Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [7]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET
PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME MARIE CHAUVET
NOVELS
Fille d’Haïti. Paris: Fasquelle, 1954.
La Danse sur le volcan. Paris: Plon, 1957; Paris/Léchelle: Maisonneuve & Larose/Emina Soleil, 2004 (republished with a preface by Catherine Hermary-Vieille).
Fonds des nègres. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1960.
Amour, colère, et folie. Paris: Gallimard, 1968; Paris/Léchelle: Maisonneuve & Larose/Emina Soleil, 2005.
Les Rapaces. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1986.
IN TRANSLATION
Dance on the Volcano (La Danse sur le volcan). Translated by Salvator Attanasio. New York: W Sloan Associates, 1959.
WORKS ABOUT VIEUX-CHAUVET
Guyonneau, Christine H. “Francophone Women Writers from Sub-Saharan Africa and Its Diaspora: A Preliminary Bibliography.” Callaloo, No. 27 (Spring 1986), pp. 404–31 [exhaustive list of contemporary reviews and of literary criticism on the work published in or before 1984 (see “Chauvet”)].
“Marie Chauvet.” http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/chauvet.html [accessed January 2009].
LOVE
Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects. An old maid! No husband. Doesn’t know love. Hasn’t even lived, really. They’re wrong. In any case, I’m savoring my revenge in silence. Silence is mine, vengeance is mine. I know into whose arms Annette will throw herself, and under no circumstances do I plan to open the eyes of our sister Félicia. She is too enraptured and carries the three-month-old fetus in her womb with too much pride. If she was smart enough to find herself a husband, I want her to be smart enough to keep him. She has too much confidence—in herself, in everyone. Her serenity exasperates me. She smiles while sewing shirts for the son she’s expecting, because of course it must be a son! And Annette will be the godmother, I bet …
I rest my elbows on the bedroom windowsill, and watch: standing in broad daylight, Annette offers Jean Luze the freshness of her twenty-two years. Their backs to Félicia, they claim each other without the slightest gesture. Desire bursting in their eyes. Jean Luze struggles, but there is no way out.
I am thirty-nine years old and still a virgin. The unenviable fate of most women in small Haitian towns. Is it like that everywhere? Are there towns in the world like this one, half mired in ancestral habits, people spying on each other? My town! My land! as they proudly call this dreary graveyard, where you see few men besides the doctor, the pharmacist, the priest, the district commandant, the mayor, the prefect, all of them newly appointed to their posts, all of them such typical “coast people” that it’s nauseating. Suitors are exotic birds, since parents here always dream of sending their sons away to Port-au-Prince or abroad to make learned men of them. One of them came back to us in the person of Dr. Audier, who studied in Paris and in whom I still search in vain for something superhuman …
I was born in 1900, a time when prejudice was at its height in this little region. Three groups emerged, isolated from each other like enemies: the “aristocrats” to whom we belonged, the petty bourgeois, and the common people. Tugged at by the delicate ambiguity of my situation, I suffered from an early age because of the dark color of my skin. The mahogany color I had inherited from some great-great-grandmother went off like a small bomb in the tight circle of whites and white-mulattoes with whom my parents socialized. But that is the past, and I don’t care to return to what is no more, at least not for now …
Father Paul says I have poisoned my mind with education. The truth is that my wits were asleep and I have stirred them—with this journal. I have discovered in myself unsuspected talents. I believe I can write. I believe I can think. I have become arrogant. I have become self-conscious. To reduce my inner life to what the eye can see, that’s my goal. A noble task! Will I succeed? To speak