Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite on the inspirations behind The Summer I Ate The Rich
Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite chats the Haitian folklore and various inspirations behind The Summer I Ate The Rich.
People always say the phrase “eat the rich” but what if that mean that literally? Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite explores this in their YA novel, The Summer I Ate The Rich. While this might be impossible in real life, fiction makes everthing possible — this time in the form of zonbi, a Haitian folklore.
Guest post written by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite.
Sometimes our book ideas come from a character: what kind of shenanigans would Alaine, a creative, confident, bold teenager who hasn’t faced many consequences for her actions, get into? Other times, our ideas are from a question we want to examine more deeply, such as what it really means when we label someone “one of the good ones”.
Our third novel sprung from a title: The Summer I Ate the Rich. We were so excited to explore, well, the summer someone ate the rich. It was an evocative image and we worked on forming the characters and story around this modified phrase that is typically attributed to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: when the poor have nothing left to eat, they will eat the rich. We created Brielle, a loner who was passionate about cooking and wanted to pursue her dream of becoming a chef despite her immigrant mother’s disapproval and fear of job instability. We came across an interesting NPR article about a girl who had received Elon Musk’s old telephone number and was fielding “pretty weird” calls.
And then there were the beeps.
In our own family life, our mother was encountering extraordinarily frustrating challenges to refilling her pain pump that helps manage her chronic pain. While she clashed with her insurance company, the pump beeped every hour to remind her that her medication had run low, as though the excruciating pain she was in did not already remind her. It is no coincidence that The Summer I Ate the Rich begins with Brielle feeling powerless to help her mother.
With all of these pieces coming together, we embarked on plotting. And even with everything we had here, we still felt something was missing in our tale. Then it came to us: What if Brielle was a zombie? A zombie who would literally eat the rich?
A zombie was the perfect creature to act as a vehicle for the rage Brielle feels about the injustice in her life. Growing up in a Haitian household, we would hear about zonbi from our parents and grandmother, about how strong yet cursed they were. You see, the original conceptualization of a zombie comes from Haitian culture, when the enslaved people feared perpetual servitude, even after death. The zombie entered American consciousness as stories about these beings traveled to the United States during Haiti’s occupation in the early twentieth century. Because Brielle is Haitian and American, she is a zombie and a zonbi, twice as scary, and twice as determined to get revenge on the powerful elites she feels are responsible for her family’s pain.
The beauty of fiction is that anything is possible in a world of one’s own creation, and what is improbable or unconscionable in the real world becomes perfectly reasonable as a course of action within the confines of imagination, even eating the rich.
