Playwrights From Haiti

"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."

"Minette pushed away her plate and stood up. What she wouldn't have given to be alone for a moment, just a moment. Oh, to have a room of my own, to be able to close myself up somewhere to think and to cry as much as I want! she thought to herself. (chapter IX, p120)"

"I am like a fruit fallen before ripening, rotting under the tree unnoticed. (p4)"

"The police force has become vigilant. It monitors our every move. Its representative is Commandant Calédu, 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. (p8)"

"By what miracle has this poor nation managed to stay so good, so welcoming, so joyful for so long, despite its poverty, despite injustice, prejudice, and our many civil wars?...Despite the ruins, despite the poverty, our little town remains beautiful. I realize this once in a while, in jolts of awareness. Habit destroys pleasure. (p8)"

"cruelty is contagious (p8)"

"Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. (p12)"

"She refuses to understand the march of history, its twists and reversals. (p15)"

"My cozy bourgeois upbringing is like a tattoo on my skin. (p18)"

"It did not escape me that for some time now I'd been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children's bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners-usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. (p18)"

"Amazing how love cancels out all other feelings. (p23)"

"The repressed have this in common: they exaggerate the importance of what they deny themselves. The priests conceal their desire under a skirt, the nuns under a veil, and yet they are both obsessed by it. (p27)"

"In order not to destroy the myth of the unblemished old maid, I admit to venial sins only. I keep the so-called mortal sins to myself. That's between me and God. I will accept punishment bravely, no matter how terrible. I will appear before Him, pointing a finger at Him. I will be the one to accuse. I don't care, everything may be perfect up there, but on earth, what a mess! (p31)"

"What a hymn to life, this work born from suffering! (p31)"

"Even though life has denied me everything, I am not inclined to play the adoptive mother. I may kiss Jane's son on his nice round cheeks but I remain detached, the door to my heart as solidly barricaded as the door to my bedroom. (p57)"

"You may be all bluster strutting about like a walking arsenal, but I'm smart enough to hide my game and look harmless to you. And therein lies my strength. I am patient, whereas you, like all fools, are impulsive. I wrap myself in the dignity of an old family line, as I nurse my serpent's venom. You spread your cruelty, I know how to hide mine. You bite, I sting-stealthily, my eye trained by a bourgeois education, imbibed like mother's milk, which makes me the most cunning of enemies. I wait for my moment. Because for now, love saves me from hatred. (p53)"

"Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it." Jean Luze shrugged. "Who can boast that he has never been afraid?" he shot back at Audier. "At least you have been spared from war. As for me, I bear its mark on my body and soul forever."

"What am I running away from that I so drunkenly welcome this glimmer of love in my life? (p56)"

"He opens our eyes on new horizons and unveils a mysterious, unknown world to us. (p65)"

"The stars multiply, separate, and scatter. Everything comes to an end and then starts again. (p67)"

"Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years-my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure-is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being. (p67-8)"

"In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. (p69)"

"Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can't reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn't I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can't define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever. (p72-3)"

"Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. (p73)"

"He is alone like me. Alone with his memories and the heavy past he drags after him like a ball and chain. (p73)"

"How can I convince her that only the most base people of any social class pay attention to gossip? (p75)"

"he forgets that a man, no matter where he is, takes his ideas and convictions with him. (p78)"

""...But what can you do time has rubbed away the full name as it rubs everything else. All you can do is adapt to the new and minimize the damage..." (p83)"

""He lives in sin," my mother explained to me, "and sin is contagious." (p93)"

"His fixation with power gnawed away at him. (p100)"

"Hidden behind their blinds, the ones who dared not show themselves tried not to miss any of the spectacle. I saw their glowing eyes, heard their cruel muffled laughter, comments, judgments, against which my father could scarcely defend himself. My fear of him died that day. I had seen him blush before my eyes (p102)"

"...she led a dignified and modest life. But society, spiteful and querulous, always seeking sacrificial victims, never forgave her. Her parents themselves had fueled the scandal by punishing her so spectacularly, for fear people would say they weren't raising her right. (p107)"

"One thing remains true: hatred only breeds hatred. (p126)"

"Ah! These long sleepless nights when even the air you breathe resounds with a life of its own, when each hour falls on the heart like a tolling bell! How these nights have furrowed my face and aged me! (p146)"

"Self-discontent, that is the venom that feeds malice. (p147)"

"My glance is more evasive than usual. I am afraid someone will see my disordered thoughts. I take care not to reveal anything. Am I going to wear this stifling mask until the end of my life? (p147)"

"Nothing matters except this bitterness consuming me, simmering on a low flame. It's dangerous. (p149)"

"Once more, the silence seemed to them so profound, so ominous, that they felt as though they could inhale it together with the air. (chapter 2)"

"That afternoon, the grandfather had the maid bring the invalid to church. Once he found a seat, he took him on his knees and sent Mélie back to wait on the porch. From his pulpit, the Haitian priest delivered a sermon that displeased him because he spoke of obedience and acceptance not of the laws of heaven but of what passed for law in the kingdom of this world. "We must learn to submit," the priest was saying. "We must learn to resign ourselves, for nothing happens on earth without God's will." A few people turned to stare at the grandfather. And for a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the sermon was directed at him. "Should I, too," he felt like shouting, "Should I, too, resign myself to having my father's grave profaned and his bones dug up?" He knew the priest would reply: "Yes, if such be God's will." And therefore he had gone astray, for rebellion and vengeance swelled within him. Jesus chased the thieves from the Temple with a whip, and my father imitated him. Was be wrong? he wondered. No, and even when he stuck a knife in the back of that incorrigible thief who had managed to bribe the judges and get the law on his side, he was right that time too. After all, since when did a man, a real man, allow what is his to be taken away against his will? And the grandfather wanted to spit in the faces of all these curs, beginning with his own son. He left the church irate, the invalid in his arms. If the Church was on the side of the thieves, he might as well pray at home from now on. And God would in the end understand that the Church had sunk into corruption. (chapter 6)"