Marie Vieux-Chauvet

"The eyes, if one knows them well, rarely lie (chapter XXII, p342)"

"During these days of turmoil, there were more runaway slaves than ever. The constabulary was dog-tired, for not an hour went by where some slave was not brought back in chains, caught mid-flight. Tipped off to what was going on by the domestic slaves, the slaves in the workhouses listened attentively to those words Liberty and Equality, which a bunch of white people, rising up before the whole world, had written in their own blood. (chapter XXIX, p418)"

"The volcano, which for long years the planters did not believe existed, was erupting. (chapter XXXV p473)"

"Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano stands with Tolstoy's War and Peace, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, Robert Graves's I, Claudius, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind in its extraordinary power to bring all the nuance and complexity of a long-gone society so vividly before our eyes. With what's going on racially and politically in the United States today, now is an excellent time for this masterpiece to appear in English - and in a translation that does full justice to the great beauty of Vieux-Chauvet's prose."

"Marie Vieux-Chauvet is for me one of Haiti’s iconic female writers. She wrote primarily during the Duvalier dictatorship and her personal story is a powerful story of the choices writers during that time were forced to make...One of the wonderful things about her work is that she also writes so exquisitely, so beautifully."

"one of Haiti’s most significant and mystifying writers...Chauvet’s fiction does not much resemble the literary radicalism put forward in so many of the social realist narratives of canonical male writers such as Roumain, Alexis, and Depestre. Her narratives are crafted independently of “the theoretical scaffolding, the too well oiled machinery that props the Indigenist novel or the committed novel.” We will not find in her works the “happy ending” whereby, even in tragedy, a peasant or proletarian male hero awakens and mobilizes a politically radicalized and enlightened community. As Colin Dayan has affrmed, “Chauvet questions the apparently endless making of heroes in Haitian history: the cult of the founder, the father, and the protector who betrays or is betrayed. She proves how damaging the cult of the hero is, how the image of a savior plays into the totalitarian designs of the dictator.” Chauvet asks her reader to think about radicalism’s reliance on individualist heroism. Having observed a series of self-serving revolutionary “groups competing for state control,” during the time she lived and wrote in Haiti, Chauvet presents a vision of community that can only be described as cynical. In a context in which coercive communities undergirded by ideologies of opposition and exclusion make alignment a matter of life and death, Chauvet’s narratives remind us that revolutionary struggles for political dominance in mid-twentieth-century Haiti did not in fact alter the structural injustices by which power is seized and maintained in the radical republic. And while Chauvet’s women may not be “black” or “radical” in any “traditional” way, might not their—and her—resistance to explicit political identifcation illuminate the limitations of radicalism within the historically gendered space of political engagement?"

"Marie Vieux-Chauvet was nitroglycerin. She set her sights on an illness ravaging Haitian society."

"What is truly radical about Chauvet's writing, however, is not just that she writes about political sexual violence and about sexuality, but that she allows her male and female protagonists to cast a critical eye on everything, including themselves. Indeed, they are never unambiguously heroic, innocent, or even sympathetic."

"The moral, social, and political complications of the failed launch of the author's most important novel, however compelling, reinforce but should not overshadow or distort her true legacy: the work itself. Love, Anger, Madness offers a literary means of articulating the challenges Haiti's history poses to its citizens and to the rest of the world, an articulation that is possible only because her protagonists are complex thinking subjects and not simply romantic heroes. When these subjects set aside racial, social, political, and religious affiliation (be it voodoo or Catholicism), what is left is pitiless self-investigation meant as a model for an investigation of the world. Of course, a sharpened mind can make for a raw heart."