My Love Is Like a Rose: Terror, Territoire, and the Poetics of Marie Chauvet

Amour, Colère et Folie is a rare book not only because it is almost impossible to find or because it has such a singular history; it is rare because there are few Caribbean women writers who have explored the workings of terror like Marie Chauvet. The violent content of the work makes it difficult to read. Ronnie Scharfman describes the text as "a nightmare that undermines rest by haunting it."¹ "Chauvet's discourse," Scharfman says, "does violence to our reading habits by transgressing the pleasure of the text. Because she is as merciless toward her reader as the world that she depicts is toward its victims."² Chauvet's triptych is destabilizing, haunting, and unsettling because of the works' penetrating, "bare-all" portrayal of brutal atrocities, but it is also mesmerizing in its ability to create a theater in the mind of the reader where all these scenes are played out vividly and repeatedly.

For readers today, the importance and relevance of Chauvet's work is undisputed. But as we learn from Yanick Lahens, this was not always the case. Marie Chauvet paved the way for the modern novel in Haiti, but at the time she was largely misunderstood in her own country, particularly since she unsettled everyone, on theleft and on the right.³ Thework wasunquestionably revolutionary and courageous in its use of a first-person narrative that dared to say what others stifled. Chauvet's poetics exposed the politics of Duvalier's terrorizing regime. The work's relevance to a Haiti past or present is even more unsettling particularly since it moves beyond Haitian reality and Haitian borders. Chauvet may not have foreseen the state of crime and its terrorizing effects in many Caribbean islands today, nor could she have predicted a burgeoning macoutisme driven by the drug trade, where complicity and collusion are the primary methods of survival, but her work still describes individuals, families, and societies under siege.

Chauvet herself was no stranger to the workings of repression and silencing. When she fled Haiti in 1968 for North America it was due to the publication of her provocative material in Amour, Colère et Folie.By that time she had already writtena play, La Légende des fleurs (1947),and several novels, Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le volcan (1957),and Fonds des Nègres (1961).Butthe climate of intolerance and violence at the time left the writer little choice but to leave. Haitian literary critic Franck Laraque, who knew Chauvet personally, speaks of her as an exciting, beautiful, vibrant woman, who after the publication of her trilogy was forced to abandon her family and a comfortable life in Haiti.⁴ The book itself has a history that only serves to reinforce the state of terror that existed within Haiti and for the writer herself. Chauvet's family refused to have her works translated and bought back all unsold copies of Amour, Colère et Folie, the book that sent her into exile.⁵ According to Joan Dayan, "Until 1968, when Gallimard published Amour, Colère et Folie, Chauvet occupied a very privileged position as a beautiful, light-skinned member of the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie."⁶ But the publication of the book caused a scandal. "Never before had a Haitian woman dared not only to question the nationalist assumptions of François Duvalier and the noiriste celebration of 'black essence' but also take on the burden of writing in a culture that had simultaneously praised and silenced women."⁷ There is no doubt that the book would haveinstilled fear in and scandalized Chauvet's own society; her father, Constant Vieux, was part of the social elite and highly placed in government. Marie Chauvet faced alienation in Haiti from her family and society. Dany Laferrière and other Haitian critics note that Amour, Colère et Folie was deliberately mocked or ignored in the major papers in Port-au-Prince.⁸ In addition,Pradel Pompilus, one of Chauvet's contemporaries, dismissed her as a minor writer...