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Fiction from Haiti Meanness of the heart

13.08.09

Introverted just after it was published in France in 1968 following a ministry warning that it would endanger the author’s family, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Haitian trilogy, “Preference, Anger, Madness”, has been an underground classic ever since. Absolutely released in France in 2005, it is now available in English.

The work provides three views of life under an increasingly oppressive and unpredictable r. In the first novella, “Love”, Claire, the eldest of three upper-birth sisters, is a fiercely independent and intelligent woman whose nefarious skin makes her less marriageable than her younger siblings with their “gold under the coating”. Until she finally rebels, Claire is a virtual bondsman to her family, while secretly consumed by desire for her French buddy-in-law. The middle-class family in “Anger” is torn distinctly when the 20-year-old heroine, Rose, is forced to be in the land of Nod with a soldier to stop the regime from seizing their land. In “Lunacy” a poet steels himself for one final stand after his village is ravaged by militants and he is trapped without grub.

Source: Economist