“There’s Marguerite,” Gertie tells Simone in the opening scenes of Myriam J. A. Chancy’s latest novel, Village Weavers, pointing to the golden-throated hen in her yard. The seven year olds have escaped school for Gertie’s stately house in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince so that Simone can meet Gertie’s pet hen. As they approach the bird, the “house boy” charges past them, swinging a blade wildly. There’s “a screech, then a squawk,” then a headless hen—slaughtered for dinner. Simone is speechless. Gertie is annoyed, but otherwise seemingly unmoved. She’d have to get another one. “Doesn’t naming a chicken mean that it has value, like family?” Simone wonders to herself. “Better not to be named.”
Village Weavers is Chancy’s fifth novel, and the fifth to revisit Haiti’s history through the eyes of interconnected characters. This time, Chancy traces the lives of Gertie and Simone, from their 1940s girlhood to the dawn of the brutal Duvalier dictatorships, ending just after the new millennium. Gertie is the youngest child of the elite Alcindor family. Simone is the youngest child of a working-class family, all women. Simone’s father visits once a week but does not claim her as his daughter. Instead, Simone takes her mother’s surname. Throughout the novel, Chancy is orbiting the question of what it means to be named—and claimed—by others.
Gertie and Simone quickly build the kind of tender, indelible bond that comes with knowing someone from the beginning of everything. Gertie dubs Simone “Sisi,” and lends her the protection of the Alcindor name. The girls at school stop whispering behind Sisi’s back about her hand-me-down uniforms, which were carefully mended by her seamstress mother. Meanwhile, Sisi has her own inheritance to lend to Gertie. When Gertie spends the night with Sisi’s family, she is enthralled by being admitted into their tight-knit, intergenerational household.
Near the end of the novel’s first act, a painful secret is revealed. Gertie is sent to live in one of the Alcindor’s other homes by the sea, and the girls’ precious season of friendship ends with no warning and little explanation. They spend the ensuing decades haunting each other’s memories. Brief encounters and sparse second-hand updates leave misunderstandings to fester, until their eventual reunion in the story’s cathartic conclusion.
According to the Haitian social structure of this time, Sisi is an illegitimate “outside child.” But it’s her absent father that she grows up pitying: “Sisi always thinks of her father as the outside child…like a cat without a proper home.” Within her household, Sisi belongs. Her grandmother Momo passes down stories of the Simbi river gods that originate from her village. Her mother Mami teaches Sisi to commune with nature, to “talk to the birds as if they were family,” a skill that will later fuel Sisi’s professional success. Sisi’s sister Margie is her protector, verbally jousting with girls from elite families who look down on them. These early chapters are some of the novel’s most satisfying. The sound of Momo’s snores on a Saturday, of Mami’s sewing machine pedal, of the sweet smell of porridge in the kitchen — this is a house that Gertie will yearn to be a part of for the rest of her life.
Gertie inherits a respected name and the wealth and privilege that attends it. Otherwise, she might as well be an orphan, abandoned to a large house by her mostly absent parents and older siblings, and pitied by the housekeepers. Chancy writes Gertie’s sisters and brother as an unrelentingly cruel monolith. They are technically separate characters, but their function is the same: To repeatedly reinforce the island’s rigid hierarchy. “The lot of you are just a bunch of women living together without any men in the house,” one of Gertie’s sisters tells Margie during an argument. “No one to give you status.”
Curiously, Chancy reveals that both the Alcindor name and wealth belong to Gertie’s mother. It seems that, for the Alcindors, the mere existence of a patriarch with a pulse is all that matters. His surname is never mentioned. “Wealth trumps everything else, in the end,” Gertie later reflects.
As the girls grow up and marry, Chancy charts new territory to explore the meaning of a family name. Sisi is eventually forced to flee Haiti amid the horrors of Papa Doc’s regime. She lands in Paris in the arms of her childhood friend Louise, who goes by Lou. Sisi fell in love with Lou when they were teens, a thin plot line that has some narrative payoff in the end. Lou introduces Sisi to Scott, a wealthy, white American studying abroad in Paris. There is plenty of darkness to Scott, but Chancy must have enjoyed bringing him to the page. Her characterization of him is pitch-perfect at every turn: Scott “eagerly seeks out ways that he can rebel while not having to risk much himself.” Scott is a student, “though they can’t tell exactly what he studies.” Scott says, “‘I want to think of myself as a good guy, you know?’”
Sisi, traumatized from years of violence in Haiti and soon Paris, overlooks Scott’s flaws in favor of the security that his money provides. “They end up married,” Chancy writes. For Scott, the decision is “a whim, something he could do to break out of the expected.” After moving Sisi to Ohio, Scott eventually stops introducing her at parties, “leaving her off by herself next to the beverage table, mistaken for the waitress.” Chancy does not give Scott a last name.
Chancy devotes less space to developing Manuel Pueyo, the man Gertie marries. The two meet on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Manuel, a human rights lawyer, frees Gertie from her gilded cage by urging her to challenge her privilege, expand her worldview, and grow up. He is more of an ideal than a person. Incidentally, Manuel comes from a Dominican family that is wealthier and more established than the Alcindors. It is only after taking Manuel’s powerful name that Gertie learns to distance herself from her own.
There are several years of Gertie’s life, including at a boarding school in the Dominican Republic, that Chancy doesn’t include in the novel. When Sisi and Gertie eventually reconnect, they plan their long-anticipated reunion at a Dominican resort. But upon arrival, the hotel staff turn Sisi away after reviewing her Haitian passport. “You just can’t go around telling people you’re Haitian, you know?” an embarrassed Gertie advises her. “This hasn’t happened to me in so long, what with Manuel and his family and all.” Because Gertie’s time in the DR is not covered, her perspective on what it means to be Dominican versus Haitian is unclear, although Chancy offers contextual clues elsewhere.
Chancy’s Village Weavers engages with complex questions about racism, colorism, colonialism, class, love, death, and ultimately: What makes a person legitimate in the end? Though uneven at times, the novel lands its heroines on safe ground, and leaves a window open for their daughters to manifest the kind of lifelong, soulmate friendship that Gertie and Sisi might have had.
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