Front List / Back List: Haitian Literature Part I - Marie Vieux-Chauvet

I've been thinking about this one since January.

It has to do with Haitian literature. If you have any previous experience with Haitian literature (something I did not possess before this project) you know then how excited I am.

As the grave reality of the January earthquake in Haiti was being reported by increasingly sun-tanned (not sure what SPF make up has but apparently it works really well) reporters I had a somewhat disturbing thought. It was based on a personal experience.

I grew up in South Florida and my experience took place on a middle school basketball court. We had a decent game going, something like a four on four. I was eleven and had just missed an open layup.

An older kid I didn't know, a Haitian, laughed at me and remarked to the rest of the group about my inability to jump.

Laughing, he quoted the title of a movie popular at the time. "Ha! Ha! See? It's true... White men can't jump."

It didn't bother me really. I was pretty good at basketball (something I can't claim today). My middle school was racially diverse. Such slander was par for the course. I was however shocked when one of my teammates, another student I didn't know came to my rescue. Well, sort of.

"And Haitian men don't work." He said with a serious tone that I remember with chilling clarity.

The student was African-American. That's when I realized that skin color did not always denote racial identification. Later in life I would obviously experience similar situations. African-Americans and Jamaicans. Whites and Latinos. Blacks and Latinos. Indians and blacks. Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

So as I watched Anderson Cooper in his Bahama shirt talk about the need for aid and relief I had a chilling thought: They won't get it. No one likes Haitians. They live in a wretched country, with nothing to offer to the developed world and therefore will be ignored.

Most Americans probably know Haiti only as the scary neighbor next to the place their going to for their Honeymoon. Luckily I was wrong and people gave lots of money and time. I'm not here to talk about that though. I just wanted to explain what made me wonder about Haiti a little longer than the cable news prescribed mourning period for natural disasters.

The Caribbean has a wonderful literary tradition. But Haiti? Other than Edwidge Danticat I knew of no others.

So I set out to read me some Haitians.

What I found dropped my jaw and left me, in a word: amazed. Not because brilliant literature exists in Haiti but because literature this brilliant exists without enduring, widespread realization.

It also left me somewhat angry. Angry about the lack of additional translations of these writers and why it took so long to get translated in the first place. Angry about a seemingly insane glossing-over of what amounts to a brilliant book in this week's Front List selection.

Anger it seems is nothing new to Haiti. It may be the last national resource left to a people that have been thoroughly fleeced by modernity.

Because of the length of which I want to quote from the Front List title I will divide the Front List and Back List up this week. The Front List being Monday and the Back List on Tuesday. The first title was published by The Modern Library in late 2009, and is just now being released in paperback. Thus it still fits nicely into the prescribed category.

As far as the bio for the book here's what Random House wrote:

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.

Okay. Now let's get to it.

From The Front List


Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. A new translation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur. Introduction by Edwidge Danticat. Trade Paperback. The Modern Library. ISBN: 9780812976922.

What possessed me to be demanding? Look how I am being punished! I angrily swallow my hopes and my love. There is nothing but hatred in me. Its roots spread, I feel them take hold of every part of my being. In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. All those who pray demand favor from God. But He's tired of it all and he gets His revenge by botching His work. We are merely the rough drafts Nature cynically employs in its quest for Perfection. Tormented creatures, a frightful mixture of the monstrous and divine, thrown pell-mell into an inhospitable world to wait for death! What choice do we have? But love must protect me from myself. I am afraid of finding myself alone with all this hatred. What would happen to me if I looked it straight in the face, if I gave in to it?...

-from Love

I get butterflies just copying that paragraph. It's power is unmanning and its implications, even when removed from the narrative that lends it increased strength, are easy to fathom. "In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness." If I were this book's publisher I would etch those words somewhere easy to find. How can you turn away from a concept as grim, as real, as that poison truth?

Would you believe me if I told you that such a paragraph occurs every ten to twenty pages? In one instance, a series of three such paragraphs occur in a mere five pages. The potency is astounding. Psychically, it is unbelievably convincing. And if you're writing of the hardships of an entire people, filtered through one amazingly conflicted human, it would have to be rendered such, less it be found wanting.

If comparisons are your thing then Love, Anger, Madness is Midnight's Children or One Hundred Years Of Solitude minus the magic. It is a book that allows little to no softening of the subject matter. There is nothing resembling humor in this book. Nothing resembling the whimsical. Do not misunderstand me. I love the two books mentioned above. It's just that there is something noble, or honest perhaps is a better word, in the stony gaze and set jaw of Vieux-Chauvet's brilliant prose.

The trilogy is not united by characters or familial ties. Instead it is a trilogy linked by milieu. It is a Haiti that is proud of its hard-fought freedom and yet also subjugated by its poverty and reactionary governments. Just as Western capitalism exploited, then crippled Haiti's economy and left it for dead (more on that in the Back List section) there was also the rise of militant "Black Power" politics that Vieux-Chauvet felt assaulted individuality and intellectual progress.

In the case of Love, Anger, Madness it is not so much the detailed revelations of Haiti's grim 20th century as it is the author's profound psychology of the personal that impressed me. Floored me, rather. Without a doubt the French colonial history has had at least one positive impact, namely a rich and defiant literary tradition that fits the island nation.

I do not want to detract from the notion of a Haitian literature. The formal approach may be very French, even existentialist in its nature. The storytelling and language itself are Haitian.

The first two stories involve upper class mulatto families and the last one deals with a lower class yet still racially mixed poet. Yet still. That is the essential verbiage, for polemically and psychically these are stories of race.

Race is what drives the beautiful protagonist of the first book, Claire, to live out a life of celibacy. Though she relishes her life as a confirmed "old maid" she covets her "white" sisters French husband. Claire is intellectual, secretly reading a library's worth of fiction, philosophy and history. She is the source of the brilliant quote above as well as the one I will close this section with, but yet she is also a woman who secretly masturbates to pornography she purchased via clandestine shopping. She coddles a plastic baby at night and makes love to another, man-sized doll.

Compounding her lustful second life is her keen eye for men. Though Jean Luze, the French husband of her sister, is her emotional love and source of admiration, there is another man who she cannot help but think about. He is the village's commandant and to accuse him of malfeasance is to say wolves are merely fond of eating lambs. His name is Caledu and his blackness defines him as much as their French heritage does the mulatto families. Caledu has brutally beaten and raped her friends, mainly because they are mulattoes and he despises their white skin. He is a monster in her mind and yet...

She despises him, tries to push him away, yet his powerful body and cruel eyes awaken in her a lust impossible to push away. Again and again, like a voluptuous nightmare he appears at the fringe of her desires.

One detail worth noting: Claire is black. A sort of accepted reality to the mixed race upper class, like the inevitability of a snake eyes when throwing dice. To her family and mulatto community she is almost an embarrassment and it is with this in mind that she has never dared approach a man of "good" family. It is precisely because of her black skin that Caledu has set his desires upon her as well. While he takes the others by force he desires her to submit willingly. What happens... Well, I'm not in the spoiler business.

So now that I've conjured for you this "sordid little beast" as Claire calls herself at one point, I want to restate the brilliance of this book. In her journal, again a secret affair, Claire writes in suddenly pedantic brilliance:

Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can't reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cezanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings.

What could possibly follow that up with? How about this: Haitians can write...

Haitian Literature Part II - Jacques Roumain