The Scorpion's Claw

Written by Irene D'Souza, executive director of the Joshua Project in Winnipeg for Winnipeg Free Press on

Winnipeg-Based Myriam Chancy's fiction seeks to deliver life in Haiti from brief sound bytes to a luminous and realistic representation. She releases the people and landscapes within plausible walls of mythical and historical significance. Her fiction recreates the charmed society life that existed during the Duvalier regime while simultaneously documenting the confusion, helplessness and horror summoned by the downfall and aftermath of the dictatorship. 

She captures her readers and never loses their attention. Chancy may well become a grand dame of Haitian literature imbued with a distinct Prairie sensibility. 

As in her previous novel, Spirit of Haiti, she's looking again, surprisingly acutely, at familiar territory. Chancy has written a calm book, filled with chaos and confusion. Her metaphorical imagination, combined with the precision with which she describes the isolation, guilt and despair of those who have escaped, is particularly poignant. Her new novel is sentimental Haitian magic realism. 

The Scorpion's Claw tells the story of a modestly grand Haitian family, distinctly cosmopolitan, seeking to retain its way of life. 

Chancy is adept at deciphering the complexities of Haitian family life. The intricate relationships -- illegitimate sons working as indentured servants in their fathers' home, half siblings who are unaware of their relations, aunts and cousins -- are identified and each given their entrances and exits. 
Although the story is filled with political strife and tension, the book is essentially a homage to a grandmother. Chancy explores the relationship of the grandmother to her grandchildren with great affection, illuminating the natural love that flows between grandparent and child without the weight of the toxicity that often imbues parent-child relationships. 

The novel is also about a young woman, Josephe, safe in Winnipeg, attending university, constantly seeking refuge even though she is thousands of miles from the melee. Josephe is subjected to a double jeopardy, disoriented by memories of a childhood assault. She must also cope with the sudden death of her grandmother, the one person, she's convinced, who truly loved and understood her. Desiree, Josephe's childhood friend, remains in Haiti. Desiree abandons her comfortable middle-class life and joins the underground movement, convinced she can make a difference in this blood-soaked country, where the bullet is mightier than the pen. 

Desiree's naiveté is realistic. Her pathetic effort to do the right thing is both noble and disheartening. 
Haiti is a violent country, and, as Chancy illustrated in her previous novel, never more so than when those that have are pitted against those that have not. 

Although Josephe witnesses the explosive bloody rebellion on TV, she falters, closing herself off from everybody. Miserable and depressed, Josephe seeks to address her pain by looking inward. 
Desiree blusters through the disaffected world of the post-Duvalier Haitian ennui. Stranded in a country that's no longer ruled by a dictator, young Haitians compensate for their sense of economic abandonment with bloodletting violence. 

Chancy describes their dreadful situation in evocative and illuminating prose. And the story she tells of the plight of a Haitian family, serves as an important and worthy subtext for all the political and genocidal atrocities that haunt our television broadcasts on any given day.