Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [5]
Human beings have an eerie resemblance to certain animals. I was struck by my resemblance to a panther I saw in a movie once. Same features, same fierce gaze veiled by false gentleness, same supple neck beneath an elegant head with wide, quivering, sensual nostrils. He, on the other hand, looks like a dog. One could easily mistake him for a gorilla, but that’s not the case. His hands are misleading since they’re long and hairy, but he’s just a dog; a poor dog craving affection who turns into a wolf as a result. […] An animal stench in our sweat, all of us. Man is just an animal hemmed in by a narrow conscience; this is why it is his lot to suffer. The struggle between mind and beast tears at him from within. A tragic fate, a relentless struggle where the mind rarely wins. God has toyed with us …
Though “the mind rarely wins,” that is nonetheless where she turns. She bows neither to the Gorilla nor to God. Nor does she seek shelter in the arms of any member of the family she is working to save.
The last novella, Madness, is a first-person narrative by René, a lower-class mulatto poet hiding inside his shack with two, then three, other poet-friends. He is living three plots at once: he is a starving civilian in a third-world country under siege, an armchair guerrilla fighting a war against what he perceives as an army of shape-shifting devils whose faces morph into the blinding metal of their helmets and weapons, all while hoping, like any young man his age, to catch a glimpse of the neighbor’s daughter. During this time René and his friends argue about the past. He claims that they have been arrested and beaten by the commandant before. The others do not remember, although one of them has a serious injury to the head he can’t explain. René and his friends seem to be lost at the intersection of false memory and oblivion. In this narrative, which keeps veering into something I can only describe as gothic science fiction, Duvalier-ism has transformed Haitian society beyond recognition: a surreal, war-ravaged landscape in which the church steps are littered with the executed bodies of men, women, and children, and where two lovers—the narrator and the bourgeois girl he loves—are reunited in the torture chamber. This novella, perhaps the most pessimistic of the three, describes the arrested development and death of an entire generation.
Although there are characters with the same names in the three novellas (a Mathurin and a Jacques in both Love and Madness), Vieux-Chauvet abstains from giving them the same biographies. This is not a literal trilogy that tells one story. Rather, its alignment is structural. It shares the three unities of classical tragedy: unity of place (Haiti), unity of time (after the 1915–34 American occupation), and unity of action (terror). To these three unities, I would add a fourth: unity of purpose. In each of the novellas, the “black power” populist pieties of a dehumanizing dictatorship collide with individual critical thought. At its core, the plot of each novella is a confrontation between a narrow-minded henchman with a gun at his hip or pliers in his hands, and Haitian civilians haplessly struggling up a steep learning curve, facing upheaval within and without.
Across the three novellas, Vieux-Chauvet’s protagonists have at least one thing in common: sooner or later they slip their racial, social, political, and religious bonds. They do so by learning to question everything. This is the cumulative thrust of the trilogy—and this unity is reflected in the history of its composition and publication. The author’s daughter Régine Charlier recalls that her mother wrote the trilogy over the course of six months in 1967. She shut herself up in her room and wrote in secret,