A Sociological Counter-reading of Marie Chauvet as an “Outsider-Within”: Paradoxes in the Construction of Haitian Women in Love, Anger, Madness

As a sociologist trained to analyze social reality in search of ways to transform it, I am always puzzled by the way literary scholars portray Marie Chauvet, to use the trope of Patricia Hill Collins, as an “outsider-within.”¹ Such a situation of dual identity is created through engagement with one’s position within a community as well as exclusion or strangeness from that community. To use an anthropological idiom, Chauvet could be considered as a writer reflexive of her own social reality. Indeed, many literary scholars define Chauvet’s work as a critique of both the political system of the Duvalierist regime of 1957–1987 and the discriminatory practices of the Haitian oligarchy, the elite to which generations of Chauvet’s family, including herself, belonged by birth and/or through marriage. That tradition of social critique has been a hallmark in Haitian literature starting with the “Indigenist school” of the nineteenth century and continuing in the works of Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, the two most successful male Haitian writers of the twentieth century. Yet for many, Chauvet is unique because, as Joan Dayan states, “Never before had a Haitian woman dared not only to question the nationalist assumptions of Francois Duvalier and the noiriste celebration of ‘black essence’ but also to take on the burden of writing in a culture that had simultaneously praised and silenced women.”²

This praise of Chauvet, which comes from many corners, is paradoxically not based on her own political engagement. Rather, her association with some form of radicalism is based on the revolutionary nature of her literary works. For example, the well-known Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat, honoring Chauvet as one of the three “giants of Haitian literature,” claims that Chauvet “seems to be speaking to us . . . from the grave” in assessing and criticizing the current sociopolitical conditions of life in contemporary Haiti.³ Another Haitian American writer, Myriam Chancy, in a provocative article titled “Exile and Resistance: History as a Revolutionary Act,” also claims that Chauvet’s work—like that of the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff —“focus[es] on the role of women and how politically conscious women negotiate their sexual oppression within social and class constraints.”⁴ For Chancy, both writers present in their work the possibilities for resistance as represented by women through history. Such resistance is revelatory of women’s efforts to free themselves of prescribed social roles as breeders, mothers, nannies, and laborers.

Celebrations of the “revolutionary and transformative nature” of Chauvet’s work contribute to a process of myth-making. Literary scholars such as Hellen Lee-Keller argue not only that Chauvet criticized despotism and racialized social hierarchies but also that the reason her book was banned was that she questioned and condemned the patriarchal and elitist structure of Haitian society. Lee-Keller further states that Chauvet uses the trope of madness as her primary strategy for navigating the political sphere, thus creating an alternative future vision for women’s roles in Haiti.⁵ Likewise, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw speaks about the “boldness and revolutionary perspective” of Chauvet’s work, stating that the writer courageously exposed the politics of Duvalier’s terrorizing regime and that her work moves beyond Haitian reality and the Haitian border. Chauvet’s use of the first-person narrative, she claims, “seemed to say what others stifled.”⁶ Another literary critic, Melissa Sande, uses Chauvet’s work as the framework for her analysis of gender and literature in post-earthquake Haiti.⁷ Lastly, although Kaiama Glover acknowledges Chauvet’s absence from—and, most likely, her refusal to participate in—any form of organized politics of Black radicalism or of women’s struggles, she finds a redemptive explanation.⁸ She claims that Chauvet was literally punished, removed from the pantheon, excluded, silenced partly because of her political decision to be “nonaligned.”⁹ For Glover, that positioning meant that Chauvet was both “as a writer and a citizen a disorderly feminine presence” who prompts Glover to rethink the parameters of “black radicalism” and to state...