Love, Anger, and Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Love, Anger, and Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, (trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur). The Modern Library. 416pp, $27.00.
In 1968, Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet published her fourth novel, Amour, Colère et Folie (Love, Anger, and Madness) with the French publisher Gallimard. The furor that arose upon the novel’s publication resulted in Vieux-Chauvet’s exile to New York and the destruction of most of the remaining copies of the book. The book was highly critical of Haiti’s 1960s political and social situation, specifically of the oppressive Duvalier regime. Vieux-Chauvet died in exile in 1973, and aside from aficionados and scholars of Caribbean literature and history, the book appeared destined for obscurity until 2005 when another French publisher, Emina Soleil, re-issued the work. Now, Love, Anger, and Madness is available for the first time in English, published by The Modern Library.
Often called a trilogy, Love, Anger, and Madness is actually a triptych of three thematically connected novellas. The overarching preoccupation of all three stories centers on the idea of fear as a force of social destruction. Vieux-Chauvet’s characters live in fear of their political and community leaders and, ultimately, of their neighbors and friends. Even the tightest family unit warps and deforms under the influence of this pervasive fear. The novel’s stories create a three-paneled portrait of what Haitian society had become by the mid 1960s—impoverished, environmentally ravaged, chaotic and violent.
The first novella, Love, introduces us to the heroine, Claire, the oldest of the three Clamont sisters. As the darkest of her sisters, her name is ironic; peau Claire means light-skinned in French. Because of her dark skin and an oppressive upbringing, Claire is still a frustrated virgin at 39, one who lives as a servant in her own home, effaced and enraged. love is Claire’s diary, a testament to the passionate interior life she hides from everyone around her.
Through her writing, Claire evolves. First concerned with the small dramas within her household—her middle sister’s marriage and younger sister’s love affairs, her own infatuation with her white French brother-in-law—she soon becomes interested in the greater socio-political tragedy at work in her small town. Claire starts to manipulate her surroundings, moving slowly outward from her inner circle, and Vieux-Chauvet makes Claire’s transformation from invisible puppet master to active community participant something greater than one woman’s self-actualization; Claire is a symbol of a much larger and significant rebellion.
Anger is perhaps the most complicated of the three novellas, as it follows an entire family, compared to Love’s focus on just one character. The Normils are middle class landowners in Port-au-Prince who wake up one morning to discover squatters—militia men in black uniforms—taking over their land. Although Vieux-Chauvet never calls these men by name, they are Duvalier’s famous Tonton Macoutes, and their appearance on the Normil property sets a devastating series of events in motion.
As its title suggests, Anger is about this emotion—as a destructive illness. Each member of the Normil family finds a different expression for their rage: the grandfather and youngest son in fantasy, the father in self-abnegation, the mother in alcoholism, the daughter in martyrdom, and the son in misplaced heroism. Vieux-Chauvet focuses a particular lens on her female characters, and so Rose Normil, the family’s 20-year-old daughter, becomes the central figure in this story. What Rose must suffer epitomizes the pure corruption and violence of the political system at that time: the entire family’s future rests on her willingness to be raped for an entire month by one of the militia leaders.
The triptych’s third novella, Madness, centers around a starving poet named René. Although each of Love, Anger, and Madness’s three stories addresses the tension inherent in Haiti’s black/white/mulatto social stratification as well as the antagonism between its traditional Vodou religion and Catholicism, Madness also zeroes in on the schizophrenic nature of those conflicting traditions. René barricades himself in his home for eight days and takes the reader through a series of intricate monologues illustrating how this cultural and religious hybridism has become a principle cause of Haiti’s tragedy.
During this time, three other poets arrive at René’s small shack, each in an equally distressing state of starvation, fear and impending madness. They are terrorized by the appearance of what they call “devils”—again another word for the Tonton Macoutes—and this fear begins to silence their muse. The men are on a quest for beauty amidst the violence and ugliness around them, and the impossibility of reconciling those two realities serves to deepen their psychic rupture. Only Jacques, the youngest and most fragile of the poets, manages to create anything at all, only to lose consciousness upon finishing his poems. Madness ends with an inevitable, final example of how self-serving violence becomes when it has been allowed to take over as the only reliable social structure.
Love, Anger, and Madness also demonstrates Vieux-Chauvet’s impressive stylistic range. The diary technique in Love renders Claire, an otherwise despicable and dangerous woman, sympathetic. Granting the reader such unfiltered access to her thoughts reveals the complex nature of her situation and the influence of her troubled past. Vieux-Chauvet’s confident use of the third-person omniscient in Anger places each family member within the reader’s confidence. Yet suddenly, halfway through this second novella, Vieux-Chauvet switches into two back-to-back monologues by siblings Paul and Rose. These two narratives are powerful laments, swan songs about the dashed hopes and disillusionment of a generation of Haitian youth. And finally, Madness reads much like a play, with clear echoes of Greek drama, a technique which highlights the “staged” or “forced” quality of the very violence the story seeks to indict.
Despite its severe criticism of Haitian society, Love, Anger, and Madness is also very much a testament to a beloved country. Vieux-Chauvet’s tender and sympathetic descriptions of both the landscape and the people (on all sides of its complicated conflict) make this triptych a powerful emotional journey through a ravaged but well-loved landscape.
Michelle Bailat-Jones is a freelance translator and writer. The holder of an MFA from Emerson College, she blogs on literature at Incurable Logophilia.
Responses to this article
The Constant Conversation
The latest posts at the blog of The Quarterly Conversation
A Taste of Cherry in a Heat Wave
I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and make my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that [...]
The Ballad of David Markson
"What’s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility." (Colin Marshall for The Millions)
Gass-X
"Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want." Via Dylan Suher, Greg Gerke's sort-of review of William H. Gass's Reading Rilke in BIG OTHER.
“Sands immense / Impart the oceanic sense,” Or, Daring to embark on Clarel
A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote. But must he read Clarel? Can [...]
Amazon’s Inability to Grasp Irony
This is just one small example.
Complete Thomas Bernhard in English: A Checklist with Pictures
Thomas Bernhard is certainly one of the major, titanic writers of any era, any country. Enormously influential, unremittingly bleak and pessimistic but never without a sense of humor, his style evolved into single-paragraphed philosophical rants extending hundreds of pages, the best of which are Woodcutters, ‘Walking’ (from Three Novellas), and Gathering Evidence. I have finally [...]
On Penguin 75
Ever since Penguin's 75th Anniversary roadtrip I have intended to address the somewhat simultaneous release of Penguin 75, a sort of vanity book of Penguin covers. This book is delightful, but flawed. Delightful, but misleading.
Let not the poets be your guide.
In The Unicorn Hunt (1993), the fifth book of Dorothy Dunnett’s cycle of historical novels of early Renaissance Europe, the House of Niccolo, Dunnett tells of the deficiencies of wealthy merchant Anselm Adorne’s relations with women thus: His wife Margriet could have warned him. He was familiar with motherly wives and the skittish ways of other [...]
Conversation with Ahsahta Press
Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press, based at Boise State University in Idaho, took the time this week to share her thoughts on poetry publishing as part of my ongoing series of publisher profiles. Ahsahta publishes seven full-length collections of poetry a year, including recent works by Kate Greenstreet, Lisa Fishman, Rusty Morrison, and Julie Carr. Like some other small presses, Ahsahta offers a yearly subscription option, which is one of my favorite ways to buy poetry and encounter the work of many poets who are new to me, as well as poets whose newest books I always look forward to reading. Janet says more about this and what it's like to craft a press's identity and consistent aesthetic.
Not a spine-tingler, in the least
An unfortunate side effect to the lengthy transition of print to digital is our long suffering endurance of stale articles in mainstream media rehashing the same points as every other article in mainstream media.
blog advertising is good for you
Bonus Articles
The latest articles published in between issues
In Homer’s Head: Ransom by David Malouf
In Ransom, Malouf satisfyingly gives us a meeting between Priam and Achilles that builds from the interiority of Priam. The novel seems to want to teach the importance of doing something human to those who might never get around to picking up Homer or who, if they do, might wish they could get into the character's heads.
How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction
Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson's own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to be considered as fiction or autobiography, laying claim to both. In Art Objects she writes: "The question put to the writer 'How much of this is based on your own experience?' is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing"; a "separate reality." At every turn she eludes the critic, the interviewer, the reader; she offers truth, but not the truth. "I'm telling you stories. Trust me."
Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport
It's difficult to pin down exactly why books as objects mean so much to me. I wasn't alive when William Goyen's excellent Come, The Restorer was published, but owning an original printing with the dust jacket—as it would have been purchased at the time of its release—makes the book more special to me than some beat-up paperback reissue. If it's signed, even more so. I'm only really interested in modern first editions (say, post-1950 or so)—before that books get quite expensive, but also I don't think they look as nice, since many were issued without dust jackets, and at that time the dust jacket wasn't considered a permanent part of the book, so they're often missing. So why the obsession and collecting, and why is it so important?
The Master of the Not Quite: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
Wood can be harsh, yes, but he is seldom unfair. Wyatt Mason was wrong to accuse him of having suggested, by dint of a string of negative reviews, that no good contemporary literature exists. (He has written favorably of McEwan, Bolaño, Robinson, Ozick, Kirsch, Sebald, Roth, Saramago, Swift, Carey.) He never simply dismisses a writer (in the manor of, say, Dale Peck); on the contrary, his criticism, even at its most polemical and uncompromising, is inexplicably bound to larger concerns about the direction of contemporary fiction. Two major concerns have dominated James Wood's writing: realism and religion. In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, his first collection, newly available in paperback from Picador, these two concerns are beautifully imbricated, resulting in what is surely among the finest achievements in recent literary journalism.
A Warehouse with an Epic Scope: Entrepôt by Mark McMorris
To say that Mark McMorris's Entrepôt is about writing poetry is to do a huge disservice to this beautiful and penetrating book, whose ostensible subject of contemplation is how to live, love, and make do in a time of war, if not cultural crisis. On the other hand, the book's greatest service, at least to my eye, is in its exploration of just what it means to be a poet—I should be more specific and say a lyric poet—amid our contemporary terrors.
More Bonus Coverage
Why help us? Read our Support page.
Help sustain indie lit coverage. Subscribe for as little as $1 per month.
No amount is too small.
Books By Contributors
about
© 2008 Scott EspositoTQC is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and PressesDesign by SoroDesign