Marie Vieux-Chauvet

Marie Vieux-Chauvet (born Marie Vieux; September 16, 1916 – June 19, 1973), was a novelist, poet and playwright who was born and educated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Quotes

Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy (1968)

translated from the French Amour, colère et folie by Val Vinokur and Rose-Myriam Réjouis (2009)

• One thing remains true: hatred only breeds hatred.

• What’s the use of religion if it oppresses instead of consoling? If it offers despair instead of relief? If it takes away instead of preserving?

• It is with my hand and with my heart that I write, not with my eyes

• At dawn, I was already flat against the wall, drinking up the least signs of life from the town like a starving man. Nothing stirred. All around, immutable nature seemed to mock our anguish. (Madness)

Love

• Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects. An old maid! No husband. Doesn't know love. Hasn't even lived, really. They're wrong. In any case, I'm savoring my revenge in silence. Silence is mine, vengeance is mine. (first lines)

• I am like a fruit fallen before ripening, rotting under the tree unnoticed. (p4)

• Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. (p12)

• She refuses to understand the march of history, its twists and reversals. (p15)

• My cozy bourgeois upbringing is like a tattoo on my skin. (p18)

• It did not escape me that for some time now I'd been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children's bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners-usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. (p18)

• Amazing how love cancels out all other feelings. (p23)

• In order not to destroy the myth of the unblemished old maid, I admit to venial sins only. I keep the so-called mortal sins to myself. That's between me and God. I will accept punishment bravely, no matter how terrible. I will appear before Him, pointing a finger at Him. I will be the one to accuse. I don't care, everything may be perfect up there, but on earth, what a mess! (p31)

• What a hymn to life, this work born from suffering! (p31)

• Even though life has denied me everything, I am not inclined to play the adoptive mother. I may kiss Jane's son on his nice round cheeks but I remain detached, the door to my heart as solidly barricaded as the door to my bedroom. (p57)

• You may be all bluster strutting about like a walking arsenal, but I'm smart enough to hide my game and look harmless to you. And therein lies my strength. I am patient, whereas you, like all fools, are impulsive. I wrap myself in the dignity of an old family line, as I nurse my serpent's venom. You spread your cruelty, I know how to hide mine. You bite, I sting-stealthily, my eye trained by a bourgeois education, imbibed like mother's milk, which makes me the most cunning of enemies. I wait for my moment. Because for now, love saves me from hatred. (p53)

• "Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it."
  Jean Luze shrugged.
  "Who can boast that he has never been afraid?" he shot back at Audier. "At least you have been spared from war. As for me, I bear its mark on my body and soul forever."
  • p45

• What am I running away from that I so drunkenly welcome this glimmer of love in my life? (p56)

• He opens our eyes on new horizons and unveils a mysterious, unknown world to us. (p65)

• Unexpected confidence fills me. Slowly I feel it emerge. Is this maturity? I run my hand over my face to feel the first transformations in my features. Yes, I have changed. My moist lips are parted on a tentative decision still unclear to me. I realize my worth. Everything that has fermented in my mind over forty years-my unappeased desires, my unheard pleas, the oblivion of solitary pleasure-is rising up within me. A revolution. I feel ready to answer to the demands of my being. (p67-8)

• In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. (p69)

• Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can't reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have 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! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn't I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can't define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever. (p72-3)

• Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. (p73)

• he forgets that a man, no matter where he is, takes his ideas and convictions with him. (p78)

• "...But what can you do time has rubbed away the full name as it rubs everything else. All you can do is adapt to the new and minimize the damage..." (p83)

• "He lives in sin," my mother explained to me, "and sin is contagious." (p93)

Anger

• Once more, the silence seemed to them so profound, so ominous, that they felt as though they could inhale it together with the air. (chapter 2)

• That afternoon, the grandfather had the maid bring the invalid to church. Once he found a seat, he took him on his knees and sent Mélie back to wait on the porch. From his pulpit, the Haitian priest delivered a sermon that displeased him because he spoke of obedience and acceptance not of the laws of heaven but of what passed for law in the kingdom of this world.
  "We must learn to submit," the priest was saying. "We must learn to resign ourselves, for nothing happens on earth without God's will."
  A few people turned to stare at the grandfather. And for a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the sermon was directed at him. "Should I, too," he felt like shouting, "Should I, too, resign myself to having my father's grave profaned and his bones dug up?" He knew the priest would reply: "Yes, if such be God's will." And therefore he had gone astray, for rebellion and vengeance swelled within him. Jesus chased the thieves from the Temple with a whip, and my father imitated him. Was be wrong? he wondered. No, and even when he stuck a knife in the back of that incorrigible thief who had managed to bribe the judges and get the law on his side, he was right that time too. After all, since when did a man, a real man, allow what is his to be taken away against his will? And the grandfather wanted to spit in the faces of all these curs, beginning with his own son. He left the church irate, the invalid in his arms. If the Church was on the side of the thieves, he might as well pray at home from now on. And God would in the end understand that the Church had sunk into corruption. (chapter 6)

• The sentences coming out of him displaced those scrolling under his eyes in the book. (chapter 8)

• Alone again, she had invented touchingly naïve myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a butterfly whether black or alive with color, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale, everything seemed pregnant with meaning. (chapter 8)

• When she came out, pure and beautiful in her immaculate smock, all that weighed on his heart seemed to melt. She exists, you simply have to remind yourself that such women exist in order to reconcile yourself with life, he told himself. (Chapter 10)

• Nothing would stop her from doing something, even if it killed her. Doing something for absolutely no reason, perhaps, but still doing something, such is what life demands from human beings. Faint whiffs of hope would stir up illusions she had thought quite dead. So this is what helps, she told herself as she walked. So this is why suicide cannot be the normal culmination of a human life. I am going to try to do something. I'm going to try to believe that I can still make myself useful. She looked at the sky, the trees, the flowers, the people, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She opened her handbag and put money in the hands of beggars; confronted with a skeletal mother and her four starving, crying babies, she took stock of her own sufferings and found them acceptable. (chapter 12)

• I am afraid to face the fact that, no matter what you do, man is a wolf to man. More than anyone else I know, I have the desire to stand firm and fight for a good cause. But not with weapons. With my ideas. My hand extended in brotherhood, offering a fresh and sober example. I would follow anyone who passed austerity laws to halt run-way decadence and the vanity of unchecked ambition; I would support whoever could abolish hunger and poverty, prison cells and torture, who would treat every man as a man and include everyone in the national dialogue. If I decide not to belong to any party, if I wish to remain free, then let that choice be mine. Alone and unarmed, I want the right to plead for justice and freedom and to shout from the rooftops that which I believe to be the truth... (chapter 13)

Dance on the Volcano (1957)

original title in the French La Danse sur le volcan, page numbers to 2016 translation to English by Kaiama L. Glover

• At twelve, she already understood many things. She accepted them as inevitable, yet questioned them all the same. Why? Why were things this way and not another? Why were some people rich and others poor? Why did people beat their slaves? Why were some masters kind and others cruel, some priests good and others evil? Why did catechism teach the things it did and why did the priests act the way they did? They said: we are all brothers, but then they bought slaves and beat or otherwise tortured them. Why should she have to hide herself in order to learn to read? Why had Rosélia, one of the neighborhood vendors, been imprisoned for hiding a runaway slave? And above all, why - knowing what could happen - had she hidden that slave, who she did not even know? (chapter I, p17)

• In Saint-Martin's voice she had sensed the stirrings of a different version of the same revolt Joseph had revealed to her that one night. The Whites could also suffer the injustice of the Law! She remembered Joseph explaining to her that the planters' greatest enemies were the poor whites. Discontent, hatred, and revolt thus existed on a human scale and not only within the black race, despised and enslaved? (chapter XII, p94)

• Minette pushed away her plate and stood up. What she wouldn't have given to be alone for a moment, just a moment. Oh, to have a room of my own, to be able to close myself up somewhere to think and to cry as much as I want! she thought to herself. (chapter IX, p120)

• A white public had put her on a pedestal, and from that pedestal she looked down and saw everything unmasked. And what she saw was horrific. It was a shame. (chapter XII, p175)

• The eyes, if one knows them well, rarely lie (chapter XXII, p342)

• During these days of turmoil, there were more runaway slaves than ever. The constabulary was dog-tired, for not an hour went by where some slave was not brought back in chains, caught mid-flight. Tipped off to what was going on by the domestic slaves, the slaves in the workhouses listened attentively to those words Liberty and Equality, which a bunch of white people, rising up before the whole world, had written in their own blood. (chapter XXIX, p418)

• The volcano, which for long years the planters did not believe existed, was erupting. (chapter XXXV p473)

Quotes about Marie Vieux-Chauvet

• Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano stands with Tolstoy's War and Peace, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, Robert Graves's I, Claudius, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind in its extraordinary power to bring all the nuance and complexity of a long-gone society so vividly before our eyes. With what's going on racially and politically in the United States today, now is an excellent time for this masterpiece to appear in English - and in a translation that does full justice to the great beauty of Vieux-Chauvet's prose.
  • Madison Smartt Bell, used as blurb for Dance on the Volcano

• 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...One of the wonderful things about her work is that she also writes so exquisitely, so beautifully.
  • Edwidge Danticat Interview (2010)

• Marie Vieux-Chauvet was nitroglycerin. She set her sights on an illness ravaging Haitian society.
  • Dany Laferrière used as blurb for Dance on the Volcano