Vale of Tears

"What does one more dead woman and one less poor person matter to the Republic?"

Paulette Poujol Oriol's Vale of Tears, translated from the French by Dolores A. Schaefer, is one of the most depressing novels I have read since Last Exit to Brooklyn. Set in Port-au-Prince on New Year's Eve, the plot follows the life of Coralie Santeuil, a white-skinned Haitian woman who suffered a decline in economic and social status, reduced to a destitute, disfigured, old woman who walks the streets of Port-au-Prince from slums to affluent communities to beg for the money she needs to avoid being homeless. Making her way across the fourteen stations (an obvious Christian allusion, further expounded on by the narrator who compares Coralie to Mary Magdalene), she struggles to find the money she needs and retain the generosity of former friends, landladies, pimps, and family while her weak legs struggle to carry her. 

As a prominent feminist in Haiti, Paulette Poujol Oriol's novel is a complex tale that juxtaposes the 'present' tense of Coralie's journey through Port-au-Prince with the events in her traumatized childhood and adulthood that brought her to this point of utter poverty. The marginalization, discriminatory double standards, and strict social conventions on proper "conduct" (socially, sexually, and professionally) for Haitian women are similarly criticized in conjunction with the class system that renders the majority of the population lives of misery. Through Coralie's fall from "grace" and the small world of the Haitian elite, to her position as a prostitute, beggar, laundress, factory worker, one sees a direct correlation in the status of women and the widespread poverty of the island. Given the central importance of women in Haitian society in a variety of roles, the so-called potomitan, the novel does include powerful women of the elite and lower classes, but all end up reinforcing the same sexist rules regarding sexual expression and "proper" behavior.

Indeed, women characters are just as likely as the men to support patriarchal notions of gender relations and sexuality, but, as mentioned before, this is brilliantly tied in with the subjugation of all women in Haiti and the pervasive class inequality. Numerous women who were once close with Coralie want nothing to do with her, including Magritte, a former prostitute now married to a man who cheats on her with young bouzen but she accepts as the cost of "respectability." Likewise, Coralie's best friends from her days at the Catholic boarding school (an abusive environment that mirrored her childhood experience with Aline, her stepmother), distant themselves from her because of her reputation for "misconduct" and loose morals, made worse by the amazingly swift grapevine and rumormill of Port-au-Prince society. Coralie's own children want nothing to do with her, too, the first son refusing to see her at all and the second one, Robert, believed  by Coralie to truly love her, does not even have the respect to identify Coralie as his mother to his lady guest. 

In many ways, Coralie's wounded psyche as an abused child sets her on a path of abusive relationships with men. Her distant, indifferent father does nothing to prevent her cruel and unusual treatment by her stepmother, paving the way for a plethora of negative relationships with men who use her, do not fulfill her needs beyond the superficial, and suffer unscathed from the "moral" dilemmas their relationships create. From her father to Marcel, every so-called meaningful relationship Coralie is one of men ignoring her, exploiting her naivete, or spoiling her with material goods, which becomes a degraded cycle of prostitution and loss of dignity in society's eyes. Her affair with a high-ranking German officer during WWII, her scandalous pregnancy from a former servant, her mistress status with Maurice, the lawyer, and her ultimate degradation as a prostitute in Carrefour illustrate this cycle of abuse which is traced back to her childhood.

Furthermore, the moral complexity of Coralie's character calls into question how one should identify Coralie. It is only after her ultimate fall from high society that she begins to understand and identify with the Haitian poor, particularly during her five "calm" years working at a baseball factory (symbolizing the ways in which gender oppression transcend class, and could lead to solidarity across class or color lines) after giving up her second son to a successful friend, Lise, a doctor whose husband perished in the Holocaust. Throughout her life, the relative material comfort and wealth of her father's business, her husband's coffee exports and property, and her failure to learn any household or professional work (in addition to her love for Parisian clothes, fashion, and expensive lifestyle) exemplify the restricted, materialistic pursuits of the idle Haitian elite. Moreover, Coralie's refusal to try to love her first son (and her abandonment of him for 8 years, 1938-1946), her affair with a Nazi military official, her affair with Mario, the secretary at the Dominican embassy and her elitist assumption that Marcel will marry her because of her pregnancy with Robert establish her reputation as questionable at best. 

Yet, despite these aforementioned flaws (and there are certainly more), Coralie is a victim of society's grasp on female sexual agency, as well as class confines. Not given a chance to succeed, victimized, manipulated, and tricked by her conniving stepmother, she never had much of a chance. A Haitian upper-class woman with no skills or career prospects struggles to get a job, does not last long in the few positions she finds, and, after becoming a supervisor in the baseball factory, gets her right hand paralyzed in the unsafe working condition by a perforator machine. Even when trying her best to be on the "right" path for a woman in Haitian society, not selling her body for money or favors, the obstacles facing the lower-class Haitian women are numerous. The closed world of the elite does not help Coralie, whose own family essentially banishes her under the influence of Aline. Her only "escape" as an upper-class woman was through marriage, which, ended in marital bliss but cut short by her older husband's death (and this husband, Gratien Nivel, was paternal figure for Coralie she never found in her father).

As a highly nuanced text in which all the social classes of Port-au-Prince are included, from Waney and Martissant to Petionville and Musseau, this novel endeavors to locate the entwined results of both rigid class and gender identities. Furthermore, the novel manages to avoid simple condemnation of prostitution (certainly an inevitable path for far too many women in Haiti's miserable economic opportunities) and portrays the highly nuanced role of gender, class, status, and reputation as self-replicating processes that prolong inequality. Just when one thinks Coralie finds love and acceptance, from her beautiful granddaughter who feeds her at the house of her first son, and her second son, Robert, adopted by Lise, who promises to pay for her to find a new home, her painful life ends because of a military man (who is about to start an affair with the wife of Coralie's first son, Felix) who sees his political and socio-economic status as placing him above women and the poor. 

For an interesting novel by a Haitian woman that shares this work's concern with Haitian society's attempts to control the "grave danger" of female sexuality, Katia D. Ulysse's Drifting offers a similar perspective in a Diasporic setting. This patriarchal aspect of Haitian society and the fear of a loss of respectability or daughters becoming bouzen proliferates among the lower-class Haitian immigrants in the US within the world of Drifting. Similar works by Haitian women writers also tackle this theme, though none (with the possible exception of Amour, Colère, Folie) as forcefully and with such nuance as Vale of Tears in hitting the trifecta of class, color, and gender. What's more, the English translation retains much of the Creole dialogue of the original text, adding another dimension and playful use of language for satire and humor in this novel. 

Favorite Quotes

"Coralie finally goes away with bent shoulders and a heavy heart. Rita is dead. Only Magritte remains" (69).

"She, the poor outcast, Cora la Manca, the beggar woman, cries for a long time about the fate of an unknown woman who resembles her like a sister, she cries about the child who will never have known the love and the tenderness of a mother's heart. Cora, the reprobate, cries for a long time" (78).

"Anything, even misery, rather than bringing out into the open the sordid, seamy side of the Santeuils' lives" (104).

"What would his guests say if they knew that the mother of the powerful Gratien-Felix Nivel, the extremely rich potentate, is a former brothel prostitute turned public beggar to boot?" (152)

"Coralie too abandoned the borrowed language, this French which too often is more of a barrier than a communication between Haitians" (157).

"From Felicien she gets her passive character, this tendency to submit to any will stronger than her own and to let herself be overwhelmed by adversity. That is the only legacy he has left her" (162).

"Something resembling hope quivers in a corner of her ravaged soul" (164).

"She is going to start out again calmly, slowly. She moves shakily from Morne Hercule to the exit of Petion-Ville's cemetery. Then she begins the Delmas road. She smiles thinking about Robert, the womanizer, who, up there in his isolated villa, has undressed the young foreigner" (168).