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INTRODUCTION by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

SHARP MINDS, RAW HEARTS:

A Translator’s Preface by Rose-Myriam Réjouis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LOVE

ANGER

MADNESS

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

Edwidge Danticat

Fewer than a handful of Haitian writers have, both while alive and dead, inspired as much adulation, analysis, and discussion as Marie Vieux-Chauvet. In fact the small number in question constitutes a multigenerational triad of which Marie Vieux-Chauvet was the final survivor and the only female. Jacques Roumain, the grandfather, was the world traveler who returned home to write Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), one of the first twentieth-century Haitian novels featuring peasant characters, and which was translated into English by Jacques Roumain’s American friends, the poet Langston Hughes and the scholar Mercer Cook. The father of the trio, Jacques Stephen Alexis, was the protest novelist who wouldn’t allow protest to mar his aesthetics, and who wrote novels which were as erotic as they were patriotic. I had the pleasure of working on a published translation of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s L’Espace d’un cillement (In the Flicker of an Eyelid), a novel that depicts the American occupation of Haiti as being as much of an assault on a country as on a woman’s body. I am equally honored to introduce you to Love, Anger, Madness, the seminal trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, the mother/sister/daughter of this trio, which represents, in my opinion, the cornerstone of Haitian literature.

Born in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, on September 16, 1916, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was a member of the “occupation generation,” that is, she was born a year after the United States invaded Haiti, launching an occupation that would last nineteen years. The U.S. invasion came in the wake of President Woodrow Wilson’s professed commitment to make the world safe for democracy. However, as soon as the marines landed in Haiti, Wilson’s administration shut down the press, took charge of Haiti’s banks and customs, and instituted a system of compulsory labor for poor Haitians. By the end of the occupation, more than fifteen thousand Haitians had lost their lives. A Haitian gendarmerie was trained to replace the American marines, then proceeded to form juntas, organize coups, and terrorize Haitians for decades. Although American troops were officially withdrawn from Haiti in 1934, the U.S. government maintained economic control of the country until 1947.

“The United States is at war with Haiti,” the American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote after returning from a fact-finding mission to occupied Haiti. “Congress has never sanctioned the war. Josephus Daniels (President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy) has illegally and unjustly occupied a free foreign land and murdered its inhabitants by the thousands. He has deposed its officials and dispersed its legally elected representatives. He is carrying on a reign of terror, brow-beating, and cruelty, at the hands of southern white naval officers and marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion.”

Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, the daughter of a Haitian senator and a Jewish émigré from the Virgin Islands, would later use the turmoil of that period as back-story for Love, the first and longest novella of this trilogy. A voracious reader, Vieux-Chauvet was exposed to a great deal of Haitian and foreign literature, which contradicted everything this occupation was meant to represent. Equating her own unfortunate predicament as a thirty-nine-year-old virgin who, because of her dark skin, is considered less beautiful and thus less marriageable than her two lighter younger sisters, Claire Clamont, the main character of Love, echoes D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary when she laments in her journal that there is “hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal.” However, is all