Today’s Haitian Book Club selection is Vale of Tears by Paulette Poujol-Oriol, a most gifted novelist. Vale of Tears is the English translation of her novel Le Passage (hats off to translator Dolores A. Schaefer for a job well-done…no clumsy, stilted English, just a smooth translation), and it’s understandable why Ibex Publishers, the publisher for the English edition didn’t title it The Passage, but chose the more descriptive Vale of Tears, for The Passage would have been an understatement, as the life of Coralie Santeuil is everything except a crystal stair. As one begins to read about her origins, and follow her into adolescence, it’s clear that it will take a miracle to salvage her from the horrendous deck of cards, she’s been dealt. Only there’s no miracle.

Born into a wealthy, upper-class mulatto family in Haiti in the year 1901, the red-headed, silver-eyed, and physically fragile Coralie is the victim of Aline, a self-serving, manipulative woman who marries her father. Aline’s cruelty makes Cinderella’s stepmother look like Mary Magdalene post-redemption. The thing about Coralie is that she never recovers from the emotional abuse inflicted by her during those pre-teen and post-adolescent years.

At this point in Haitian society, it was probably rather scandalous for an unmarried girl to get away from her wicked stepmother by going off to her own apartment, so Coralie is somewhat of a helpless victim. When she does leave home, though, at the start of Word War II, she uses her freedom to liberate her body, not her mind. She’s still the same frightened little Coralie that Aline used to lock up in dark closets, and deprive of her loving doll—the mother Aline can never be, who gives her the affection that her absentee, backbone-lacking father Félix has wholly surrendered to his second wife.

Vale of Tears is truly brilliantly written; the narrator goes from one stage to another of Coralie Santeuil’s life, with each chapter a back and forth of sort between her past and her present. It’s been said that dwelling on the past is destructive, but for a woman like Coralie, looking at the past is an absolute must. Flipping over the previous pages of her life, allows her to reflect, to see where she went wrong, even if her decisions and lack of self-will are irreversible.

Poujol-Oriol captures the essence of human nature so well, that the novel might as well have been a contemporary one. This passage from the novel for example describes a scene at a funeral:

“Well, it is not the dead that people give wreaths and sheaves of flowers at funerals. They could not care less. It is to those who stay behind, to the living, especially if they are rich, that the super floral arrangements are given. It is a way of saying to acquaintances, “See we are your friends. Do not forget us at your parties and in your business ventures.”

By the time I had read the last sentence of the book, I felt this immeasurable sadness, this melancholy for Coralie’s life, and this regret over the fact that I would never meet this agile novelist Paulette Poujol Oriol, who died in March 2011. Her novel has been one of the most engrossing, at times difficult to take, works I’ve ever read. Her heroine is so real, you can almost feel her pain when she gets cut, feel her mortification every time she’s humiliated. Coralie is, as Poujol-Oriol puts it, “engrossed in her private hurricane”, and judging from the direction her life took, it must have been a Category 6.

Author Photo: Eddy Aubourg/Le Nouvelliste

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If there is a year that would go down as the year of the greatest achievement in the literary career of Paulette Poujol-Oriol, it would no doubt be 1980, the year she turned 54. That year would bring Poujol-Oriol a great deal of critical acclaim (including the Deschamps Literary Prize) with what some consider to be her most outstanding work: Le creuset: roman.

The novel covers more than a century in the lives of a Haitian family, starting with the matriarch Hermansia Pierre, a woman born under Emperor Faustin Soulouque. Ti Sia, as she is called (Sò Sia, Man Sia afterwards…Sister Sia, Madame Sia), grows up as a homely servant in the household of a relative, and marries at 17 to an older man, a soldier. Procreating is the poor man’s way of acquiring children, and since the first two children that she bears die prematurely, she is deserted by her husband. Just when she thinks everything is lost, Compad a seasonal Cuban merchant steps into her life, and by the time he leaves her never to return, she doesn’t even hold grudges because he left her with Linda, the seed she’s dreamed of at last. Linda marries Merantus Tervil, and that relationship yields Pierre “Roro” Tervil, who practically dominates the rest of the book. With the money left to him in an old mattress by his godfather Boss Calalou, Tervil sets out to make something of himself. During the U.S. Occupation of Haiti in the 1920s, he befriends an American hospital, who’s instrumental in getting him a full scholarship to the United States to become a full-pledged pediatrician. While there, Tervil becomes involved with Lynn, but at his departure he breaks off the relationship with her, with the rationale that she will never adapt to Haitian life and norms. Ironically, while on a steamship returning to Haiti, Tervil meets blonde haired, ice-eyed Micaëlle Deperac Landsfeld, a German-Haitian, returning from Europe. She’s 18, and he’s already in his 30s, and they begin a torrid affair on the ship. All is well until they land in Haiti. When her highbrow, hard-nosed Haitian elite parents uncover the affair, they explode. The reader, of course, notes how a relationship with a fellow compatriot can consist of even more difficulty than that one with a foreigner.

Le Creuset is not a romance novel, though it definitely has its moments, but it’s more like a detailed sketch of life and norms in Haiti. Color issues, social prejudice, education, feminism—are all explored within.

Poujol-Oriol wouldn’t publish another novel until 1996, the riveting story of Coralie Santeuil in Le passage: roman. Where Hermansia Pierre is a take-charge woman, Coralie is so weak, and is so lacking in taking initiative, that she exasperates the reader. Four years prior to telling the story of Coralie, Poujol-Oriol had written a collection of short stories that she entitled La fleur rouge: nouvelles. This book, as with the others, show how much of a genius of the written word that Poujol-Oriol was. In each story, she depicts pieces of Haitian life, sometimes evoking a chuckle, sometimes a shake of the head. There is the story “Lucette”, in which she writes of a socialite in Port-au-Prince who goes to France in search of a husband, accompanied by her mountain-bred playmate. The socialite has some plastic surgery while there to fix her buck teeth, and to decrease her bust size. After a five year campaign, she finally lands the husband, and returns to Haiti with the childhood playmate, who is now in her late teens. The socialite sends her off her childhood friend off to the “trou”, the hole where she came from. The wise reader reads into this, that the girl is sent away—under the pretext that she let some prized birds fly away—when in reality it is because her mistress fears that she will become major temptation for her new husband. The other stories in La fleur rouge: nouvelles follow this same pattern; simple introduction, denouement, and then a final O. Henry-like element of surprise.

Poujol-Oriol was also an educator it turns out, but how glad one is that she found time to write these works, which are a great contribution to Haitian literature. Poujol-Oriol’s genius is recognized by many including Nadève Ménard who in the book Ecrits d’Haïti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne, [Writings of Haiti: Perspective on Haitians Literature] classifies the novelist as one of the most remarkable literary giants of the 20th Century.

Image Credit: Radio Television Caraibes