Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [1]
“We have been practicing at cutting each other’s throats since Independence,” she writes of the country that we Haitians like to remind the world was the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, home to the only slave revolt that succeeded in producing a nation. What we would rather not say, and what Claire Clamont and Marie Vieux-Chauvet are brave enough to say, is that this same country has continued to fail at reaching its full potential, in part because of foreign interference and domination, but also because of internal strife and power struggles. What at first seem like personal dramas in this book become microcosms of larger historical conflicts. In fact, the man Claire and her sisters are all pining after is French. However, the man who terrorizes them is a Haitian, who is given by an unseen dictator the power to decide who lives and dies in X, the pseudonymous town that could stand in for many Haitian towns.
It would be too simple, however, for X and its inhabitants to be plagued by a single terror. Not only are the hills and mountains heartbreakingly eroded but American ships routinely leave X’s ports filled with the prized wood that is causing that erosion. Children die of typhoid and malaria. Beggars drink dirty water from ditches and are routinely persecuted by the ruling colonel, who equally punishes the poor, the artists and intellectuals, as well as the aristocracy, to which Claire and her family belong. Even though this section of the trilogy is mostly set in 1939, five years after the end of the American occupation, it is obvious that it is meant to evoke 1967, the year the book was written, a time when what would end up as a thirty-year dictatorship run by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was becoming more and more severe, enrolling the poor as henchmen and -women, killing them to reduce their number, and persecuting intellectuals for their ideas and artists for their creations. That Marie Vieux-Chauvet ended up in exile in the United States in 1968 after a valiant battle to publish this book in France (see Translator’s Preface) is no surprise. This book, in three distinct, well-developed, nondidactic, masterfully crafted novellas, still manages to condemn totalitarianism and tyranny at every turn. Marie Vieux-Chauvet might as well have been speaking to Haiti’s dictators and many of her future critics when she has Claire write in her journal: “Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript; call me indecent, immoral.” But she is neither indecent nor immoral, offering us not just prurient evil in all its vivid ugliness or good in all its beatific triumph, but the murkier and grayer areas in between. How do those who stuff hot potatoes in their child servants’ mouths fare against those who murder a poet or rape a neighbor? How can those who have been brutally enslaved turn around and enslave others? In depicting the many layers of injustice that Haiti—one might even say the world—has never been able to fully shake, Marie Vieux-Chauvet almost seems to be speaking to us about current political issues from the grave. In Anger, the second novella of the trilogy, Paul, the brother of Rose Normil—a self-sacrificing counterpart to Loves Claire Clamont—dreams of a better future for his town and country in words that echo in our time. “I know that we’ve been wallowing in error and concupiscence for a long time now, and personally I was hoping for a change,” he declares. “I would follow anyone who passed austerity laws to halt runaway decadence and the vanity of the unchecked ambition; I would support whoever could abolish hunger and poverty, prison cells and torture….” Also in Anger a crippled boy hears gunshots and concludes that songbirds are being killed. “Grandfather … tell me a story,” he demands. The story we read in that novella is largely driven by that repeated request. It is the story that makes the boy brave as he grows into a man, even one with limited capabilities.