Sometimes a novel can make a powerful romantic statement, which may make it (in part) read like work from the romantic period, though it may not belong in the category of “romance novel.” (The terms romantic and romance as they apply to literature are of course related, but not the same.) Haitian-Canadian writer Myriam Chancy’s most recent novel, The Loneliness of Angels (2010), is a novel of romantic and romance genre parts. It can be read as having a romantic feel if we understand romantic in a broad sense as an individual quest for knowledge, for deeper meaning to one’s life, and the revelation of a certain optimism about human beings despite the dire circumstances in which they may exist. The Loneliness of Angels also has elements of a modern / contemporary romance novel: there is a continuous love story between a pair of characters and there is a sex. And if I were to give the novel a complete sweep of literary categories into which it can fit, I’d add that since its major characters (and self-discoverers) are mostly women, we can call it feminist, or at least woman-centered...
The novel consists of the stories of five major characters (one male, and four female), and it spans four generations of Haitians and their fore-parents who came from places outside of Haiti. It has four geographical settings: Haiti, Ireland, Canada, and Paris.
(Excerpt from The Loneliness of Angels: setting: Dublin 1848:)
It wasn’t as if Elsie didn’t care for love, or hope for it. It wasn’t as if she had never loved or allowed herself to be loved. It was simply that once she’d understood the nature of her Work, she found that there were few others who could understand the way her mind turned, the deep yearnings of her heart for something more than a home and a hearth with children who vaguely resembled herself, and a man with whom to live out her life.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tumbled in and out of a bed or two -- and even on a haystack that matched the colour of their hair exactly -- a warm, chestnut gold. That one had been with a boy who made her think of milk fresh from the cow’s tit. The hollows of his palms seemed small for his long tapered fingers but they were just the right size to hold her small nubs of breasts. He had exclaimed at their softness when she’d first allowed him a touch, talked about their orange brown areolas, the freckles drawing a constellation between her small mounds. He’d taken each nipple into his mouth and sucked gently, and she’d wondered if the sensations would be the same with a newborn draining her of milk. He’d been gentle with her. Mesmerized. He’d hardly had a stitch of stubble on his chin and she hardly noticed when he entered her as softly as he suckled. Her thoughts were so focused on the pulsing below her navel she’d never experienced before that she hardly took note of the pain, there, between her legs, when he thrust. After all the Catholic school warnings, she’d never imagined a boy could be so harmless.
He was nothing like the others, so gentle, so poetic, like a girl with an extra appendage. It wasn’t long before they were lost in each other, no longer able to tell each other’s limbs apart. They both had legs covered with a blond down. The hay poked and itched but it seemed more than worth the heat and the pulsing and the sensations across her chest like the beating of butterfly wings when he cupped his small palms over her breasts as if they were some exotic fruit from a distant land.
David. It was with him that she had begun to talk of leaving for somewhere else, anywhere at all. But he had turned out to be just like the others, like her father, wanting her to stay put, to tend someone else’s children in a rich household as if they were hothouse flowers, to be happy with being a chambermaid in the heat of a suffocating attic, in any city far away from home. But she’d only got as far as Dublin.
David had dreamed of one day renting a farm, of making her his wife, but that was all. He had no instinct for gazing at the immensity of the stars above them, or thinking that in distant lands there were people so unlike themselves it would be worth the journey to discover them.
In the above excerpt, Elsie, an Irish woman, is reflecting on love, sex, and her desires for a fulfilling live that will entail moving beyond the choices available to her in Ireland in 1848. Elsie feels confined by poverty, but she is unrestrained sexually. In addition to the gentle sex she has with David, she has “hungry, desperate” sex with her English employer, which involves slapping flesh and slurping body fluids, causes them to grunt and groan, and results in a pregnancy. Add seer to Esie’s portrayal, and what we get in her is a woman who embodies a certain romantic ideal: she is earthly and earthy, spiritual, ambitious, and full of desire for adventure. In her late 20s, pregnant and unmarried, Elsie leaves Ireland for Haiti. She is driven in part by her desire to be more than a chambermaid, a mother, and a wife, and in part by what she sees as her “calling.” She envisions Romulus, a young, celebrated Haitian musician who is generations away from being born when she leaves for Haiti, as a “chosen one,” and she is charged to guide him through his weaknesses (he will become addicted to drugs and lose everything) to his true destiny. It is unclear what Romulus’s true destiny as the chosen one might be, and one can’t help but think that Elsie has been misguided in believing he is the chosen one. But Romulus does eventually come to a profound sense of understanding about his life when he visits Ireland after he hits his lowest point as a drug addict and a delinquent father.
Elsie and Romulus’s connection is an example of the sometimes time-and-place-defying connections between characters that inhabit Chancy’s novel, and that gives her work a romantic, whimsical, speculative quality, but that quality is rather momentary and fleeting. The Loneliness of Angels is overwhelmingly heavy in tone and feel and two of its female Haitian characters, Ruth and Rose, are mostly burdened by the past, and by the spiritual “other-worldly” and earthly duties they are made to fulfill. Their lives, spent in the Duvalier regimes and in times as recent as 2004 in Haiti, are full of loss, trauma, and mourning, and unlike Elsie’s, sexually restrained. A third female Haitian character, Catherine, the youngest of the four, is also burdened by memories of her past, which affect her current life, but her journey through the novel is full of hope for reconciliation. Nevertheless, none of the three are given moments like Elsie’s with David and her son’s father where they get to express and enjoy themselves sexually. Like Elsie, they are conscious of a sense of destiny, but theirs for the most part isn’t made up of the matter of whim and fancy and earthy adventure as hers is.
Ruth’s strong sense of destiny comes partially gifted to her as a member of Haiti’s privileged class, and in part as her gift as a seer. When we first meet her, she is reflective and resigned to her impending fate: she will be murdered and there will be a family reunion of sorts. As a woman who has spent her entire life in Haiti, she reflects on having been “lucky to live an independent life in a land in which women are forced to stand on their own two feet all too early and yet not given the reins of their own destinies.” Her independence seems to have also been strengthened by the fact that she never married, and that no man ever “held court” in her house. Ruth is a revered, undefinable woman in her community. They call her mambo though she had not been initiated in a vodou cult and did not, we are told, truly know the secrets of that parallel world. They assume she must be of another world, not theirs, because she does not live a life they could easily identify within the culture, but they consider her important. She is killed by a new order in Haiti--those who presumably don’t share in the knowledge of her importance, and those who see more value in her financial wealth than her presence in the community.
Though Ruth has no children of her own, she becomes a mother figure to a pair of children who are placed in her care, and who have been essentially abandoned by their parents. One of those children is her niece Catherine (also Elsie’s great-great-granddaughter) whose story is the only one told in first-person. Catherine, when we meet her, is a musician living in Paris with her Jewish-American boyfriend. Their relationship is in crisis; he suspects she has been unfaithful to him, and she is at a psychological crossroads about her career and their relationship. When she journeys back to Haiti for her aunt’s funeral, she is made to confront long-shelved issues about motherlessness, abandonment, and grief. On the flight back, she remembers how she had felt when she was first sent to live there by her father after her mother had died:
At eleven, I greeted my native land with rage. It answered me with despair. It threw back on me my sorrow, heaped with disdain and blame. In my mourning, I replied with wide-eyed indifference. I heaped upon her abuse and she responded with calm generosity. I tried to flee from her and she offered me her shadows in which to rest.
Catherine’s memory of her move to Haiti as a child (which she reflects on as an adult) can be read simultaneously as her assessment of her relationship with her aunt, whose generosity she had at first rejected, but then later came to value. It’s possible also to read the sentiments of despair and flight in Catherine’s recollection as a recall of Catherine’s mother’s (Rose) own battle with her gifts of seer ability and with the ghosts of the Duvalier regime, whose stories of mutilation and incarceration cause her to marry and flee Haiti for Canada. Rose eventually realizes she can’t run away from those ghosts and she succumbs to the burden of that knowledge. Upon her return to Haiti, Catherine has to contend with her own seer abilities, her own ghosts. Once in Haiti, she is finally able to release her pent feelings by confronting her father about his abandonment of her. She then has a series of visions and a reunion with a long-lost family member, which lead to empowering discoveries about her past and her abilities as a seer. Her return to Haiti is essentially a return to accept her cultural and familial inheritances.
As the only “I” voice in the novel, Catherine, who is in her 40s and childless, takes on a significance that can be gender and generation related. In the sense that she is of gender and generational significance, Catherine’s actions speak loudest when she accepts that she is like the women in her family, but a revised one (so to speak): one who (unlike Ruth and Rose and like her great-great-grandmother Elsie) willingly accepts her seer abilities; one who, unlike all three of her female predecessors, accepts her vulnerabilities as a woman involved in a relationship with a man she loves and who loves her. On her way back to Paris, Catherine is expectant, but not with child, with a renewed sense of self and adventure. She sums up her experiences:
This is all I know:
There are no answers.
Only: is and is.
They are foreseeably words of acceptance--acceptance of the uncertainties in carrying the burden of ghosts, as well as acceptance of the uncertainties of her earthly desires. Written the way it is (poetic and dramatic), one gets a graphic depiction of the steps she has made at the end of one journey as well as a sense that that journey will continue, and that is essentially the substance of The Loneliness of Angels' feminist, romantic statement. The novel's romantic bent may be momentary and fleeting, but each of those moments are powerful enough to suggest lightness and hope where none of those sentiments might seem possible.
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The Loneliness of Angels, by Myriam Chancy (Peepal Tree Press Ltd 2010, 372 pp).
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