Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych [PDF] Free Download

Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych Book by Marie Vieux Chauvet [PDF] Free Download

ABOUT THE BOOK

Author: Marie Vieux Chauvet

Genre: Literary fiction

Language: English

Page Count: 424

File Size: 2.2 MB

File Format: PDF

INTRODUCTION

Edwidge Danticat

Fewer than a handful of Haitian writers have, both while alive and dead, inspired as much adulation, analysis, and discussion as Marie Vieux-Chauvet. In fact the small number in question constitutes a multigenerational triad of which Marie Vieux-Chauvet was the nal survivor and the only female. Jacques Roumain, the grandfather, was the world traveler who returned home to write Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), one of the rst twentieth-century Haitian novels featuring peasant characters, and which was translated into English by Jacques Roumain’s American friends, the poet Langston Hughes and the scholar Mercer Cook. The father of the trio, Jacques Stephen Alexis, was the protest novelist who wouldn’t allow protest to mar his aesthetics, and who wrote novels which were as erotic as they were patriotic. I had the pleasure of working on a published translation of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s L’Espace d’un cillement (In the Flicker of an Eyelid), a novel that depicts the American occupation of Haiti as being as much of an assault on a country as on a woman’s body. I am equally honored to introduce you to Love, Anger, Madness, the seminal trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, the mother/sister/daughter of this trio, which represents, in my opinion, the cornerstone of Haitian literature. Born in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, on September 16, 1916, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was a member of the “occupation generation,” that is, she was born a year after the United States invaded Haiti, launching an occupation that would last nineteen years. The U.S. invasion came in the wake of President Woodrow Wilson’s professed commitment to make the world safe for democracy. However, as soon as the marines landed in Haiti, Wilson’s administration shut down the press, took charge of Haiti’s banks and customs, and instituted a system of compulsory labor for poor Haitians. By the end of the occupation, more than fteen thousand Haitians had lost their lives. A Haitian gendarmerie was trained to replace the American marines, then proceeded to form juntas, organize coups, and terrorize Haitians for decades. Although American troops were ocially withdrawn from Haiti in 1934, the U.S. government maintained economic control of the country until 1947. “The United States is at war with Haiti,” the American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote after returning from a fact-nding mission to occupied Haiti. “Congress has never sanctioned the war. Josephus Daniels (President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy) has illegally and unjustly occupied a free foreign land and murdered its inhabitants by the thousands. He has deposed its ocials and dispersed its legally elected representatives. He is carrying on a reign of terror, brow-beating, and cruelty, at the hands of southern white naval ocers and marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion.”

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