Myriam J. A. Chancy

"Sublime. A striking and formidable novel by one of our most brilliant writers and storytellers." --Edwidge Danticat The earth had buckled and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the earth's children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination.

What Storm, What Thunder

Village Weavers

A Novel

Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced--this has been the position of Haitian women within their own society, as well as how they have been seen by foreign occupiers. Romanticized symbols of nationhood, they have served, however unwillingly, as a politicized site of contestation between opposing forces. In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction--as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women's social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation's ambivalent political climate. Through daring and sensitive readings, simultaneously historical, fictional and autobiographical, Chancy explores this literature, seeking to uncover answers to the current crisis facing these women today, both within their country and in exile.The writers surveyed include Anne-christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Rey Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and Edwidge Danticat, whose work has recently achieved such high acclaim.

Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women

Framing Silence

As they rework traditional literary forms, artists such as Joan Riley, Beryl Gilroy, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera, Audre Lorde, Rosa Guy, Michelle Cliff, and Marie Chauvet give voice to Afro-Caribbean women's alienation and longing to return home. Whether the return home is realized geographically or metaphorically, the poems, fiction, and film considered in this book speak boldly of self-definition and transformation.

Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile

Searching for Safe Spaces

Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth’s murder; Rose, Catherine’s mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all. Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.

The Loneliness of Angels

Josephe, safe in Canada, watches the television images of Haiti's descent into chaos following the collapse of the Baby Doc regime. She sees an angry mob stone to death a tonton macoute, whom she recognises as the youth who molested her as a child. In her isolation, despair and guilt she begins to recreate the stories of those who were once close to her. There is her grandmother, who dies terrified over her family's future; her cousin Alphonse who flees to the USA where he hopes to escape the dark shadow of his father and a life of domestic servitude; Alphonse's half-brother, Delphi, who joins the rebels and pays the heaviest price; Josephe's best friend, Desiree, who abandons her comfortable middle-class life to join the underground and finds there both a community and the mysteries of voudun, with the power to breathe new life into her veins. Behind them all is Delphi's mother, Mami Celeste, the mambo who has lived and died four lifetimes and whose tongue can speak the whole history of Haiti. In giving voice to these individuals and interweaving the story of her own childhood connexions with them, Josephe begins to close the distance between present and past, Canada and Haiti and the painful divisions within herself.

Myriam J. A. Chancy

About

Books

Join the club