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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Fast-paced literary novel worth the price for compelling character

Reviewed by: Dana Medoro

Posted: 07/3/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Myriam Chancy

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The Loneliness of Angels

By Myriam Chancy

Peepal Tree Press, 351 pages, $26

The plot of this fast-paced literary novel centres on a woman hacked to death by machete in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2004.

She knows it's coming because she knows Haiti, "never mind that her mother's people had been treated like cattle, branded and sold."

Throughout its 200-year history, Haiti has endured international interference, brutal dictatorships, and over 30 governmental coups, all forms of violence bound up with the legacy of colonial aggression and Euro-American white supremacy.

It is no wonder that the machetes used by the slaves to hack sugar cane or to rise in rebellion are, by their descendants, still kept close at hand.

This volatility frames Myriam Chancy's third work of fiction, a lengthy novel that opens with an excerpt from La Dessalinienne, the Haitian national anthem -- "Let us be masters of our soil. United let us march" -- and that closes with a grief-stricken question, "What humility before the scarred world can the gods admit, to allow the angels, at last, in their loneliness, to sing?"

Anthems, songs to angels, a character's obsession with Chopin -- music provides spaces of reprieve within the painful memories captured by this novel.

A Haitian-born former Winnipegger, Chancy is currently a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has written three academic books on the Caribbean, and her scholarly touch shows here, but she is never heavy-handed.

Instead, details about the island come in and out of focus, just like the photographs under plastic in her character Ruth's living room. Scattered through poignant allusions, Haiti's painful history emerges when Chancy briefly mentions the Statue of the Unknown Slave in the city centre, makes a seemingly off-hand reference to the 20th-century "elections" (in sarcastic quotation marks), or reflects upon the powder used in voodoo rituals.

Chancy takes it for granted that we know certain things about Haiti. She refuses to spell out the brutality of the Duvalier regimes or the courage of the resistance movements, banking on our sense of background or pushing us to learn more. The novel was written, of course, prior to the recent earthquake.

Her elusive style seems, in fact, to be generated by a theory that it's all too horrific to cover in depth or that the aftershocks experienced by her 21st-century characters matter in their own right.

But this is also a weakness of the novel because we never come to know the motives of her characters in any real depth, either. We never learn the nature of Ruth's resistance to the government nor how she's found out, even though her political work is central to the plot and the most interesting part of it.

She's a fascinating figure and she kicks off the novel in a gripping first sentence -- "Ruth smoothes the plastic covering her memory table as if she is trying to undo wrinkles in time" -- but she gets less space than the far less interesting character Catherine.

The character Rose is even more compelling than Ruth, a mysterious woman who is either broken and driven to drink by the viciousness of the world around her or who is taken over by Haitian ghosts. The chapter devoted to her is worth the price of the book.

The novel closes with a chapter on Elsie, a woman from Ireland who forges a subtle parallel between Haitian and Irish colonization. If a bit awkward, this move on Chancy's part ultimately highlights her vision of Haiti as not only part of an island in the Caribbean but also a country profoundly interconnected with the rest of the world.

Dana Medoro teaches American and Caribbean literature at the University of Manitoba.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 3, 2010 H8

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