Toni Morrison : A mercy (Un don)

To say I'm a fan of this author, this is an understatement. Also when I happen to stop by chance at Fnac (a book superstore in France), when I saw the last issue of Toni Morrison, I violently pulled a copy of it from the shelves and urgently ranked it at the top of my stack of books to read. Life is so made of constant injustices that we perpetrate with relish. My apologies anyway to all these good whose reading I have pushed back to the Greek calendar.

Copyright © 2008 Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

Naturally, starting this book I wondered if it would give me the same satisfaction as my previous readings of Toni Morrison. Immediately I found a few trademarks of the American author; Polyphony for example. The need to bring a fresh perspective on an event and thus to express oneself through several voices. That of Florens, a young black slave taken from (or rather sold) by her mother through a deal, that Jakob Vaark, a Dutch settler who emigrated to America, that of Lina, a servant with American Indian ancestry, that of Rebekka the wife of Jakob, a young woman virtually sold to the latter, that of Sorrow, a servant in the Vaark household, slightly schizophrenic, or that of Scully and Willard, whom are White and slaves.

What is the story about? We are in 1690. The English colonies in America are still a wilderness where smallpox decimates indigenous populations, where waves of immigrants arrive, fleeing intolerance they experienced in Europe to only do the same but worst in America. A time when the dregs of European society have a choice between incarceration on the old continent and live a form of slavery in North America. A time when rigorous laws of management of slavery are gradually introduced to reduce the uprisings. A wild land to tame, where everything is possible. The American dream. Finally, it depends to whom.

The action takes place around and with the Vaarks. Under an agreement with a debt collector farmer, Florens a little girl 5/6 years old is sold to Jakob Vaark without his full agreement of this transaction. It is the plea of ​​the mother of the little girl which leads him to decide to accept the deal. A dozen of years later, after Vaark developed his farm and almost completed the construction of his big house, he is struck by smallpox, without enjoying his dream. The disappearance of Jakob Vaark, who left no offspring, will upset the fragile balance and the family atmosphere that united the Vaarks and their servants.

The end is very interesting. I have here a linear presentation. But the construction of Morrison is much more elaborate than that. Between the monologues of some characters and the description of the actions of others, the writing is often introspective and the look back to the past seems to be a need to explain the violence of an act, the change in attitude of a character. What interests Morrison is the mechanism that binds the different characters of her novel, the secret expectations of everyone, complex silence. We perceive that the way immigrants arrived determines their actions. The casual reader will be surprised to find the slavery of Whites in this roughing of the United States, religious intolerance of the new settlers, and he will feel the barbarity of American soil.

Love is at the heart of this novel. The love of Florens. A violent, wild, passionate love for a blacksmith, black and free. A love born of misunderstanding and non resolution of the equation so dear to Toni Morrison: namely the one that can produce a maternal love in the most extreme situations.

I have long felt that I was reading a good novel, but when reviwing the last 30 pages, this text takes on another dimension. This is my opinion. The best novel by Toni Morrison since Beloved.

Let Florens talk about her passion:

“My hunger is acute, but my happiness is even greater. I cannot eat much. We talk about many different things and I'm not saying what I think. That I'll stay forever. Never, never without you. Here I'm not the one that is being removed. Nobody steals my warmth and my shoes because I am small. Nobody cares of my posterior. Nobody bleats like a sheep because I fall from fear or fatigue. Nobody screams by seeing me. Nobody studies my body looking for weird things. With you my body is fun and safe and it has a place. I will never support that you would not have me with you.”

Page 163 Edition Christian Bourgois

Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Gary Victor : Cursed Education (Maudite éducation)

Not long ago, I commented on the novel Soro by Gary Victor published by Mémoires d'encrier (Memoirs of ink). Each reading of this Haitian author shoves, surprises, offers a dive ever more confusing in the heart of this country in the Caribbean where Gary Victor resides.

Maudite Education (Cursed Education) is no exception to this Haitian anchor, about this novelist. But of all the books I've read from Gary Victor, it is the one where the author seems to undress himself more. The central character is Carl Vausier. He is a teenager when the novel begins. The eldest of three siblings, his father is an intellectual under a totalitarian regime identical to that of Dr. Duvalier. Carl Vausier tells the story of his adolescence, that of an ordinary young man with inferiority complexes, extremely shy and belonging to the Haitian bourgeoisie (middle class), but whose inability to communicate with girls of his age, wonders around the wastelands of Port-au Prince lowlands to be initiated to sexuality from whores sad with melancholy, whom for some, tell him their stories. Paradoxically, these nocturnal excursions are an opportunity for this young man to face both the misery of the abandoned people of Nan Palmis and other slums in Haiti, to the fantastic Haitian who fascinates him at first before he sharpens his rationalism and its singles out his view of things over time in a country where imagination is always a step ahead of reality from the narrator, madness over lucidity.

In parallel to his nocturnal trips, the young Carl maintains in the context of a game, a correspondence with Coeur qui Saigne (Bleeding Heart), a young girl traumatized by the suicide of her sister. In this correspondence, where the young goofy in real life creates a tailored charismatic persona of himself, is born on the basis of a fiasco, a complex relationship made of many misunderstandings, unspoken feelings, and fantasies maintained or not.

Carl Vausier carries at the same time a particular view, touching on the paternal figure, who died too early in a hospital without emergency service, a hospital yet located 333 meters from the Palace of the Presidency. This delirious image marked by helplessness in the direction of a State office totally indifferent to the fate of citizens splashes Carl’s spirit of. It is also all missed appointments between a father and a son, silences, forced initiation to literature, the mother, apparently a secondary character whose strength is discreetly drawn through the chapters, the one who reads all chapters of
the novels of her sons.

Carl Vausier grows, haunted by the character of Coeur qui Saigne who disappeared after the fiasco of their first encounter in the real world.

 “She must have had for me now only pity and perhaps even contempt. In this letter, I developed an excuse for my poor performance. The reason for my sudden collapse was my exposure to the aura of a person as exceptional. I had lost my ability like a prisoner who finds himself suddenly in the daylight after having been immersed for years in the darkness of his cell. My infancy, my stuttering were the result of the derailment of my thoughts, taken as I was in the attraction of her beauty. I hit the sparkling iceberg of femininity and I was lost body and soul.”

Maudite Education, Ed. Philippe Rey, page 133

Selected paragraph for the road:

Chaque fois que je me retrouve dans une impasse de ma vie, chaque fois que cette terre risque de m'engloutir dans ses mythes et ses impostures, je vais mesurer la distance entre les bâtiments  de cet hôpital et le Palais national. Cela me ramène à la mémoire les circonstances de la mort de mon père. Cela ravive mon ressentiment pour ce pays. Pas pour ce pays qui m'a vu naître. Cette terre, elle n'y est pour rien. On l'a abreuvée de sang. Mais pour cette société de menteurs et de flibustiers qui se drapent depuis deux siècles dans des radotages stériles sur la fondation d'une nation, d'un Etat qui a condamné dès le départ des centaines de milliers d'être humains aux conditions de vies les plus abjectes. 

Je n'ai aucune fierté d'être Haïtien. Mais je voudrais bien me battre pour l'être, pour que mes enfants le soient aussi

Whenever I find myself in a dead end of my life, whenever this earth could swallow me in its myths and falsehoods, I will measure the distance between the buildings of this hospital and the National Palace. This brings me back to memory the circumstances of the death of my father. It revives my resentment for this country. Not for this country that I was born. This land, she has nothing to do. They watered her with blood. But for this society of liars and pirates that drape over two centuries in sterile ramblings on the foundation of a nation, of a state that has doomed from the start hundreds of thousands of human beings to the conditions of the lives most abject.

I have no pride in being Haitian. But I would like to fight to be, so that my children also become.”

Maudite éducation, Ed. Philippe Rey, page 209

Happy reading!

Gary Victor,  Maudite education