Love, Anger, Madness
Love, Anger, Madness
Marie Vieux-Chauvet
A Haitian Triptych
An omnibus of novels
Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005.
In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually building in emotional intensity, the novellas paint a shocking portrait of families and artists struggling to survive under Haiti's terrifying government restrictions that have turned its society upside down, transforming neighbors into victims, spies, and enemies.
In 'Love,' Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family. Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a criminal act of rebellion.
In 'Anger,' a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her father's land.
And in 'Madness,' René, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority.
Sympathetic, savage and truly compelling with an insightful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave and graphic evocation of a country in turmoil.
Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Love, Anger, Madness
© 2009
INTRODUCTION
Edwidge Danticat
Fewer than a handful of Haitian writers have, both while alive and dead, inspired as much adulation, analysis, and discussion as Marie Vieux-Chauvet. In fact the small number in question constitutes a multigenerational triad of which Marie Vieux-Chauvet was the final survivor and the only female. Jacques Roumain, the grandfather, was the world traveler who returned home to write Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), one of the first twentieth-century Haitian novels featuring peasant characters, and which was translated into English by Jacques Roumain’s American friends, the poet Langston Hughes and the scholar Mercer Cook. The father of the trio, Jacques Stephen Alexis, was the protest novelist who wouldn’t allow protest to mar his aesthetics, and who wrote novels which were as erotic as they were patriotic. I had the pleasure of working on a published translation of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s L’Espace d’un cillement (In the Flicker of an Eyelid), a novel that depicts the American occupation of Haiti as being as much of an assault on a country as on a woman’s body. I am equally honored to introduce you to Love, Anger, Madness, the seminal trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, the mother/sister/daughter of this trio, which represents, in my opinion, the cornerstone of Haitian literature.
Born in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, on September 16, 1916, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was a member of the “occupation generation,” that is, she was born a year after the United States invaded Haiti, launching an occupation that would last nineteen years. The U.S. invasion came in the wake of President Woodrow Wilson’s professed commitment to make the world safe for democracy. However, as soon as the marines landed in Haiti, Wilson’s administration shut down the press, took charge of Haiti’s banks and customs, and instituted a system of compulsory labor for poor Haitians. By the end of the occupation, more than fifteen thousand Haitians had lost their lives. A Haitian gendarmerie was trained to replace the American marines, then proceeded to form juntas, organize coups, and terrorize Haitians for decades. Although American troops were officially withdrawn from Haiti in 1934, the U.S. government maintained economic control of the country until 1947.
“The United States is at war with Haiti,” the American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote after returning from a fact-finding mission to occupied Haiti. “Congress has never sanctioned the war. Josephus Daniels (President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy) has illegally and unjustly occupied a free foreign land and murdered its inhabitants by the thousands. He has deposed its officials and dispersed its legally elected representatives. He is carrying on a reign of terror, brow-beating, and cruelty, at the hands of southern white naval officers and marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion.”
Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, the daughter of a Haitian senator and a Jewish émigré from the Virgin Islands, would later use the turmoil of that period as back-story for Love, the first and longest novella of this trilogy. A voracious reader, Vieux-Chauvet was exposed to a great deal of Haitian and foreign literature, which contradicted everything this occupation was meant to represent. Equating her own unfortunate predicament as a thirty-nine-year-old virgin who, because of her dark skin, is considered less beautiful and thus less marriageable than her two lighter younger sisters, Claire Clamont, the main character of Love, echoes D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary when she laments in her journal that there is “hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal.” However, is all suffering equal when the people who suffer are not considered equal?
“We have been practicing at cutting each other’s throats since Independence,” she writes of the country that we Haitians like to remind the world was the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, home to the only slave revolt that succeeded in producing a nation. What we would rather not say, and what Claire Clamont and Marie Vieux-Chauvet are brave enough to say, is that this same country has continued to fail at reaching its full potential, in part because of foreign interference and domination, but also because of internal strife and power struggles. What at first seem like personal dramas in this book become microcosms of larger historical conflicts. In fact, the man Claire and her sisters are all pining after is French. However, the man who terrorizes them is a Haitian, who is given by an unseen dictator the power to decide who lives and dies in X, the pseudonymous town that could stand in for many Haitian towns.
It would be too simple, however, for X and its inhabitants to be plagued by a single terror. Not only are the hills and mountains heartbreakingly eroded but American ships routinely leave X’s ports filled with the prized wood that is causing that erosion. Children die of typhoid and malaria. Beggars drink dirty water from ditches and are routinely persecuted by the ruling colonel, who equally punishes the poor, the artists and intellectuals, as well as the aristocracy, to which Claire and her family belong. Even though this section of the trilogy is mostly set in 1939, five years after the end of the American occupation, it is obvious that it is meant to evoke 1967, the year the book was written, a time when what would end up as a thirty-year dictatorship run by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was becoming more and more severe, enrolling the poor as henchmen and -women, killing them to reduce their number, and persecuting intellectuals for their ideas and artists for their creations. That Marie Vieux-Chauvet ended up in exile in the United States in 1968 after a valiant battle to publish this book in France (see Translator’s Preface) is no surprise. This book, in three distinct, well-developed, nondidactic, masterfully crafted novellas, still manages to condemn totalitarianism and tyranny at every turn. Marie Vieux-Chauvet might as well have been speaking to Haiti’s dictators and many of her future critics when sh
e has Claire write in her journal: “Feel free to shriek at the top of your lungs if you ever see this manuscript; call me indecent, immoral.” But she is neither indecent nor immoral, offering us not just prurient evil in all its vivid ugliness or good in all its beatific triumph, but the murkier and grayer areas in between. How do those who stuff hot potatoes in their child servants’ mouths fare against those who murder a poet or rape a neighbor? How can those who have been brutally enslaved turn around and enslave others? In depicting the many layers of injustice that Haiti-one might even say the world-has never been able to fully shake, Marie Vieux-Chauvet almost seems to be speaking to us about current political issues from the grave. In Anger, the second novella of the trilogy, Paul, the brother of Rose Normil-a self-sacrificing counterpart to Loves Claire Clamont-dreams of a better future for his town and country in words that echo in our time. “I know that we’ve been wallowing in error and concupiscence for a long time now, and personally I was hoping for a change,” he declares. “I would follow anyone who passed austerity laws to halt runaway decadence and the vanity of the unchecked ambition; I would support whoever could abolish hunger and poverty, prison cells and torture…” Also in Anger a crippled boy hears gunshots and concludes that songbirds are being killed. “Grandfather… tell me a story,” he demands. The story we read in that novella is largely driven by that repeated request. It is the story that makes the boy brave as he grows into a man, even one with limited capabilities. It is the story that gives him, to use what is here an appropriate cliché, “legs to stand on.”
“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 pay. Other poor Haitians were sold by the Haitian government in secret deals to work in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic and were shipped off like slaves to the other side of the island.
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 tortu
re-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 prisoners’ screams. The prison is not far from my house. […] The police force has become vigilant. It monitors our every move. Its representative is Commandant Calédu, a ferocious black man who has been terrorizing us for about eight years now. He wields the right of life and death over us, and he abuses it. […] And cruelty is contagious: kneeling on coarse salt, forcing a victim to count the blows tearing at his skin, his mouth stuffed with hot potatoes, these are a few of the minor punishments some of us [members of the bourgeois mulatto class] inflict upon our child-servants. Upon those turned slaves by hunger, who must suffer our spite and rage in all its voluptuousness.