Karen Lindo (Bowdoin College)
The re-publication of Marie Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère, et Folie in 2003 coincides with a significant corpus of theoretical tools that have exposed how much the binary private-public divide has created an artificial separation of the personal from the political to sustain a hyper-masculine political agenda This binary has nevertheless been applied to critical interpretations of Chauvet’s work, in particular this novel, which focuses on the political atrocities committed during the Duvalier regime to illuminate its consequences on the political landscape of Haiti today. To advance a reading which reveals how the private space operates in tandem with the political in Colère, this paper examines the place of silence and the body as they play themselves out between the respective couplings of male and female characters, Louis Normil and his wife Laura (private sphere), as well as their daughter Rose and the political oppressor of the Tontons Macoutes (political sphere). Focusing on silence and somatic language give way to gender-specific interpretations of shame, desire and martyrdom, which become powerful markers of the female presence in Colère. This body-silence paradigm conflates the conjugal bed with the political arena and brings within striking proximity the otherwise alienated desires of mother and daughter that communicate corporeally. The mother-daughter dyad further undoes the binary of speech versus silence thus shifting the optic of the trilogy from the outside inward, from the surface to far less visible interior spaces where the female experience is privileged. Whereas the phallus must perform vertically to be seen, Chauvet shows how the less visible female sexual organ effects a quiet mutation horizontally that forces the gaze toward those bodies that bemoan what it is to be alive, a harboring of monstrous desires.Finally Colère is considered alongside fellow compatriot Edwidge Danticat’s Children of the Sea (1993) where alienated desires are explored within the Haitian Diaspora.
