Book suppressed, translation belated: Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness
Friday, July 16th, 2010A review of Love, Anger, Madness (Modern Library, 2009) by Clockroot intern A’Dora Phillips.
Of the many reasons that a worthy work of literature may not be translated for decades, one of the most common is its suppression in the original time and place in which it was written. Such is the case of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger Madness, a trilogy of novellas, often referred to as a “triptych,” evoking and condemning the violence and tyranny of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Reign of Terror in Haiti. The book dates to 1967, when for six months Vieux-Chauvet sequestered herself in a room in Haiti, writing the entire text in what must have been, one imagines, a fever-pitch of anxiety and artistic necessity against a backdrop of state-sanctioned violence. Though Vieux-Chauvet set her stories in the generation(s) before Duvalier ascended to power, it is obvious that she was evoking and speaking out against Duvalier’s brutal regime, and she does so in a voice so unable to equivocate the outrage she feels that we are reminded of the words Osip Mandelstam conjured in ‘homage’ to Stalin: “the thick worms his fingers… the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims…” (Translated by W.S. Merwin)
She sent the trilogy off as a single unified manuscript to Paris, and Gallimard agreed to publish it. Shortly thereafter, in 1968, an advance copy was read by Haiti’s ambassador to France, and he warned Vieux-Chauvet that its existence placed her and her family in danger. Three Vieux-Chauvet family members had already been executed by the regime, and so she took his warning seriously. She persuaded Gallimard to halt distribution and went on a trip to New York, from which she never returned to Haiti. Making an emergency visit to Haiti, her husband acquired stray copies of the book and destroyed them. Five years later, in 1973, Chauvet died in exile at the age of fifty-seven (of brain cancer). She had three children, and although they possessed a cache of remaining copies, which they sold “discreetly” over the years, Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy was essentially “lost” until the French publisher Zellige republished it in 2005. And only with the 2009 publication of the English translation, rendered by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, is Vieux-Chauvet’s seminal work finally available in English. More than four decades have passed, yes, but the delay in publication does nothing to diminish the book’s relevance and air of urgency. In a way this might be seen as unfortunate, given the terrible nature of her subject matter.
The first novella, Love, is also the longest and most realistically rendered. It is told from the point-of-view of Claire Clamont, at thirty-nine the oldest and darkest of three mulatto sisters whose parents are dead. She is unmarried, a frustrated virgin who records her bitterness and longing in a journal she keeps. The Clamont sisters inhabit their ancestral house, which they cannot afford to maintain; their inheritance, largely squandered; and their unnamed hometown, seething with fear under the despotic eyes of Calédu (a commandant assigned to keep order in their region); with mounting anxiety and disaffection. Yet in the midst of this troubled social, cultural, and political environment, the sisters focus hopeful eyes on Jean Luze, a white Frenchman who marries the middle sister (who is also the whitest) after traveling to Haiti to build a career in the export business. While she is pregnant with their second child, he has an affair with her younger sister and serves as the object of the older one’s unconsummated sexual and emotional cravings. As personal and political tensions rise within the many spaces circumscribed by the narrative, we feel the certainty of violent rupture. But in testament to Vieux-Chauvet’s artistry, the final act of violence is a surprising one and her story thus evades simplistic formulations.
The overarching impression evoked by Love is one of suffocating confinement and stagnation, but with the second of the three stories the confinement tightens in Kafkaesque helplessness when a Haitian family wakes one morning to find that “men in black” are staking out, and cordoning off, their property. The men carry guns and laugh in the face of the family’s misfortune, and it is obvious both to the family and to the reader that to protest the unexpected confiscation would be to perish. Days pass, and a wall is erected separating the family from their orchards and the tomb of its patriarch. As in Love, the family is watched, shunned, and judged by neighbors, witnesses behind curtains that imperceptibly shift to afford a glance out. The family suffers a loss of standing in the community and is pulled asunder as its members react in their individual ways to the fate that has befallen them. The reader knows that nothing can be done, that tragedy is foregone, that nothing can take back what has been set in motion. The mother in Anger, too, knows this and succumbs to alcoholism. But the father, somewhat unconsciously, offers his daughter up as a sexual sacrifice to a local commandant in the hope that their land and status will be restored, while the grandfather plots with the younger son, an invalid, to retaliate against the men who have intruded upon them. While in Love there is an explosion in the culminating scene, in Anger there is collapse.
From the rubbles of the collapse, the rubble of what Haiti has become by 1967, emerges Madness, the final novella of Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy. The beggars from Love who are put to work as soldiers in the service of the regime – a reference to one of Duvalier’s literal practices – become slightly more abstracted in Anger as “men in black”, and even more so in Madness as “devils” seen by a poet, René, from where he remains barricaded in a shack, muttering soliloquies and visited by terrified friends searching for a refuge from the dark of night and its henchmen. By this third novella, the anchor of reality – albeit fictional reality – slips for the reader. We see the world through the eyes of a poet who may or may not be mad, may or may not be imagining that which he sees, including a corpse outside his door rapidly decaying in the heat.
Vieux-Chauvet’s writing is sometimes painfully raw. A woman detained by Calédu and gang-raped is upon her release seen on the street stumbling and unable to walk properly; the poor are manipulated into clear-cutting the trees on their land, a huge profit made by the businessman who pays them pennies, while the peasants are forced to abandon “their bleached, bled-dry land to watch the cars arriving from Port-au-Prince”; a handicapped man is shot in the head during a religious procession, and all are afraid to go to him. With these images and others, we are left feeling the corrupt systems, ravaged environment, racism, class hatred, and misogyny of an unjust regime, and in a sense Vieux-Chauvet’s work thus stands as a memorial to the raped and murdered, the disenfranchised and abused of any nation under such a rule. But her novellas have us looking not just to the past. They leave us too with the question: what must we say, now? The United States. 2010.
—A’Dora Phillips, Clockroot intern
