Les Thazar

Fernand Hibbert's Les Thazar is an endlessly entertaining social satire of the Port-au-prince upper classes. Written over a century ago, it depicts the long-lost Haiti Thomas of our forebears, focusing on the corrupt and venal upper-classes in the capital. The Thazar family, once rich, have lost their fortune. Madame Thazar pushes for the marriage of her daughter, Cecile, to a wealthy German so the family can maintain their status and rank in Port-au-Prince society. In order to accomplish this, the materialistic wife  is willing to sacrifice anything and everything to keep up appearances and ensure her two children will not descend the social ladder. Needless to say, the Thazar home in Turgeau also attracts a number of suitors for the hand of Cecile (as well as family friends, mostly from the Haitians of their social rank), providing the narrator an excuse to satirize various types of the Haitian bourgeoisie and corrupt politicians. This is very much a dialogue-driven narrative, with a tragic conclusion to its satirical content. One cannot help but wonder if Haitian elites a century ago had such dim hopes for Haiti then, what are they thinking today?

Foreigners, particularly Germans and French, also provide cannon fodder for the satire as their outsider view of Haiti provides great comedic relief. Ravet, for instance, has the most difficult experience trying to get his landlord, Madame Thazar, to fix his leaky roof. During his long discourse with Madame Thazar, we learn about his disobedient domestic, who is also a part-time tailor, and the various ways in which life in Haiti is upside down. Or, for that matter, the constant questions from Cresson, who is following Ravet around Port-au-Prince on the streetcar one day. In the end, Ravet agrees to pay for the repairs to the roof, but it is another instance of Haiti as a an aberrant place to the foreign mind. The question of race is often part of this, with Haitians speaking of news of lynchings in the US, Booker T. Washington (perhaps a message of vocational schools and practicality for the Haitian educational system, instead of effete and useless bourgeois like those in the novel?), the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa and British imperialism's positive impact on the "natives") and a naturalized Haitian who renounces citizenship, Alphonse Laubepin. Alphonse Laubepin, who is presumably of mixed racial origins from the French Antilles, refuses to see himself as one of the black race, and is constantly reminded of his racial origins by Cresson. This amusing episode is likely an allusion to the pattern of some mixed-race immigrants of the French Antilles refusing to take Haitian citizenship and using their status as French subjects for additional privileges in Haiti.  Of course, the iniquitous color question also rears its ugly head among Haitians themselves, a "political" issue which shapes how the bourgeois characters relate to each other and their non-elite compatriots in matters of love, class, language, and culture. 

Impressively, Hibbert transports the reader to the Port-au-Prince of the early 20th century. The German commercial and financial dominance of Haiti was palpable, and foreigners were protected from the excesses and corruption of the Haitian government better than Haitian citizens. Unsurprisingly, Madame Thazar prefers to marry her daughter to the German Schlieden than any Haitian suitor, reasoning that they will be unable to look after her material interests with the utmost security. Lamertume, a darker-hued Haitian "nephew" of Monsieur Thazar, is ambitious but utterly lacking in honor, wealth, and merit, so he is quickly rejected. Lionel Brion, who descends from a great family and was educated in France, also wishes to marry her, but is similarly rejected for not being wealthy. The "bourgeois" of Haiti are, in short, vain, corrupt, materialistic, and concerned only for themselves or their primal instincts. And, while Madame Thazar, Titus Baudouin, Cresson, Madame Apice, and a plethora of the characters in the novel exemplify all the aforementioned flaws, counter-examples such as Lionel Brion and Dr. Remo prove the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, in Haiti mediocrity and corruption reign supreme, so exceptional men of the upper-classes, who would and could transform and place Haiti on the path to progress, are unable to achieve their goals or find happiness. Lionel Brion never recovers from his love and loss of Cecile, Delhi has isolated himself at Mariani with a lower-class woman he abuses as his lover and servant. 

Perhaps like the case of Romulus, another novel by Hibbert but set in Miragoane during the "disturbances" of 1883, Hibbert was driven by exploring the theme of the frustrated bourgeois reformers, whose hopes are dashed by Haitian reality. Trevier or the proponents of Bazelais, in that novel, and Brion, in Les Thazar, are both ruined by their experiences, seemingly common to anyone who endeavors to go against the grain of materialism and mediocrity. Hibbert appears to infuse both novels with a pervasive pessimism as the Haitian bourgeois male has proven himself unable to save Haiti or those who should be theirs (their families, and wives). Another contemporary writer of Hibbert's, Justin Lherisson, also explored this theme even more humorously in La Famille Des Pitite Caille, where the rise and fall of a bourgeois family demonstrates the vacuity, corruption and  avarice of the bourgeois paterfamilias. It would take another generation before Haitian writers would look to the masses, with Jacques Roumain being part of that transition through the peasant novel. Perhaps not coincidentally, Roumain married the daughter of Hibbert, and it took Roumain's generation to begin the shift from the elite-focus of Hibbert.