Create Dangerously

CHAPTER 4

I first read Jan J. Dominique, the Haitian novelist and daughter of Jean Dominique, when I could still read an entire book in French without once consulting a dictionary. Five years before, at age twelve, I had left Haiti (where I had been living with my uncle and aunt) and had moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be reunited with my parents. Being new to a place where schoolmates felt free to call me a dirty Haitian or Frenchie or boat person, I hungered for words from home. Reading in New York would not be like reading back in Haiti, where rote memorization was the primary method of learning for children my age and where I had memorized, then recited, and then quickly forgotten at least a million unsavored words. If anything, I had resented those forgotten words, their length and complication, their impenetrability, their occasional irrelevance to my tropical reality. We had been made to memorize, for example, lessons about seasons, which listed them as le printemps, l’été, l’automne, et l’hiver-spring, summer, fall, and winter-without acknowledging the dry or rainy seasons, or even the hurricane seasons, around us. At least we were not obliged to recite the French colonial creed, “Our ancestors the Gauls” with our African lips while staring ahead from our black faces with our dark eyes. But there were still some necessary erasures, one of them being the fact that, because of the dictatorship and its brutal censorship, I knew no child who had read even a short novel by a Haitian-born writer. What we got in school were excerpts from certain French novels, among them Camille and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père et fils, who had a Haitian grandmother and great-grandmother in Marie-Cesette Dumas.

Many older students also read the meticulous details of Émile Zola’s downtrodden classes, which strongly echoed some of the realties of my own impoverished neighborhood. These and the fables of La Fontaine, the pensées of Blaise Pascal, and the crude jokes of François Rabelais filled whatever space and time might have been devoted to homegrown contemporary talent. I can hear now as I write this cries of protest from other Haitians my age (and younger and older, too) shouting from the space above my shoulders, the bleachers above every writer’s shoulders where readers cheer or hiss and boo in advance. They are hissing now, that chorus or a portion of it, decrying this as both a contradiction and a lie. “I read Haitian writers when I was twelve,” they say, but I must stop and turn to them now and say, I am speaking only for myself.

One of my young literature teachers in primary school, Miss Roy, loved French literature so much that she was always quoting from it. “Comme a dit l’auteur,” or “As the writer said,” she would begin, before citing Voltaire, Racine, Baudelaire-writers to whose words we must be exposed, she thought, in order to be fully “civilized.”

I would later become a French literature major in college, I think because I secretly worshipped her. I remember her cocoa brown skin, her manicured nails, and her forced Parisian accent, her slight hint of vetiver perfume, her perfectly creased clothes, her face that never sweated, even on the hottest days, when in the heat’s haze it would appear almost as though her spiky high heel shoes were not even touching the ground. If my angelic literature teacher knew the existence of homegrown literature, she never betrayed the fact.

So I first read Jan J. Dominique when I could still read an entire book in French without consulting a dictionary. At seventeen, after having lived in the United States for five years, I went on what had become a regular weekly quest for reading material at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library one Saturday afternoon and was shocked to come across two new narrow shelves of books labeled Livres Haitiens, or Haitian books, most of them still crisp and new as though they had each been carefully packaged and lovingly hand-delivered to those shelves. The thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship had just ended in Haiti, and perhaps some of the more vocal Haitian patrons of the Brooklyn library had demanded more books about themselves to help them interpret their ever-changing country from afar.

I checked out the only two novels remaining among the poetry collections and political essays: Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire d’une amnésique (Memoir of an Amnesiac), and the French edition of Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, (Masters of the Dew). Because the Roumain book was shorter, I devoured it first, and perhaps it is thanks to that eager first reading that I have tried to maintain a silent conversation with Jacques Roumain that publicly manifested itself in the title of my 2004 book The Dew Breaker, a book that I intended to be neither a novel nor a story collection, but something in between. The longing to converse with Roumain is not mine alone. In a tribute on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Jan J. Dominique wrote, “Over the years, Jacques Roumain has often been present in my life. For various reasons ranging from literature to politics, to Vodou, to linguistics choices, to personal considerations and professional activities. Roumain has sometimes infiltrated my daily life as a journalist, teacher, citizen, and most of all, I have felt his absence in my awareness of being a literary orphan.”

Inasmuch as our stories are the bastard children of everything that we have ever experienced and read, my desire to tell some of my stories in a collaged manner, to merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others, begins with my reading of the two books I eagerly checked out from the Livres Haitiens section of the Brooklyn Public Library that day, books that could have been written only by literary orphans, to offer to other literary orphans.

Maxims about judging a book by its cover aside, when I picked up Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire d’une amnésique, I was of course drawn to its paradoxical title. How can an amnesiac remember? Perhaps there is a particular type of memory allowed to amnesiacs, one that only other amnesiacs or near amnesiacs share. I had grown up steeped in Haitian orality, but I had never seen it written down in French before, especially in such an intricate and graceful way. Here was a deeply moving exploration of childhood, of a complex father/daughter relationship, further complicated by a brutal dictator who to his arsenal of physiological weapons adds folktales, turning old myths into living nightmares. Thus the legend of the Tonton Macoutes, bogeymen who come to take disobedient children away in a knapsack, comes to life in the form of denim-clad killers, henchmen and henchwomen who would assassinate their own mothers and fathers if so ordered by the dictator.

A foreign journalist once asked François Duvalier what he represented for Haitians and Duvalier replied that he was their father and the Virgin Mary was their mother. Duvalier also dressed as the guardian of cemetery, the Baron Samedi, and was believed to have stealthily stood in the crowd dressed like this, or in military camouflage, at the public execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Thus all Haitians were meant to be like the future young writer of Jan J.’s novel, terrified children who could not be sure even whom to look in the eye or smile at or love. For love could easily turn into something ugly, something that could be expressed only through violence. A slap, like the one given to the daughter who must not speak against the evil she witnesses, to silence her and protect her from greater injuries. Coldness that hides a fear of attachment because who knows when we might have to leave, to go into hiding, into exile? Who knows when we might have to die? Who knows if we are going to be remembered once we are gone?

Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions. We have, it seems, a collective agreement to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures. Thus, we speak of the Haitian revolution as though it happened just yesterday but we rarely speak of the slavery that prompted it. Our paintings show glorious Edenlike African jungles but never the Middle Passage. In order to shield our shattered collective psyche from a long history of setbacks and disillusionment, our constant roller-coaster ride between saviors and dictators, homespun oppression and foreign tyranny, we cultivate communal and historical amnesia, continually repeating cycles that we never see coming until we are reliving similar horrors.

Never again will foreigners trample Haitian soil, the founders of the republic declared in 1804. Yet in 1915, the “boots,” as they are referred to in Jan J.’s novel, invade, launching an American occupation that would last nineteen years. As soon as they landed, U.S. marines shut down the press, took charge of Haiti’s banks and customhouses, and instituted a system of compulsory labor for poor Haitians. By the end of the occupation, more than fifteen thousand Haitians had lost their lives.

“The United States is at war with Haiti,” W. E. B. Dubois wrote after returning from a fact-finding 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 officials 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 officers and Marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion.”

Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, the narrator’s father will never truly know a free and sovereign life, having had not just his country but also his imagination invaded as a small boy when his parents used the presence of U.S. marines to frighten him into drinking his milk.

There are many ways that our mind protects us from present and past horrors. One way is by allowing us to forget. Forgetting is a constant fear in any writer’s life. For the immigrant writer, far from home, memory becomes an even deeper abyss. It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the tree, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.

But what happens when we cannot tell our own stories, when our memories have temporarily abandoned us? What is left is longing for something we are not even sure we ever had but are certain we will never experience again.

“I love memories on glossy paper” the struggling novelist narrator of Mémoire d’une amnésique declares. Memories when not frozen in time are excruciating, yet Jan J.’s stand-in writer has no choice but to write around these memories because, for one thing, the types of books she loves and would love to write are forbidden and illegal. Their mere presence in her house can result in the arrest and execution of her entire family.

How does one write under those conditions? this novel asks again and again. How can we not write in code, andaki, when so many of those who came before us lost their lives because they thought they had nothing to fear? How does Jan J. write after having seen her father gunned down a few feet from where they worked together at his radio station? The book that she finally began writing three years after his death is called Mémoire errante, Wandering Memory.

In Mémoire errante, Jan J., now as a memoirist, writes, “Since April 3, 2000, I no longer write. Before I was full of ideas. I have always loved working on many texts at once, planning parallel stories. A story set in the present filled with furor and noise while dreaming of a woman from the past without knowing if the two will eventually become linked. There has been no link. There has been no book.”

A book that almost never was is Amour, colère, folie, the singlevolume trilogy I encountered on my next trip to my Livres Haitiens haven at the Brooklyn public library. The author was the stunning and brave-the guapa-Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Born in Port-au-Prince during the first year of the U.S. occupation, she would later recreate this period in Love, the first novella in her seminal trilogy, which was published for the first time in English in August 2009 as Love, Anger, Madness. Claire Clamont, the main character of Love, equates her own unfortunate predicament as a thirty-nine-year-old virgin with the predicaments of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (both Vieux-Chauvet favorites) when she laments in her journal that “there is hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal.”

But is all suffering equal, Marie Vieux-Chauvet wonders, when the people who suffer are not considered equal? How do those who stuff hot potatoes into their child servants’ mouths fare against those who murder a journalist or rape a neighbor? How can those who have been brutally enslaved turn around and enslave others? Is suffering truly equal when we live in a society that would never allow the people who are suffering to be considered equal?

“We have been practicing at cutting each other’s throats since Independence,” Vieux-Chauvet writes of the country that we Haitians like to remind the world was the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, home to the only slave revolt that succeeded in producing a nation. What we would rather not say, and what Vieux-Chauvet does, is that this same country has continued to fail to reach its full potential, in part because of foreign interference, but also because of internal strife and cruelty.

X, the pseudonymous town featured in Love, is terrorized by local henchmen who are given by an unseen dictator the power to decide at any time who lives and who dies. The town is also plagued by other terrors. Not only are the hills and mountains heartbreakingly eroded, but American ships routinely leave X’s ports filled with prized wood from trees the loss of which is causing that erosion. Children die of typhoid and malaria. Beggars drink dirty water from ditches and are routinely persecuted by the ruling colonel. Even though this section of the trilogy is mostly set in the 1930s, it is obvious that it is meant also to evoke the later period, 1967, during which this book was written in a six-month-long writing binge-when the elder Duvalier’s regime was becoming more and more severe and, in addition to carrying out public and private executions, was persecuting intellectuals and artists.

“Alone again,” Marie Vieux-Chauvet writes, referring to Rose Normil of Anger, the second novella in the trilogy, “she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or multicolored, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale seemed pregnant with meaning.”

This is me, I thought, reading this while attempting my first little stories filled with my self-created folklore-my fake-lore-my hybrid and métisse warm-weather daffodils, my crackling fires of dried tree branches and death-announcing black butterflies, my visions of flame-feathered birds.

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 Araignées 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 Réjouis, 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 Réjouis, “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 Mémoire 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 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!”

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.