WHEN A ZOMBIE TASTES SALT: The story of a girl servant in Haiti

(Paperback)

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Description

In the countryside town of Guinaude located in the Grand Anse department of Haiti, some girls played hide-and-seek, jumped rope, practiced walking in high heels, and learned how to apply lipstick as they dreamed of becoming adults. In 1935, one such girl had big dreams for her future. Eight-year-old Erz wanted more than anything to learn to read and write and one day become an affluent Madan Sara a female vendor in the flea market. Erz's dreams would have to wait. Unable to care for her, her parents gave her away as a restavk child servant to a distant cousin in the City of Jrmie in the hope that she would have a better future. Erz would have to learn quickly how to navigate life in this new world of high-class aristocratic mulattos. Among the political tensions left by the United States' occupation of Haiti, a highly classist society, forbidden love affairs, and scandals of unwed motherhood, life would not ever be easy for Erz. Yet through all her hardships, she clung tightly to her dreams and revisited them often as she waited and longed for the day when she would finally be able to write her own story.

Author Bio

Elsy Dinvil is a chef, writer, educator, culinary artist, and food entrepreneur, born and raised in Jrmie, Haiti. She is the author of two cookbooks, Cooking With My Mother and Spice Up Simple Dishes With A Haitian Twist. She now lives in Portland, Oregon where she has resided since 1999. When not developing and writing recipes or teaching cooking classes, Elsy is busy chopping veggies and mixing spices in the Creole Me Up Kitchen, a food company she founded in 2017 to bring allergen-free Haitian food products to the Pacific Northwest.