Children of Heroes

Lyonel Trouillot's Children of Heroes, a short but compelling novel translated by Linda Coverdale, is a depressing but essential read for a feel of Port-au-Prince's urban landscape. The city itself becomes a character as Colin and his sister, Mariela, flee their slum neighborhood after killing their abusive father. From the slums to Boutilliers, the siblings experience the city in its totality for three days on the run, with extensive social commentary, the legacy of the nation and its heroes, and the relentless pursuit of poverty (and the law). The crushing poverty with the consequent class divide in the city of Port-au-Prince matches the dysfunction of Colin's family (and he is mostly the narrator, although I appreciate how the author 'mixes' it up by having a shift in narrator later on, and the creative way dialogue is expressed), the fighting stray dogs, who, like Haiti, fight over scraps. 

Despite the lack of a 'happy' ending, the novel succeeds by breathing life into the world of the two slum children, making their violent, alcoholic father and submissive, already-dead mother realistic, and capturing the dissolution of Haiti under the Place des Heros. The loss of dignity is even more supremely expressed when the protagonists of the novel are photographed by tourists, who, despite the dirty rags the fugitive children wear and their robotic smiles, loves what it represents. In spite of it all, their attempts to escape their world inevitably fails, and the harshness of life, nihilism, and decay continue, under the statues of the heroes of independence.

For those eager to read Haitian literature set in Port-au-Prince, this relatively short novel is an easy read and excellent place to start. One truly gets a feel for the city of Port-au-Prince through the prose and commentary of Trouillot, who manages to tell the story of slum children without condescension or criticism. These very same residents of the slums, the urban counterparts of the moun andeyo, search for dignity, self-respect, inclusion in the social fabric of the city, and become heroic in their struggle. I actually found myself feeling sympathy for some rather unpleasant characters in the novel, including the murdered father, as I am sure other readers will.

Favorite Quotes

"During those first hours after Corazón had died for real, after our race to escape the slum, we walked quietly around the Champ-de-Mars, where the statues of heroes look down indifferently from on high" (28).

"Life, good or bad, doesn't interest people. It's death that makes a splash" (49).

"In the slum, no one trusts visitors" (59).

"In our house, the punches, the screaming, the quarrels and prayers were the finishing touch to our poverty" (61).

"Our life killed Corazón. Our lousy life, so far from hope, and so close to death" (99).

"Not many of our locals have any dealings with the State. For good or ill. The State is far away. Its existence doesn't affect us, and it remembers us only when forced to by some misfortune" (104).

"The inscription beneath the bust pointed out that Carl Brouard had been a great poet. I think poets can go to hell. This one couldn't even manage to get his name on a pretty square" (107).

"It's just a faded piece of cloth fought over by dogs" (134).

Massacre River

"Pedro takes heart, convinced that a deep human fervor can unite the people of the low land with those of the highland, just as the poetic areitos of the Golden Flower, the woman of the West, were carried in the quiver of the Cacique of the Cibao, the man of the East."

Massacre River, René Philoctète's novel on the 1937 Parsley Massacre along the Dominican-Haitian border, translated by Linda Coverdale, is an excellent example of the literary Spiralism movement, of which Philoctète helped pioneer. Although most of his writings consisted of poetry, this novel is full of poetic prose that personifies a Dominican guagua, fictionalizes Trujillo's motives as an impossible dream of conquering the Citadel, lists the sounds, colors, and physical attributes of the world to show a fully-fleshed frontier where Dominicans and Haitians lived cooperatively. Using the metaphorical couple of Haitian Adele and Dominican Pedro, who live in Elías Piña, a border town forever shattered by the massacre ordered by Trujillo, the author demonstrates how Haitians and Dominicans lived peacefully, exchanged goods, and, through numerous other residents, even shared land, family, and other resources. Racial and cultural distinctions, though present, were never enough to completely separate neighbors. 

The novel also satirizes Trujillo's myth of Dominican nationality, his attempt to 'whiten' the population, and the creation of the indio identity despite the obvious African ancestry of the Dominican population. Government propaganda, radio broadcasts, and Trujillo's supreme authority allow him to get away with this, just as the shadow of World War II, fasciscm, and US imperialism lingers in the background (the baseball game in Chicago is broadcast on the radio as the Massacre occurs, and Trujillo is likened to Hitler and Mussolini). Trujillo's crackdown on labor is also explored, since Pedro is a union organizer who seeks to combat the massacre and maintain the social cohesion that characterized the frontier before 1937. Thus, Trujillo's dictatorship is depicted as monstrous and a threat to Dominicans and Haitians alike, while the Haitian government profits off the misery of Haitians in Haiti and across the border (the non-response from Vincent's government is horrifically ridiculed by Philoctète, as Haitian officials in the capital party and gorge themselves while Haitians flee for their lives in the Dominican Republic. 

Philoctète accomplishes all of the above in a loosely structured story that, like a 'spiral,' moves back and forth in narration, plot, and characters. Hints of magical realism, foreshadowing, symbolism, madness, and moving, decapitated heads permeate the novel which heighten the dark themes of the novel, which is just as critical of Trujillo as it is of Vincent. Consequently, this is a difficult novel, but one which is full of promise, memory, and hope for a more harmonious Hispaniola. 

Favorite Quotes

"We acknowledge that we were a single people: the people of the island of Haiti."

"The Citadel fled further and further from Trujillo's dreams. But although the phantasm was frightened, the myth was holding its own. 

"There's no need for any more bulletins from the authorities. The whole affair is a done deal. The people have been told enough. The League of Nations will make a fuss, that's understandable, but after a few diplomatic formalities that haven't changed since Cyrus the Great; it will all be forgotten." 

"That every Haitian has a drum in his belly? Every Puerto Rican a fountain in his laughter? Every Cuban a sunbeam in his throat? Every Jamaican rum in his eyes? Every Dominican a heaven between his legs?

"For each Haitian decapitation at the border, a draught of Haitian blood at the masked ball, Field of Mars, Square of Heroes."

"Port-au-Prince didn't bother with ways or means of routine protocol. Or even bluffing, grandstanding, putting up a front. Port-au-Prince didn't go in for hypocrisy, swaggering, righteous wrath, curses, sanctimony, gloating: it was all the same to them, business as usual. An invoice, a bill."

"They have so many things in common, share so many similar wounds and joys that trying to distinguish between the two peoples violates their tacit understanding to live as one."

Patrick Chamoiseau's School Days

“In those days, the blue-eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone’s ancestor. In those days, Europeans were the founders of History. The world, once shrouded in darkness, began with them. Our islands had been veiled in a fog of nonexistence, crossed by phantom Caribs or Arawaks themselves lost in the obscurity of a cannibal nonhistory. And then, when the colonists arrived, there was light. Civilization. History. The humanization of the teeming Earth. They shouldered the heavy burden of this world they were raising to the lofty heights of consciousness. We had to strive stoutly so as not to abandon them to the solitude of this responsibility. The teacher wanted to carry the world on his shoulders, too” (121-22)

Chamoiseau’s account of his schoolboy days, School Days, translated by Linda Coverdale, is a touching narrative filled with adorable moments of youthful innocence, curiosity, adventure, and struggle. Like his other writings, his playful, unique style of writing that fuses humor  French, Creole, and inventive rhetoric to encapsulate another world succeeds brilliantly in School Days. As a child growing up in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau recounts his younger, preliterate days as a “little black boy” who irritated his mother and older siblings incessantly to have the chance to go to school. Once in school, however, his Creole worldview and self-identity is challenged by the institution’s Francophile nature and the Teacher’s attempts to make Frenchmen out of black, Creole-speaking students. Nevertheless, the sweet novel, though often heavily focused the destructive impact of the Francophilic tendencies of school on the language and identity of Martinique, exemplified by Big Bellybutton, a poor Creole-speaking child who ultimately concedes to the Teacher his inferiority as a poor, black Creole child coming out of the sugar cane shacks of colonial Martinique, can be seen as ending on a positive note through what may be termed as nascent créolité in that Chamoiseau articulates a fusion of the Creole language, mythology, and worldview of Big Bellybutton and his wannabe French Teacher. This fusion consists of not only the African and European elements of culture and language in Martinique, but also the Indian, Syrian, and indigenous Carib and Arawak presence in the history, cuisine and society of the Antilles.

Besides describing the important moment in his early school days when he would become a proponent of créolité, School Days is an artful example of storytelling that captures the world through a child’s eyes. He incorporates Creole phrases, mythology and magic into the story, evident in their belief in magic and quimboiseurs:

To tie up a Teacher (you’re not hearing this from me), you had to cross your fingers and hold them like that, thrust deep in your pockets; stand on your left food in front of the school; murmur over and over again before he appeared: Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the teacher…(You didn't hear this from me…) (125).

This aforementioned adorable quote marks the belief by a young Chamoiseau, Big Bellybutton (whose ‘real’ French name is never mentioned, only the Creole Big Bellybutton) and other schoolboys in their ability to cause illness toward their Teacher, a Frenchman with black skin and a white mask to whom France was a magic word (108). The little Chamoiseau also had his adorable moments prior to school, scribbling on the walls of his home, persistently demanding of his mother, Mam Ninotte, to take him to school like the Big Kids, his older siblings, and strolling through the city streets as Syrian merchants, workers, and other adults carried on with the busy activities of the day. The student bullies, who persecute Big Bellybutton especially, also provide moments of comic relief when the latter pulls out a snake’s head to scare them away or when the poetic rejoinders of Les Respondeurs or Chamoiseau occasionally breaking his third-person narrative provide further commentary on the little black boy’s life.

Clearly, for Chamoiseau, learning to read and write was not just survival, or learning to live despite going to school to “shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manner—all the same thing” (120). Survival entailed learning to thrive through new discourse, one partly indebted to the negritude past but inclusive of all of Martinique’s heterogeneous origins. Chamoiseau, while criticizing the schools’ attempts to make Gauls out of Martinique’s children, teaching them to see the world and read literature from French eyes, when winter snow and rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed days of blond childhood were never part of life for the overwhelming majority of Martinicans, nonetheless found value in the ability to transport oneself to new terrains, new worlds, beyond the island shores of his home. This necessitates a synthesis of Creole and French, the Caribbean and its diverse origins, to represent the world of his youth in this formative period of his schooling. Overall, this is a fascinating account worth reading by anyone even remotely interested in Martinique, French colonialism, Caribbean literature, or the magical realism of the lens of a bright child. To read it in English was utter delight, since Coverdale’s translation retains the artful blend of Martinican/Creole vocabulary with the collective voice of the narrator and Les Respondeurs in addition to Chamoiseau’s characteristic humor.