Love, Anger, Madness Read online

  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. She accepts her family’s guilt (her grandfather murdered the owner of the land who tried to cheat him out of it after he had bartered sheep for it) and her own coerced complicity in the sexual role-play She expresses a secular kind of self-knowledge and self-acceptance that includes acceptance and compassion even for her torturer:

  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, against the backdrop of the reign of terror of François Duvalier, who had by 1964 proclaimed himself president for life. She sent one manuscript (not three) to Paris and threw a party when she got a contract for the book with Gallimard, the premier French press. One can’t help wonder if some members of Haiti Littéraire, a poets’ group of which Vieux-Chauvet was an honorary member in the early sixties and which included Villard Denis (aka Davertige), Anthony Phelps, René Philoctète, Roland Morrisseau, and Serge Legagneur, were able to attend the party. At the party she recited excerpts from the book for the first time. It was then that family and friends expressed concerns about how the book might, no matter what absurd formula Duvalier used to determine who counted as an enemy of the state, put the life of every member of her family and her husband’s family at risk. That response made Vieux-Chauvet, who was by then a mother of three, a committed writer. She stood up for her book and refused to postpone its publication. She hoped that it would cause an international scandal and draw attention to Haiti.

  In 1968 Gallimard published Amour, colère, et folie, but right before its distribution an incident occurred
that changed the fate of the book as well as that of its author. Haiti’s ambassador to France apparently saw an advance copy and expressed concerns for the family’s safety. This episode made Marie Vieux-Chauvet cancel the book’s distribution and convinced her to turn her trip to New York into a permanent exile.

  Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s daughter Régine Charlier confessed that many of her own questions about this story remain unanswered. The moral, social, and political complications of the failed launch of the author’s most important novel, however compelling, reinforce but should not overshadow or distort her true legacy: the work itself. Love, Anger, Madness offers a literary means of articulating the challenges Haiti’s history poses to its citizens and to the rest of the world, an articulation that is possible only because her protagonists are complex thinking subjects and not simply romantic heroes. When these subjects set aside racial, social, political, and religious affiliation (be it voodoo or Catholicism), what is left is pitiless self-investigation meant as a model for an investigation of the world. Of course, a sharpened mind can make for a raw heart. Then again, if the human being is but “an animal hemmed in by a narrow conscience” whose lot is to suffer, perhaps such lucidity is all we really need.

  – ROSE-MYRIAM RÉJOUIS, BROOKLYN, 2009

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Ten years ago, Régine Charlier, Marie Chauvet’s eldest daughter, wrote to me and Val about her desire to publish a translation of Amour, Colère, et Folie. Her letter came from Haiti and I remember being mesmerized by the distance between what the stamps commemorated (Renaissance art) and what was going on in Haiti (continual disappointment). Edwidge Danticat had given her our names. We wrote back right away, explaining that we had to decline because we had just returned to our Ph.D. programs and needed to focus on passing exams and writing our dissertations. We are moved that we were given a second chance.

  A few words about our process: When asked how Val and I divide the labor of translating, I often respond: we take turns. When I defend the original, he defends the translation. When he defends the translation, I defend the original. This is still my best answer.-R.M.R.

  TRANSLATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to express our gratitude to the following people and institutions for their support of this translation: Judy Sternlight, Edwidge Danticat, Régine Charlier, Thomas Colchie, Thomas Spear, Holly Webber, Michael Dash, Joan Dayan, Ronnie Scharfman, Carolyn Vega, Jeanne Garane, Emmanuelle Ertel, Etienne Dobenesque, Alyson Waters, Patrick Erouart-Siad, Margo Jefferson, Jonathan Veitch, Neil Gordon, Noah Eisenberg, Carolyn Berman, Laura Frost, Lea Beresford, Vincent La Scala, Ann Snitow, Ferentz Lafargue, Elaine Savory, John Flicker, Jessica Waters, Exit Art, and the Simon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

  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 of myself is easy. All I have to do is lie a lot while convincing myself that I’m really putting my finger on it. I will attempt sincerity: solitude has made me bitter; I am like a fruit fallen before ripening, rotting under the tree unnoticed. Hurrah for Annette! After Justin Rollier, the poet who died of tuberculosis, there was Bob the Syrian; after Bob now Jean, brother-in-law to us both-and she is not yet twenty-three. Our little town of X is emancipating itself. It would seem we have been contaminated by what they call civilization.

  I am the oldest of the three Clamont sisters. There are about eight years in age between each of us. We live together in this house, an undivided inheritance from our late parents. As usual, I have been entrusted with the more vexing tasks. You have nothing to do, so keep busy, they seem to say. And they have handed the keys to both house and strongbox over to me. I am at once servant and mistress of the house, a kind of housekeeper on whose shoulders rests the daily round of their lives. As recompense, each gives me something to live on. Annette works. A nice bourgeois girl ruined, cornered by circumstances, floundering shamelessly in compromise and promiscuity, and where else but as a salesgirl with Bob Charivi, a Syrian of the worst sort with a store on Grand-rue. Jean Luze, Félicia’s husband, a handsome Frenchman, beached on our welcoming shores by who knows what miracle, is in the employ of Mr. Long, an American executive
who has been here for ten years. I need very little, and thanks to them I am gathering a fortune. I have developed a sordid miserliness in my old age. You should see me patiently counting my nest egg each month. “It’s dreadful,” Annette likes to say, “how Claire neglects herself!”

  Félicia shrugs.

  Since she got married, only Jean Luze exists. Gorgeous Jean Luze! Brilliant Jean Luze! The exotic and mysterious foreigner, who has set up his library and record collection in our house, and makes fun of our backward way of living and thinking. A flawless man, an ideal husband. Félicia’s cup overfloweth with love and admiration. I won’t be the one to open her eyes. From my window, I spy on their every move. This is how I came to find Annette in the arms of her Syrian boss one night. She was in the back of the car they had parked halfway in the garage. I saw everything, heard everything, despite all the precautions they were taking in order not to wake Félicia. They hadn’t thought of me. How could the old maid, uninterested in anything having to do with love, suspect them for one moment? That affair lasted until Félicia’s engagement. After that, everything fell apart for Annette again…

  Félicia is of average height and on the voluptuous side, light-skinned with bland blond hair and the delicate features of a white woman. Although Annette is white too, there is gold under her skin. And her hair is black, blue-black like her eyes. Except for the skin color, she is a touched-up copy of me sixteen years ago. These two white-mulatto girls are my sisters. I am the surprise that mixed blood had in store for my parents, no doubt an unpleasant surprise in their day, given how they made me suffer… Times have changed, and I have learned with age to appreciate what has been given me. History is on the move and so is fashion, fortunately…