Almanac of Story Tellers: Marie Vieux-Chauvet

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Sept. 16th

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    It is the 259th day of the year, leaving 106 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1916, the Haitian author, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, was born in Port-au-Prince.

    She told her stories about class, gender, and color while under almost constant surveillance by the autocratic ruler of Haiti. But she persisted, hosting meetings of writers in her home.

    She has been called one of the greatest of Haitian writers, put in a "multi-generational triad" with Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, and dubbed the "cornerstone of Haitian literature."

    Her first novel, Fille d'Haiti, (in English, Daughters of Haiti) was published in 1954 and received a literary prize from the Alliance Française. Another early and well received novel was Fonds des Nègres, which tells of a city women who discovers a taste for traditional culture when lost in a small town (from which the novel took its title.)

    But her most acclaimed book -- and ultimately, one that was difficult to find for some 40 years -- was a trilogy of novellas titled Amour, colère et folie (Love, Anger, Madness). The three stories tell how different classes of people react to a claustrophobic nature within their houses and oppression from without. 

    It was widely seen as an attack on François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who became president of Haiti in 1957, and soon installed himself as president for life, complete with a death squad called the Tonton Macoute that attacked and killed his opponents..

    After being published in France in 1968, Amour, colère et Folie was banned in Haiti. Fearing for her life, Chauvet asked the publisher to withdraw the book, and she fled to the United States, where she settled in New York. Her husband, Pierre Chauvet, returned to Haiti where he bought up as many copies of the book he could find. Most were destroyed. Some copies of the original edition were surreptitiously sold. 

    It wasn't until 2005 when the book was published again in France that it became more widely available.

    Chauvet died in New York in 1973.