Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘translation’ category

Marie Vieux-Chauvet

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I started studying Haitian and Caribbean literature as a graduate student looking at diaspora fiction. This was one of the ways I snuck in as much literature in French while getting a degree based on English. So my ends were selfish but along the way I discovered some truly amazing work, in particular, a Haitian author who quickly became one of my favorites. 

Marie Vieux-Chauvet is one of those sadly overlooked writers whose work deserves to be taught, studied, translated, published and republished again. Her literature is politically and socially engaged and she addresses the important issues of oppression, racism, and sexism – all through her particular Haitian lens. She wrote five novels and two plays. Most of which are quite difficult to find outside of a library. None of them are currently available in English. 

The story of her most well-known novel, Amour, Colère et Folie is fascinating. Vieux-Chauvet wrote the book in 1968, and although the novel is set in a slightly earlier period of Haitian history (ca. 1939) it was a direct criticism of the Duvalier government. Vieux-Chauvet actually sent the manuscript to Simone de Beauvoir who helped get it published by Gallimard in France. Sadly, worried that her family in Haiti might be affected if the book gained too much success, she actually bought the remaining stock of the book and destroyed them. Luckily, a small publisher in France re-issued this novel along with one other Vieux-Chauvet in 2005.  

Amour, Colère et Folie (Love, Anger and Madness) is an incredible novel. Actually a series of three thematically connected novellas, the book examines Haiti’s special form of segregation “shadism” and the devastation it wrought on that country’s society. The first section – Love, is the story of Claire (ironically named, as she is the darkest of her two sisters) and her internal rebellion and transformation. It’s a dark and powerful story. Beautifully written. 

I’m hard put to decide which of Vieux-Chauvet’s novels I prefer. It’s a toss up between Amour, Colère et Folie and her first novel Fille d’Haiti, which follows the coming-of-age of a Port-au-Prince prostitute’s daughter named Lotus. This novel also explores Haiti’s powerful religious traditions and paints a fascinating portrait of a young woman struggling to understand who she is when faced with a series of contradictory social mirrors. 

I just recently found out that The Modern Library is publishing a translation of Amour, Colère et Folie scheduled for 2009 by a translator duo of Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur. I’m ecstatic. I’ll be one of the first people to buy it. I’d been nearly convinced this would never happen.

And for those of you who do read in French, I would recommend her other novels if you can find them: 

  • Fille d’Haïti. Paris: Fasquelle, 1954.
  • La Danse sur le volcan. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose / Emina Soleil, 2004
  • Fonds des Nègres. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1960
  • Amour, colère et folie. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose / Emina Soleil, 2005.
  • Les Rapaces. Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1986.  

Tran thi Thuong-Thuong – Letters to a Teacher

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A friend of mind has just published a lovely little book called Letters to a Teacher: Six years in the Vietminh War Zone 4 and I want to write about it in the hopes of generating some interest in her project. The book is a translation of a series of letters written by Tran thi Thuong-Thuong, my friend’s mother, to her former school teacher. The letters were written in 1995 when Tran was finally living in the United States and were sent to her teacher who had also relocated to America and who was at that point bed-ridden, quite elderly and longing to remember the country she had left behind.  

Tran has an incredible story to tell about a short period of her life (1946 to 1952) when she was living and teaching in the Communist-controlled area of North Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The book contains five richly detailed letters just bursting with stories about the necessity of teaching every lesson with a Marxist-Leninist slant, about trying to help students learn while all around them their world grew more and more violent, about having two young children in such a frightening and unstable situation.   

Eventually, Tran and her husband decide they will escape to the South in the hopes of securing a better future for their children and reuniting with Tran’s family (whom she had not seen or heard from in years because of the fighting). They escape separately, Tran going first with her two children – she tells of hiding her three-year-old daughter under a load of bananas to avoid detection and then watching as the bananas get covered in water by soldiers, preparing bamboo arm sheaths to ward off attacks by orangutans in the jungle, and watching her five-year-old son walk hot railroad tracks for miles and miles and never once complaining at the blisters and welts that soon appeared on his feet. 

Quite an incredible memoir. Tran remembers what she calls the death of her youth with honest precision and painstakingly explains what went on for ordinary citizens at a time of such political and social turmoil. Many of the stories are frightening – about torture, brainwashing and poverty, while others describe endless indoctrination meetings and the dwindling trust between former neighbors and friends along with the frustrating necessity of negotiating a complex and often terrifying government system. 

For anyone looking to learn about this period of Vietnamese history, Letters to a Teacher provides an excellent entry. And in a more general way, it is quite simply a moving story of one woman trying to be a teacher and a mother under some extraordinary circumstances.

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