Love, Anger, Madness

"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. Her book was printed and ready to go when the publication was stopped in France because it would put her family in Haiti in danger. So she really had to choose between the safety of her family and her book. The book is a beautiful trilogy, three sets of stories of people who each in their own way are taking a stand against the dictatorship. It isn’t polemical at all but that alone was enough to make the dictatorship want to stop it from being published. The first story is all about one woman who keeps a journal and talks about her own personal pain and also the pain of her environment. She looks at what is going on with people around her – the beggars and the brutal henchmen in the town. In the second story there is a woman who, in order to save her family, is forced to offer her body to this henchman in the town. And the third story… I think was probably closest to Marie’s own situation. It’s about a group of poets in hiding and it also gives a clue about how people might be writing under the types of circumstances Marie was in. She had a group of writers who met at her house regularly to read each other’s work which was somewhat similar to the group in hiding in the book. But, this story takes everything further. One of the wonderful things about her work is that she also writes so exquisitely, so beautifully. So you can also take out the political context, which I must admit is virtually impossible – but even if that part of the work is of little interest to you, you can just enjoy her prose. But there was enough of a sense of protest in her book that it was deemed dangerous to the people in power. Marie eventually decided to go into exile in the United States for her own safety and that of her family. She continued to write there until she died of brain cancer in her 50s. Love, Anger, Madness is her big book, if you will, the one she’s best known for. Yes, especially at the time of the dictatorship. One of the other writers on my list, Jacques Stephen Alexis, was ambushed by Duvalier’s henchmen coming back from abroad and he was killed and his body was never found. So there was a good reason for a lot of these writers to fear."