Thoughts on Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness

"They're extraordinary, Haiti's blacks. Even when they've been reduced to their last extremity, they cling to life like a cherished possession."

Marie Vieux-Chauvet, daughter of a Haitian senator and a Jewish emigre, was a member of Haiti's mulatto elite. Born near the beginning of the American occupation (1915-1934), she lived through the horrors of both American oppression and Duvalier's (Papa Doc) rise to power. Although she lived a life of relative comfort and ease, members of her family were murdered by the Duvalier regime. Indeed, she used the story of her deceased relatives and other examples of Papa Doc's terrifying Tonton Macoutes who ravaged Haitian cities and murdered and raped anyone who they suspected of being subversives.  In fact, she was forced to flee the country before Amour, colere et folie was published in order to save her relatives additional torment. Her husband purchased most of the copies of the book and Marie Vieux-Chauvet spent the rest of her life in New York. So this book was forced underground and never translated to English until Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur took up the task in 2009. 

It's a shame that this book, Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych  was never well-known until now. It's a collection of 3 novellas using love, anger, and madness as the main themes of each. Each story fully indicates the horror of living in Duvalier's Haiti, which is the reason why the author chose exile. The book is such a thinly-veiled attack on Papa Doc that she really had no choice but exile. Furthermore, each of the novellas features multiracial Haitians, descending in class from the elite to the poor intellectual. Each of the main characters are mulatto or griffe (Haitian word for someone who is half-mulatto, half-black, or a dark-skinned mulatto). Each novella also explores themes of race, class, and gender that illustrate the complete reversion of power that occurred under Duvalier. Prior to his centralization of power and installation of black-skinned Tonton Macoutes who were given free reign to terrorize all sectors of Haitian society, the mulattoes were used to being in charge and having respect and deference shown to them. All of the novellas indicate the rise of a noirist regime that largely excluded mulattoes from political power and social superiority in favor of the small black middle-class and the poor who were able to become Duvalier's secret police. 

The first novella, Love, is about a dark-skinned mulatto woman who is enamored by her sister's French husband. This story highlights issues of skin color  complexes and biases in Haitian society. Claire, the main character, is the darkest in her family of 'white' mulattoes. Her sisters, Annette and Felicia, are so light-skinned they could pass for white. Her parents were also light-skinned mulattoes, although her paternal grandmother is described as a black woman. Due to her dark skin, Claire feels uncomfortable and perceives herself as 'ugly' and inferior. Her internalized color issues cause her to never marry or have sex, remaining a virgin at age 39. Since she never marries and is the oldest daughter, she becomes the maid who cleans, and cooks, with the help of a black servant. Her younger sisters marry, have sex, and Felicia has children. And of course throughout the entire novella Claire is struggling to find love and companionship as the black commandant Caledu has taken over the small Haitian provincial town. His men kidnap and torture victims in a prison so close to her home that she can hear the prisoners' screams. 

Love (or Amour if you prefer French) has some fascinating themes and contradictions apparent in the mulatto elite. Claire's father never gave up the loas of his black grandmother (whose dark skin Claire inherits) yet he abuses the black peasants who work on his land and looks down upon darker-skinned Haitians. Indeed, he states that those with black blood need an occasional beating to be productive after attacking the black peasants who serve him. Paradoxically, he also worships the loas of the blacks with the peasant houngan. So he clearly had some love and loyalty for his grandmother and his black roots. Indeed, he was also a nationalist who vehemently opposed US occupation, which led to his attempts to become president. Of course he had to sell most of his land in order to fund his vain attempts in politics. But it's odd that this light-skinned man who could pass for white was still so proud of his national heritage and the Haitian Revolution (although he clearly believed in mulatto superiority and control of the government). This reminded me of Jean Dominique's father, who was also incredibly proud of the Haitian Revolution and his ancestor who fought at the Battle of Vertieres. So mulattoes have this odd pride in Haitian history but perpetuate the same racism of the French: subjugating blacks or dark-skinned mulattoes and excluding them from political, social, and economic justice.

Another interesting turn this novella takes is emphasizing the beauty and pride of dark-skinned Haitians. Claire's secret inferiority complex is brought up in conversation, and Jean Luze (the French brother-in-law she secretly adores) tells her she must've been the most beautiful of the three sisters because of her dark skin! Notice how Jean uses the word 'been,' which suggests that he sees her as an old maid. Personally, I agree with Jean about darker-skinned biracial people being more beautiful. Indeed, since they're Haitian one expects Haitian women to be dark. But Marie Vieux-Chauvet also rightfully critiques mulatto color prejudice and racism through the character of Tonton Mathurin, an old black man who accumulated wealth through his skill and intellect. Despite his wealth, no mulatto woman in the city would marry him, and he publicly shames Claire's father for his color prejudice, arguing that Claire is black in order to remind him of his grandmother.  Vieux-Chauvet basically attacks Duvalierism, Catholicism, clinging to France (represented by Jean), mulatto racism, and sexism in her call for black beauty, democracy and equality. It ends on a somewhat mysterious note, with the death of Caledu and Jean and Claire embracing. 

The next novella, Anger, is a 20th century Haitian Greek tragedy. A Haitian family in the Turgeau neighborhood of Port-au-Prince wake up to find men in black ( a reference to Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes) setting up stakes on their property. The family (a black grandfather, his son, the son's mulatto wife, and their 3 children) struggles to find a way to liberate their family from the dispossession, which is remarkably random and indicates the undemocratic land seizures and kidnappings of Duvalier's government. Properly entitled Anger, this novella uses anger as the main theme as a response to social disorder caused by fear (fear of the authoritarian figure). Themes of color prejudice, race, and sexism are also evident here, especially in the interactions between the grandfather and his daughter-in-law, who he sees as the daughter of a drunken mulatto and undeserving of his family's wealth (the grandfather's father was a peasant who gradually accumulated land through hard work and guile. The children are the oldest son, a daughter, and an invalid son who is only close to the grandfather. 

Each of the characters endeavor to deal with the problem (a dictatorship which manipulates and controls through fear) in different ways: capitulation, militant resistance, acceptance and alcoholism, backstabbing manipulation, and misguided (and unnecessary) heroism. The true hero of this novella, the beautiful daughter, agrees to sleep with the government thug who can restore their land for 30 nights. Her father helps arrange the deal with a corrupt lawyer who sets the whole thing up, promising that the man she sleeps with (referred to as a Gorilla, a dark-skinned and little black man) will restore their property after 30 nights of sex with her. Like a coward in the face of fear, her father agrees, and the daughter heroically does the deed in order to save her family's property and wealth. 

This sexualization of power is clearly a reference to the widespread practices of rape and sexual violence against women under Duvalier. His men, who got their payment from raiding and stealing from citizens, had nothing to stop them from raping and pillaging. Power was conceived as a male focus, and in a repressive dictatorship, often manifested itself in sexism and violence against women. This story also indicates some interesting examples of misguided male heroism, since the youngest son concocts a fantasy of killing the men in black by joining ranks with them. In the end, he accomplishes nothing and lets his family suffer, leaving his sister to save the family. Like Paul, the elder son, the invalid and his grandfather also choose a fantasy of dying as heroes, foolishly attacking the men in black who surround their property. 

My other thoughts on Anger? Like a Greek tragedy, the hero dies, and despite some success, the ultimate costs are too much to bear. The family (an upper-middle class mulatto/biracial one) ends up broken and/or dead by the novella's conclusion, seemingly suggesting that anger as the motivation of ending political oppression is the wrong method. In Love, Claire is able to defeat Caledu with love as a motivating and unifying factor. Here the family responds angrily and fails to achieve anything meaningful, though the Gorilla is killed. The mother succumbs to alcoholism, the daughter perishes, the grandfather and invalid die, and the future of the father and son are very uncertain because whoever replaces the Gorilla could target them soon. So the ultimate message I get from Anger is that one must cooperate with others to end political oppression (the family doesn't cooperate, causing their downfall) and responding to a brutal authoritarian regime with just anger is not enough. One must be prepared to create a better society, one without the hunger, suffering, and oppression of the black majority for the privileged black and mulatto elite. 

The final novella, Madness, is a bit harder to understand. It's written from the perspective of a poet and his three friends who stay in a small shack, fearing the 'devils' who have taken over the town. As a griffe, the poet was raised by his black mother, who was raped by her nearly-white mulatto employer during her youth. Never recognized by his father, the poet's black mother sends him to a Catholic school and spoils him, never wanting her griffe son to suffer. The poet is now motherless, and living in a barricaded shack in the city, afraid that the 'devils' (another reference to the Tonton Macoute) who have taken over the city will kill him. His three poet friends eventually join him in the shack, and the 3 blacks (the white poet, Simon, is a Frenchman who has come to Haiti after serving in World War II, and only wants to drink and sleep with black women) all come to agree that they can't leave the shack. So they live off clairin (a type of alcohol) and coffee for eight days while the world outside keeps going on. Of course the 'devils' really did take over the city's administration, and there were murders, but nothing on the scale the protagonist sees in his mind. His mental condition progressively worsens over time, with him seeing himself as the angel who will rid the city of the devils and win the love of Cecile, the beautiful mulatto woman whose house he can see from his shack. 

Themes of colonialism, religion, sexuality, race, and the nature of sanity are addressed here. The faith of the black Haitians in the loas prevents all from drinking the syrup left as libation, leaving them no alternative for food and drink besides the alcohol and a little bit of coffee they possess. Andre's refusal to let Simon and the main character drink from the libation represents Haitians' faith as a cause for their suffering, since they would rather feed the gods than feed themselves first. Vieux-Chauvet also criticizes colonialism and the French quite often. The white poet, Simon, feels entitled to superior treatment and respect from the dictatorship because of his French nationality. Indeed, he is shocked and disgusted when the Commandant calls him white trash and laughs at his promise of notifying the French embassy about his incarceration and torture from the 'devils.' He claims to understand Haiti and identify with the country, but but remains indifferent to the protagonist's  desire to free Haiti of the 'devils' (Duvalier's men). 

Moreover, the theme of madness as a result of social dysfunction operates here. The three black poets lose their sanity and can only see the world through the literary lens of poetry, rather than the real suffering and death around them. They become so insane that they really believe the dead dog outside the shack is really the corpse of a merchant murdered by the 'devils.' In many ways this story is self-referential: as a member of Haiti's literary circle known as Les Araignees du soir (Spiders of the Night), a small group of poets and novelists who met at her house weekly to discuss literature, she often criticized Duvalier. Like the poets in this story, she also felt powerless, unable to actually change the conditions her country was in. Like the poets, she closely followed political events and went to the scenes of violence as a source for her writing. But due to fear and cowardice, like the poets in Madness, she was unable to clearly express her scathing attacks on the regime (3 of her nephews and countless friends and acquaintances 'disappeared' during this turbulent period). Her experience as an intellectual who supported democracy and opposed the Duvalier dictatorship but was forced to live in exile or huddle in fear is present in the poets, all victims of the dehumanizing noirist regime that attempts to eradicate individual thought (and ironically, oppress the poor black majority even more than the mulattoes)

In addition to being a vehicle in which to express her own frustation at being unable to physically challenge a brutal dictatorship, Madness also alludes to the breakdown of society as well as the poets. The society is mentally ill, one where complete power is in the hands of a brutal dictatorship, where violent rape is seen as a right for the 'devils,' an unjust society that dehumanizes everyone. The Haitian people, unable to let go of their religious traditions (Haitian Vodou and Catholicism) and unable to unite in opposition (all due to colonialism and the forceful fusion of the two traditions, European and African),  yet they cling to a life of extreme suffering which makes it hard to not become a nihilist. Human life is reduced to animal instincts of fight or flight as self-serving violence becomes the rule of society. This dichotomy in human nature appears as a theme in the other stories as well, with the human being as torn between the mind and body in an eternal dualist boxing match, with the mind rarely winning. Thus, society in Haiti has become one in which thinking itself is dangerous and second to the needs of the baser instincts of human nature.

As someone who only picked up the book at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative and knowing nothing about the author, I had no idea what I was getting into when I purchased the book. Though horrifying in its details of human suffering, and self-critical of the Haitian nation, Marie Vieux-Chauvet completed an amazing task. Her triptych of Haitian society by the 1960s perfectly illustrates the strength and will of the people. In spite of a despotic government where violence, often sexualized, ruled the day, the people still found the strength to resist through literature, art, and religion. And though Vieux-Chauvet blames the colonial past for sowing the divisions within society that led to political centralization in the hands of the few, she doesn't blame France or the United States for most of the problems. Those two countries obviously played a significant role in ensuring Haiti's poverty and isolation from the rest of the world, but the Haitians themselves never possessed the unity essential to build a democratic society, which culminates in the horror of the Papa Doc and Baby Doc regimes. She also brings to the forefront the issue of gender and the sexual violence associated with dictatorships, since there is torture, rape, and violence aimed at women in each of the three novellas. The following quote from the first novella adroitly demonstrates the type of society Duvalier's Haiti had declined into:

We have been practicing at cutting each other's throats since Independence. The claws of our people have been growing and getting sharper. Hatred has hatched among us, and torturers have crawled out of the nest. It's a colonial legacy to which we cling, just as we cling to French. We excel at the former but struggle with the latter. I often hear the prisoners' screams. The prison is not far from my house...The police force has become vigilant. It monitors our every move. Its representative is Commandant Caledu, a ferocious black man who has been terrorizing us for about eight years now. He wields the right of life and death over us, and he abuses it...And cruelty is contagious: kneeling on coarse salt, forcing a victim to count the blows tearing at his skin, his mouth stuffed with hot potatoes, these are a few of the minor punishments some of us (members of the bourgeois mulatto class) inflict upon our child-servants. Upon those turned slaves by hunger, who must suffer our spite and rage in all its voluptuousness.