Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [4]
Setting aside a clichéd national pride about Haitian independence, Claire goes straight to the heart of the matter: something is rotten in the second republic of the Americas. During the course of the novel, in order to understand what is taking place around her and her place in it, Claire must free herself from paralyzing self-hatred and a host of illusions about who she should be and what she should want. Although she is committed to a rigorous critique of the beliefs tattooed upon her by her parents and a Catholic education, it takes awhile for Claire to dispel her escapist fantasies, confront her assumptions, and change her commitments. When she does, she has an epiphany and kills Calédu.
Whereas in the first novella Vieux-Chauvet can still imagine a heroic confrontation with the strong man Calédu, it is clear in the second and third novellas that the battle against the regime is a losing one. The thug who blackmails the Normil family in Anger, the second novella, confesses: “You look to me, such as I am, but I am only a cog in an immense machine. The one who gives us our orders is like God, invisible and all-powerful. We get our orders and we carry them out. That’s all. We often know nothing about the reasons for the things he asks of us and we just blindly obey.” In the second and third novellas, Vieux-Chauvet depicts individuals struggling against this machine and, ultimately, losing the battle if perhaps not the war.
In Anger, which seems to take place shortly after World War II, several years after Love, the protagonists are up against organized paramilitaries who have absorbed most of the beggars that had trailed them in Love and have become “the men in black,” fascist Blackshirts that resemble Duvalier’s tonton-makout (named after the Haitian bogeyman—literally, “uncle with a basket”—tonton-makout were soldiers and civilians who organized political violence on Duvalier’s behalf). By the second novella they have more guns, uniforms, trucks, lawyers, a hierarchy, recruiting and training structures, as well as a fortress. They seem to have come into their own, policing and polarizing civilians. In the midst of the storm stands the Normil family, whose land is being occupied by Blackshirts and who must appease or confront the group’s local leader, referred to only as “the Gorilla”—a dark-skinned man whose father was once the servant of a mulatto bourgeois man he now employs. He himself was once a beggar until he joined the paramilitaries and quickly rose within their ranks because of his talent for ruthlessness. The family is unable to react as a unit until the father takes the lead by trying to pull a bait and switch. He asks his daughter, Rose, to accompany him to the office of a lawyer who represents the Gorilla, advertising her beauty until he can borrow enough money from his mistress to bribe the Gorilla and his lawyer. But he loses his wager: the Gorilla chooses the girl over the money. This is the deal he puts on the table: the girl must submit to sadistic sexual role-play and become his “girlfriend” for thirty days. Rose agrees to the deal without explicitly telling any member of her family.
Vieux-Chauvet insists on making the torture-rape victim a thinking subject. In fact, Rose can’t stop thinking. Her thoughts sometimes even wander past the fence posts that would make her martyrdom unimpeachable. But innocence is not Rose’s claim.