DANCE ON THE VOLCANO, a Haïtian Revolution epic of deep relatability

DANCE ON THE VOLCANO
MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET (tr. Kaiama L Glover)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Dance on the Volcano tells the story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off limits to people of color.

Closely examining a society sagging under the white supremacy of the French colonist rulers, Dance on the Volcano is one of only novels to closely depict the seeds and fruition of the Haitian Revolution, tracking an elaborate hierarchy of skin color and class through the experiences of two young women. It is a story about hatred and fear, love and loss, and the complex tensions between colonizer and colonized, masterfully translated by Kaiama L. Glover.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A magisterial telling of the loud echoes of Revolution in the world of the 1790s. Saint-Domingue, as Haïti was called in colonial times, was a society primed to explode. With racial and political tensions reaching peaks guaranteed to end violently, we meet mixed-race Minette. Her singing talent is a wonder. It leads to the bending of many immutable rules. This was only possible during the ferment of the post-1789 world, but Minette really doesn't care...yet...as long as she can sing.

Evoking the colonial reality of Saint-Domingue in careful vignettes elaborated on enough to universalize the suffering they show, Author Vieux-Chauvet goes a bit overboard on description. What makes that work for me-the-reader in this story is the immersion it afforded me in a world I knew not at all. It was a revelation to me that the colonial forces wanted more huane treatment of Blacks, free or enslaved, than the on-the-ground colonist masters. It makes geopolitical sense, when one really looks at it; the government that promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 would not have thought to exclude Blacks until the colonial profiteers got hold of the reins again. It is this story that Author Vieux-Chauvet spends close-on 500pp telling through Minette's doomed love story.

As is ever the case, a woman must suffer for falling in love...always with the wrong man, usually with an abusive one, frequently enough a man who belittles her. Jean-Baptiste Lapointe, a free slave-holding Black man, rejects Minette with a lie about being disabled when she asks him to dance with her. I don't know about you but if someone did such a thing to me I'd avoid 'em forever after. Which is, I suppose, why no one will ever write a novel about me....

Minette is not a real person. She is a composite of free mulatto women Author Vieux-Chauvet encountered in her extensive research into the subject of Haïti's past as Saint-Domingue. Minette felt pretty real to me...though my goddesses does she cry a lot. If Kleenex had been in business then, Minette would've filled several landfills with tear-soaked wads of it. She's got plenty of excellent reasons, though. Her own precarious, rule-breaking career as a singer who entertains the white-dominated elite is stressful, her privileged access bringing her into their awful attitudes towards their slaves (who share half Minette's ancestry) means she sees firsthand the horrors of the enslaved's lives. It does not help that Lapointe, though Black, treats his slaves as vilely as the white colonizers do. The Parisians who now politically control Haïti/Saint-Domingue want to curb the brutality in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, those most Revolutionary of concepts (though that formulation, the French national motto, is an artifact of the late nineteenth century), leading to internal conflict in Minette's world. She develops as a human being and a political actor in her world over the course of the story. It is good to see this development in her, and in the world; but as we all know it's going to come to a tragic end.

Even in novels there comes Reality's ugly face.

A book written in 1957 and first translated into English in 2017, and since then largely ignored, and here's me guiltily writing up my reading notes for it almost exactly ten years after my own read of the DRC. I was not fired up by the story of a country given hope, then betrayed, in 2017. It's happening to me now. Faithful to the human adage "what's in it for me?" here I am recommending to all y'all you take off the blinders and read about the injustices the untrammelled ruling class always, always perpetrates. Learn how "They" perpetuate systems of exploitation and destruction solely for "Their" benefit. Don't look away. It's too costly to do.