Create Dangerously

It is in Madness, the final novella of the trilogy, that Vieux-Chauvet perhaps comes closest to reproducing herself and her dilemma as a writer living and writing under a brutal authoritarian regime. Depicting four persecuted poets living in a shack, she echoes her own membership in Les Araignees du soir (Spiders of the Night), a small group of poets and novelists who met weekly at her house to discuss one another’s work. Like actual spiders, they hoped to weave a protective web around their own and keep out predatory pests. But many were either jailed or exiled by the dictatorship, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet herself had no choice but to flee Haiti in 1968, after this book, on the verge of being published in Paris, was pulled from publication for fear that her family members might be arrested or killed.

According to Rose-Myriam Rejouis, one of the trilogy’s two official translators, when Marie Vieux-Chauvet received news that the book had been accepted for publication, she threw a party at which she read excerpts from her manuscript to her friends and family.

“It was then,” writes Rejouis, “that family and friends expressed concerns about how the book might, no matter what absurd formula Duvalier used to determine who counted as an enemy of the state, put the life of every member of her family and her husband’s family at risk.”

At first Marie Vieux-Chauvet resisted, insisting that the publication of the book might bring rebuke and shame to the regime, but then it became obvious that she would have to choose between the book and the people she loved.

“There is a curious split in my behavior,” the poet narrator of Madness confesses. “I calmly go where there is screaming, where I am certain the devils are committing murder. I avoid danger while accusing myself of cowardice, loathing my own reactions. In the trunk there are a few poems, unpublished, as are all of my poems about devils and hell. Enough of them there to get me pumped full of lead without anyone hesitating.”

Exile became Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s only choice.

Later, while living in Queens, New York, Marie Vieux-Chauvet wrote Les Rapaces (The Vultures), a novel that portrays a writer wrestling with his work and his brutal surroundings after the death of Papa Doc Duvalier. Through the valiant effort of a devoted reader, the work of that book’s fictional writer manages to live on, something that Marie Vieux-Chauvet must have dreamed of for herself while writing about Haiti, in French, in the United States, not certain if either she or her books would ever find their way back to Haiti or would ever find an interested audience in the United States.

On June 19, 1973, at fifty-seven years old, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died of brain cancer after five years in exile. The Duvalier dictatorship had been passed down from father to son, whom the U.S. government saw as more acceptable. Foreign investment flowed into Haiti, nurturing an atrocious sweatshop culture that added another layer of despair to the lives of a population that could not refuse to work, no matter how meager the pay. Other poor Haitians were sold by the Haitian government in secret deals to work in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic and were shipped off like slaves to the other side of the island.

As a child growing up in Haiti at the time, I heard, along with the darkest of tales of the brutal Tonton Macoutes or Vieux-Chauvet’s men in black, stories of children being kidnapped so their organs could be harvested and used to save rich sick children in America, an idea that frightened me so much that I sometimes could not sleep. What would Marie Vieux-Chauvet have made of such a tale? I wonder. Or of the period that followed the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, when the son flew off into his own exile and the people, like the beggars of her trilogy and the masses of Les Rapaces, took to the streets in celebration and revenge? What would she have made of the first democratically elected president of Haiti, or the death of Jean Dominique? Of September 11th? Of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake on January 12, 2010? And what would it have been like to have sat down with her over a cup of coffee in a dark corner of a Haitian restaurant in Port-au-Prince or Miami, as I have had the pleasure of doing with Jan J. Dominique? In Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s absence, I feel orphaned. But it was only after I read Jan J.’s Memoire errante that I felt once again what it was like to lose a literary parent and a biological one at the same time.

Because she bore her father’s name but for a single vowel, there was always the possibility that someone would mistake the novelist daughter for the agronomist/journalist. So the novelist daughter at first used her nickname, J. J., on the cover of her books.

“One day they’ll introduce me as the father of Jan, the novelist,” her father said. He loved her novels. He said that one of them reminded him of Proust, his favorite writer. “If I weren’t your father,” he said, “I’d write a review, but people would think me biased.”

Then there was the assassination and her being unable to write because everyone was saying to her, “You should write about your father,” which she eventually did.

For her part, during the final months of her life, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was researching and mapping out an epic novel called Les Enfants d’Ogoun (The Children of Ogoun), Ogoun being the Haitian god of war. Unfortunately, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died before completing more than a few pages of this much hoped-for book.

“I would like to be sure,” she writes in Love, “that Beethoven died appeased that he had written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cezanne 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!”

I too would like to be sure that Marie Vieux-Chauvet died appeased that she, like her living sister novelist/memoirist Jan J. Dominique, had written, passionately, fearlessly, dangerously, the books that she did. The more I write myself, the more certain I am that she did.

CHAPTER 5

I Speak Out

Alerte Belance: I only have a stub where my arm used to be, and the fingers of my left hand have been severed; I can’t close it. That hand can’t do anything for me. That’s why I say to you: consider that I always lift my face up, I speak out… Look at my martyrdom from when the wicked ones kidnapped me and took me to the killing fields… Hear my story, what I have experienced.

We were speeding through the Lincoln Tunnel toward New Jersey to visit a Haitian woman named Alerte Belance. Alerte was the latest casualty of the 1991 military coup d’etat in Haiti. We-the director, the producers of the documentary, and I-had heard about Alerte through a refugee women’s organization in Brooklyn. We were told that she had been arrested by men belonging to a paramilitary group working for the junta that had led the coup and had become the de facto leadership of the country. Five of us immediately jumped into a small car and, with a trunk full of video equipment, headed for the public housing project in Newark where Alerte, her husband, and their three children were living. Our documentary was about Haitian torture survivors and we hoped that she would tell us her story.

As we entered the sparsely furnished apartment on the top floor of the six-story building, we were greeted by two young girls dressed in ruffled pink dresses and matching bows in their hair. Alerte’s son was sitting on a large orange sofa in the middle of the living room. He was a small boy and it was hard to tell whether he was older or younger than the girls, who both appeared to be around ten. The boy never smiled, which made me think that he was indeed older and understood a lot better than his sisters did what had happened.

Alerte’s husband, a youthful-looking, goateed man, carried in a few chairs from the kitchen for us. Then Alerte emerged from the bedroom. She was a small woman, her dark face sunken on one side where a machete had nearly chopped off her cheekbone. She was in her late twenties, but looked twice as old, the machete scars and suture marks like tiny railroad tracks leading toward her chin. She was wearing a green blouse, a flowered skirt, and a dark knit cap on her head, and as she limped toward the couch she greeted each of us with a nod.

Somewhere downstairs a baby was crying.

“These apartments are sometimes used for battered women,” she said in halting Creole.

Still, her voice was a lot clearer than we had expected, since during the attack her tongue had been cut in two.