I must first say that I know little of magical realism,
which I believe is the genre this book most clearly fits into. Women become
pools, men cathedrals (well, each of those happens only once, but there is lots
else besides). This doesn't happen on every page and when it does it is
generally effective. But I can't measure its effectiveness against, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude and its
ilk, which I haven't read.
I am spending so many keystrokes on the style because this
book is much held by style, so much so that the content and indeed the story
are sometimes obscured by it. Recall that this is written in translation—as far
as I can tell, a very literate and often beautiful translation, by Bridget
Jones.
The sense I have is that some of, perhaps much of the gist
of the novel is, like the Kreyol language itself, not in the words so much as
what images and stories they remind the reader of, and in this the English
translation can't much help us. I have had times in the past when a person would
speak to me in Kreyol and I understood every word that was said and had no idea
of the meaning. English, at its most colourful, can do the same. All of this is
to explain that although I read with care, there were often times when I had
only the foggiest idea what was going on, and I don't know how much of this was
the language and how much was due to the author's tendency to switch points of
view without necessarily saying who we were switching into, and drifting back
and forth between minor characters over much of the book—occasionally lending
confusion as to whether a character was the same as another or a different one
entirely.
This may have been deliberate. We do learn names, and there
is one character in particular, strangely called John, rather than Jean, who is
more or less the main POV character. But we miss him for ages at a time and we
never really do get into his skin. Much, much is said of the collective
experience of the poor, and how they are herded back and forth and brutalized
by the elements and the soldier class. So it may be that Clitandre's vagueness
in POV change and his distance from the heart of his characters is because they
are all, to him, metaphors, folk images, elements of Vodou, reminders of
history, reminders of suffering and the only way to elude it—maybe. A wiser (or
more foolish) writer than myself might spend a lot of time trying to understand
the position of women within the narrative, and children, and men, each
separately, and a thousand other ingredients that combine in this ever-moving,
elemental piece.
One last word on words. Despite her gorgeous rendering of Clitandre’s most brutal and sublime reveries, I can't thank Jones for choosing “a
lively West Indian English” as the jargon for the people. I have spoken in
English with many Haitians and they do not speak that way. It felt weirdly
superimposed and hard to get used to—no less beautiful but foreign. A minor
point.
So what of the story? Read it? Don't read it?
Read it. Let it wash over you just as it is, without struggling
in the ways I have struggled to make it fit into the confines of a regular
novel. Don't expect all the plot lines, or metaphors, more accurately, to be
tied up. Don't expect to know how it ends. (Remember that Duvalier was still in
power when this novel broke. Clitandre's father, by the way, was one of the
many disappeared.)
Let it be a long, long poem, expressing the endless ebb and
flow of suffering and beauty and brutality and hope. It is coarse, it is
sometimes disgusting, it is transporting, it is tragic, it refuses to be any of
the above.
Image: Credit is not given. A Haitian mural. No idea where, but Jacmel on the bus does give us a hint!
