Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [3]
As a child growing up in Haiti at the time, I heard, along with the darkest of tales of the brutal Tonton Macoutes, or Chauvet’s “men in black,” stories of children being kidnapped so their organs could be harvested and used to save sick rich children in America. When one loves the work of a novelist who has prematurely died, one wonders what that writer might have produced in the years after his or her death. What would Marie Vieux-Chauvet have made, for example, of the period that followed the end of the Duvalier dictatorship when the son flew off into his own exile and the people, like the beggars of her trilogy and the masses of Les Rapaces, took to the streets in celebration and revenge?
During the final months of her life, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was researching and mapping out an epic novel called Les Enfants D’Ogoun (The Children of Ogoun), Ogoun being the Haitian god of war. We Haitians believe that our lwas, or gods, do not “cross water” or migrate, but I like to think that Ogoun, charmed as everyone was by Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s legendary beauty, wit, and intelligence, would have crossed any body of water for her. Unfortunately, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died before completing more than a few pages of this much hoped for book. Still, we are fortunate to have the work that she had already completed and to have seen her books slowly return to print, first in France, where the publication of this book was abruptly stalled in 1968, then in Haiti, and finally here in the United States where she died.
“I would like to be sure,” she writes in Love, “that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyesky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul!” I too would like to be sure that Marie Vieux-Chauvet died satisfied to have written, among others, the book that you are about to read. Reading it again, in this translation, I am a bit more certain that she did.
January 2009,
Miami, Florida
SHARP MINDS, RAW HEARTS
A Translator’s Preface
In discussing the novel, I indirectly reveal much of the plot. For many readers, it may be advisable to read the novel first before continuing.
In Haiti, State Against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out that womanhood became a disadvantage in Haiti after 1957 with the election of François Duvalier, because of “the Duvalierist preference for the sexual ‘conquest’ of females associated with the political opposition, from torture-rape to acquaintance-rape and marriage.” Indeed, there is torture-rape in each of the novellas in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s 1968 trilogy, Love, Anger, Madness, and it is no wonder that in the last fifteen years most readers of the trilogy have focused on the plight of the female protagonists in the first two volumes. What is truly radical about Chauvet’s writing, however, is not just that she writes about political sexual violence and about sexuality, but that she allows her male and female protagonists to cast a critical eye on everything, including themselves. Indeed, they are never unambiguously heroic, innocent, or even sympathetic.
At the beginning of Love, which takes the form of a journal kept by Claire Clamont, a self-conscious dark-skinned intellectual from a conservative “white mulatto” bourgeois family, she confesses:
We have been practicing at cutting each other’s throats since Independence. The claws of our people have been growing and getting sharper. Hatred has hatched among us, and torturers have crawled out of the nest. They torture you before cutting your throat. It’s a colonial legacy to which we cling, just as we cling to French. We excel at the former but struggle with the latter. I often hear the