Aside from the serpent and the tarantula, no animal exudes more fear than the scorpion. It’s the creature whose infamous claws prolongs and—puts a dead stop—to life. The claw is the primary instrument used by the animal to gather food necessary for survival. With it, the scorpion kills, sometimes its very own.
Dr. Myriam J.A. Chancy’s literary outing, the fittingly-titled The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press), is a poetic prose-rich novel, recounting nearly four generations of valiant Haitian women and men from the early years of the U.S. Occupation to post-Duvalier days.
Within the novel’s sanguine and restless pages, one becomes acquainted—and subsequently fully engrossed—in the life of the long-suffering matriarch Carmel, whose determination to make sense of the 75 years she’s lived, is the catalyst for such-like, indisposed self-examination of offspring to come. In Carmel’s world and that of her daughters Jacqueline and Maude, self-denial and hypocritically shutting the eye to the unpleasant is the norm. Reads the text: “The girls like me, lived their lives behind their husbands, denying that anything was wrong when their men did not come home for whole weeks at a time, denying any resemblance between their children and those who they saw playing in the streets in the next town or village. Perhaps they thought they were the lucky ones since they had rings on their fingers and their men presented themselves at their sides in church every Sunday.”
One such child ‘in the next town or village’ is Alphonse, the spawn of the coupling of the middle class Monsieur Leo and a poor peasant. Alphonse’s lowly birth is such that he is the servant in his own father’s house, the invisible child, whose existence will not be swiftly forgiven by a society who’s not so particularly merciful when it comes to trespassing unwritten class laws. Alphonse’s persistent need for vengeance realized through the shutting out his half-brother Delphi leads to a lifetime of emotional haunting and another wrong in the vicious cycle of man-orchestrated retribution.
In The Scorpion’s Claw, one also sorts through the emotional baggage of Josèphe, whose remedy for the trauma suffered through the rape at the hands of a family acquaintance, is total absorption—or rather obsession—with her academic studies. Her cousin Désirée, does not necessarily have a better lot. Through a conscience awakening, she abandons the elite lifestyle to join the lowly masses. But there is no burning bush or miraculous, glorious deliverance after her Moses-like abandoning of Egyptian riches in return for the disfranchised life of the people.
Chancy, a past nominee of Canada’s prestigious Commonwealth Literary Prize and whose more accustomed to analyzing other writers’ works (e.g. 1997’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women in Exile) than crafting her own—has written quite a novel. With its contemplative text, The Scorpion’s Claw attempts to pull the veil shielding the ugly and spiteful past and open the passage way to redress newly open scabs. It succeeds considerably in tackling both areas.
Have you read this selection of the Haitian Book Club? If not, be sure to let us know your thoughts after you’ve read it.
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