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anks to hold more capital, the flow of lending would slow and the fuel for speculation would diminish. Such a policy would not eliminate financial crises or recessions altogether. But as Mr Smithers rightly says, the aim of central banks should not be to avoid an occasional mild recession but a big downturn, such as the world has been suffering. Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. -131-
Fiction from Haiti Meanness of the heart Aug 13th 2009 From The Economist print edition Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy. By Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Modern Library; 379 pages; $27. Buy from Amazon.com Illustration by Daniel Pudles WITHDRAWN just after it was published in France in 1968 following a government warning that it would endanger the author’s family, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Haitian trilogy, “Love, Anger, Madness”, has been an underground classic ever since. Finally released in France in 2005, it is now available in English. The book provides three views of life under an increasingly oppressive and unpredictable regime. In the first novella, “Love”, Claire, the eldest of three upper-class sisters, is a fiercely independent and intelligent woman whose dark skin makes her less marriageable than her younger siblings with their “gold under the skin”. Until she finally rebels, Claire is a virtual slave to her family, while secretly consumed by desire for her French brother-in-law. The middle-class family in “Anger” is torn apart when the 20-year-old heroine, Rose, is forced to sleep with a soldier to stop the regime from seizing their land. In “Madness” a poet steels himself for one final stand after his village is ravaged by militants and he is trapped without food. The daughter of a Haitian senator and a Jewish émigrée from the Virgin Islands, Vieux-Chauvet, who died in 1973, was a member of Haiti’s “occupation generation”. She was born in 1916, a year after Woodrow Wilson launched the American invasion of Haiti that was to last 19 years—damaging a nation proud of being the first black republic in the Western hemisphere and the only one that could boast a successful slave revolt. The occupation, and the years immediately following it, form the backdrop to the triptych. But it is also hard not to sense the growing power of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who proclaimed himself Haiti’s president for life in 1964, and whose family and followers, the terrifying tonton macoutes, were consolidating their grip on the country even as Vieux-Chauvet was secretly writing her book in her bedroom. Oppression—commercial, political, sexual—dominates Vieux-Chauvet’s writing, as it does the work of Haiti’s two other 20th-century literary masters, Jacques Roumain, who featured peasant heroes in his fiction, and Jacques Stephen Alexis, who portrayed the American occupation as rape. It would be easy to dismiss Vieux-Chauvet’s book as an out-of-date protest against colonialism, were it not for two elements that give it an important contemporary resonance: a powerful and erotic consciousness (“I am 39 years old and still a virgin. The unenviable fate of most women in small Haitian towns,” writes Claire) and a sharp and constant questioning about who really is the victim and who the torturer. “To defend himself, man refines the meanness of his heart,” she observes. True of Haiti 40 years ago, still true of too many places today. Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. -132-
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Politics this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
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Business this week Aug 13th 2009 Fr
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KAL's cartoon Aug 13th 2009 From Th
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Asia’s rebound has several causes
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democratic region. But Brazil’s l
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World trade and commercial aircraft
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Galileo, four centuries on As impor
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Correction: America's sex laws Aug
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SIR - You mentioned the slaughter d
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Professor of the history of art Sch
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Their arrival coincides with, and i
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and integrated well.) Peru has beco
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Clean energy in the Midwest Greenin
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The economics of natural gas Drowni
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meetings on health reform planned f
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Drought in Texas Not a cloud Aug 13
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Rich animals The dog will have his
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twice the national average. But it
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international institutions and the
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Energy v environment in Canada Bomb
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further sanctions. Yet it is doubtf
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egistered voters are frauds. Yet Mr
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Australia's opposition His own wors
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Taiwan's typhoon Taiwan's disastrou
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Banyan The Burmese road to ruin Aug
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Fatah and the Palestinians Fresh fa
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Iran and human rights The crackdown
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Security in Iraq A return to the ba
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Ethiopia's resilient prime minister
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America and Africa Hillary (not Bil
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Southern Italy's ills The messy mez
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Copyright © 2009 The Economist New
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Italy's vigilantes On the beat Aug
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crisis-driven entanglement in banks
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colluded with the Russian patriarch
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Prospects for recovery Mervyn's rea
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Conservatives will be fighting over
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advanced to scale down much. If the
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Scotland's capital and recession Pa
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