugee is so visible in their small Canadian town. The two boys rapidly become inseparable.
While Hugues insists on the similarities between himself and Habéké through their shared exile from home and family, Habéké’s alienation is undoubtedly the greater one. He arrives not long after the famine that has killed his family catches Hugues’ attention on the nightly news. Habéké is an immediate source of fascination for the entire town. “It was the first time that a genuine Black had appeared to us in the flesh, outside the television set, and we, the young Whites, wanted to touch him with our fingers to see what it felt like,” Hugues recounts. Hugues is immediately smitten with this immigrant boy’s stories of Ethiopia, and resolves to become his friend. But the other young students (as throughout the novel, it is not clear how young) are not so welcoming. They call him “big blackie toasted on both sides” and “slavey,” warning him that “your asshole race isn’t long for this world!” There is no record of how the adults respond to the children’s violent, racist comments. Apart from this moment and one other — in which their classmates interestingly make Hugues the primary target, calling him “Chinaman” and related names for his “slanted eyes,” although another girl confirms that Hugues is not Chinese — this is the only time we see Habéké’s potential exclusion from social life. This episode seems poised to convince the reader of Hugues’ enlightened character: he sees kinship, even superiority, where others see difference and inferiority. We can’t see, of course, whether Hugues was indeed Habéké’s only other friend. We don’t know to what degree racism may have played a role in his isolation. What we can see is how Hugues’ reverence for Habéké partakes of a different, more insidious kind of racial stereotyping, in the form of the trope of the magical negro.
Hugues speaks of his friend with the awe and love usually reserved for monarchs and gods. “When he was very small,” Hugues tells us in the first few pages, “Habéké went fifty days without eating because of the famine, yes, fifty days, ten more than the king of kings called Jesus Christ, who was tempted by the devil in the biblical desert.” He encourages Habéké’s experiments with invented shamanic ritual and speaks of Africa as a magical place where:
[…] they have a different moon that tilts like the rocking of a cradle, a different sun that rises dizzily, vertically, straight as a flaming arrow, so much so that equatorial Africans do not know dawns or twilights, their day explodes around them all at once to dazzle the night, then their night, in the evening, falls like a bronze bell onto the day to snuff it out.
(Here again, Trudel captures so beautifully how a child’s attempt to make sense of school lessons, such as the effect of latitude on sun exposure, morphs into fantastical half-truths.) And then Hugues turns again to his insistence that he and Habéké “correspond” to one another, that they are the same: “I can see that somewhere deep in myself, there where so many mysteries trouble me, I am this unknown, I am this fantastical continent that is adrift in my friend on the rivers of night, and I feel as though I am brushing up against a world of fire.”
It is this blurring of himself and Habéké, in his insistence that he is African or even Africa itself, that gives me a new source of discomfort with our dramatic narrator. To cast Habéké as a magical negro, a shaman protector and savior whose role is to be the white boy’s spiritual aide, is already a self-serving and ultimately demeaning move on Hugues’ part, even if it is done out of genuine love. (It certainly seems much better than the vitriol Habéké receives from the other boys). But combined with Hugues’ insistence that he, himself, is like Habéké, the relationship begins to feel even more coercive and egotistical. As the novel progresses, we realize that more and more of the boys’ wild ideas come from Hugues alone, from their attempts to make Icarus-like wings from chicken feathers (they fall into a river without harm, unable to fly), to the final kidnapping of Odile. Hugues comes to seem more and more like the manipulator of Habéké, and combined with his insistence on their similarity and this reverential tone for magical Africa, the racial politics start to feel rather, well, colonial. It is the Black man who is here branded as both the criminal and the font of ancient wisdom, and the white man who calls the shots. It is Habéké’s secret knowledge and spiritual purity that Hugues hopes can save him from the “poison” in his “aggrieved heart” over his infant abandonment. And it is Hugues who is — maybe — privileged to live out his adult life cocooned in his fantasies, while his Black friend takes the literal fall, over the rapids to his likely death.
Or, maybe, I’ve read it all wrong. Perhaps the racial politics are not so colonial. Perhaps I’ve approached these passages anachronistically, importing a twenty-first century American academic’s analytics of race and power onto a twentieth-century Canadian novel where it does not belong. Perhaps the better reading would be more attentive to Hugues’ endless declarations of love for Habéké — perhaps this novel is about homosexual desire among two boys who had no way to express it. I don’t know — that’s the exciting and destabilizing thing about an ambiguous narrative and an unreliable narrator. It isn’t clear to me what Trudel meant to achieve, although I imagine at least some of my confusion was intentional. And it is a mark of his skill that he wrote a book with many possible interpretations. For my part, I was surprised to see so much press that spoke only of this novel as “a beautiful story!” and “a beguiling fairy tale” full of “peerless insight into a child’s speech, imagination, and supple sense of wonder” in the varied praise that accompanied the new translation. This is a dark book, for all its delightful childhood imagination. It feels like a warning about neglect and its cyclicality, from Hugues’ abandonment to his hand in the orphaning of the next generation. It feels, perhaps problematically or perhaps as intentional commentary, like another book in which the Black character has only two options: criminal or shaman. Rumaan Alam writes on the back cover that this is “a beguiling fairy tale of a book, indebted as much to Bellow’s Henderson as it is to the immortal Peter Pan, a slender novel of the great adventure that is growing up.” It also has questionable racial politics, I might add, although that may be unfair — I haven’t decided.
Caitlin Kossmann is a historian, writer, and editor originally from New Mexico. She currently works for The Yale Review.
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