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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WITHDRAWN just after it was published in France in 1968 following a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.
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