Staging a Dictatorship: The Theatrical Poetics and Politics of Marie Chauvet's Colère

This essay interrogates the relationship between politics and literary genre in Marie Vieux Chauvet's Colère, the under-studied second movement of her trilogy Amour, colère, folie (1968). Specifically, it seeks to demonstrate that Chauvet's formation in theater is central to her politics and poetics. In Colère, Chauvet writes the Haitian public sphere's disarticulation under Duvalierism as a roman-théâtre, a hybrid genre embedding dramatic conventions into the novel form. This formal innovation gives Chauvet's writing a unique critical purchase, allowing the author to reenact the lifeworld of the Haitian subject of state terror as an ongoing spectacle before a malevolent spectator.