Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [2]
“Alone again,” Marie Vieux-Chauvet writes, referring to the young man’s aunt Rose, “she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or alive with color, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale seemed pregnant with meaning.”
It is in Madness, however, the final novella of the trilogy, that we come closest to Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s own dilemma as a writer living and writing under a brutal authoritarian regime. Depicting four persecuted poets living in a shack, Marie Vieux-Chauvet echoes her own membership in Les Araignées du soir (Spiders of the Night), a small group of poets and novelists who met weekly at her house to discuss literature and one another’s work. Like actual spiders, they hoped to weave a protective web around themselves and keep out predatory pests. However, many were either jailed or exiled by the dictatorship from which Marie Vieux-Chauvet herself had no choice but to flee.
“There is a curious split in my behavior,” noted one of Madness’s own Spider poets. “I calmly go where I hear screaming, where I am certain the devils are committing murder. I avoid danger as I accuse myself of cowardice, loathing my own reactions. In the trunk, there are a few poems, unpublished, as are all of my poems about devils and hell. Enough of them there to get me pumped full of lead without anyone hesitating.”
Was Marie Vieux-Chauvet ever afraid to write? Especially after having three nephews and countless acquaintances and friends imprisoned, executed, or gone missing? Her triumph over her fears, if indeed she had any, seems to be infused in characters like Claire Clamont and Rose Normil and the poets who, in spite of the horrors they constantly face, refuse to stop living, to stop loving, and each in their own way, to stop creating.
“I write with my hand and my heart, not with my eyes,” declares the poet, who still manages to craft a few poems in the shack where he is hiding. Even with her first work, La Légende des fleurs (The Legend of Flowers), an allegorical play that was written when she was thirty-one and published under the pseudonym Colibri (Hummingbird), Marie Vieux-Chauvet was already displaying the type of caution that would have been wisely exercised by “songbirds” who feared the wrath of more powerful birds of prey. By the time she wrote this trilogy, however, she was already a seasoned novelist and was using her own name. La Danse sur le volcan (Dance on the Volcano), her epic novel on the revolutionary period leading to Haitian independence, was written ten years before this trilogy and was translated and published in the United States, joining Jacques Roumain and two Haitian brothers, Philippe and Pierre Thoby-Marcelin, as the only Haitian writers widely available to American readers who, during the occupation period, had been inundated by memoirs written by U.S. military officers who portrayed Haitians as savages, cannibals, and zombies.
Later, while living in Queens, New York, Marie Vieux-Chauvet wrote Les Rapaces (The Vultures), a novel that shows a writer wrestling with his work and his brutal surroundings after the death of François Duvalier. Through the valiant effort of an admirer, the writer’s work manages to live on, something which Marie Vieux-Chauvet must have dreamed for herself while writing about Haiti, in French, in the United States, not certain if either she or her books would ever find their way back to Haiti or would ever find an interested audience in the United States.
On June 19, 1973, at the age of fifty-seven, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died of brain cancer after five years in exile. The Duvalier dictatorship had been passed down from father to son, whom the U.S. government saw as a more acceptable face. Foreign investment flowed into Haiti, nurturing an atrocious sweatshop culture that added another layer of despair to the lives of a population that could not refuse to work, no matter what the