THE GIFT OF MISFORTUNE CHRONICLES
THE STORY OF A YOUNG HAITIAN IMMIGRANT TORN BETWEEN HIS NATIVE LAND WHICH HE LOVES UNREMITTINGLY AND AN ADOPTED COUNTRY THAT HE FALLS IN LOVE WITH AT FIRST SIGHT. However, once he reluctantly arrives in his new country, though he loves it, three major obstacles surface that alters his attitudes and eventually, his life: his natural kinship with the Christian notion of poverty and wealth; his encounter with his adopted father/friend, Thomas, who is very critical of America, and the most important obstacle that makes him change his attitude towards American culture and democracy, his malevolent and greedy wife, Monica. Politics, religion, fear, deception, greed, courage, and revelation all come to play in the journey of Armand who brings a willing sister to the United States while his heart and soul is still in Haiti.
During Haiti most turbulent recent times, Armand and sister, Deborah, become concern about the chaos that is claiming the streets of Port-au-Prince. The fear, violence, murder, and hopelessness were affecting the poor and desperate but the wealthy and political conscious as well. Deborah wants to go and so one morning she wakes up in her comfortable house, after hearing another story of one of her friends put to death because they will not join the military of Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier), wants out of Haiti as both patriot and citizen. Deborah can not go anywhere without her brother Armand and though he too is frightened, he feels that he can’t leave Haiti at this time. They are not involved in politics, both but are religious people: Armand, a fundamentalist Protestant and Deborah, a traditional Catholic; nevertheless, they are still thrust into the politics of the country. They attend the finest school in Haiti and they attend this school with the country’s elite who are pro-Duvalier. With warring factions, violence spurting all around them, certain friends disappearing overnight never to return, and some friends demanding them to chose between their neutral political life and the need for them to get involve in the Duvalier government, and concerns for Deborah’s freedom because an important Duvalier official might want Deborah for his son, so they hatch out a plan to escape to the United States of America.
In the beginning, it is Deborah and not Armand that wanted to abandon Haiti, but Armand had to go to protect his sister and make sure she got there safely. After making a careful trip back to their hometown, Bainet to get money from their very wealthy parents, they leave for the United States. Armand leaves with a heavy heart because unlike Deborah, he wanted to stay in Haiti to do religious work which would end up looking like political work since Armand has a close connection and passion for the poor. But because of family and tradition, Deborah becomes the major priority.
Armand starts a whole new journey when he gets on that plane to the United States and lands in New York City where his relatives and friends are awaiting him and Deborah.
In New York City, he is immediately thrown into a quandary. Though he misses Haiti, he excitingly falls in love with the United States and New York City. On his beginning U.S. journey, he is introduced to the two most important people in his life and the two most important characters in the novel. [Also, he is introduced to two of the most important characters in his life in the United States]. Thomas, a radical Christian socialist who constantly places the United States into the glaring light of expectation and reality and compels Armand to go beyond his strict religious beliefs to uncover deeper truth about a society that worships material greed; and the other person is Monica, a young woman of questionable reputation, but sterling charm, a charm that in spite of all of Armand’s family and church friends warning, convinces Armand to marry her.
The novel unfolds with these two polar opposite characters. Each affect the young Armand in different ways but unite him on rethinking his enthusiasm and his love for America. Both characters, Thomas and Monica, forces Armand to look at his life more deeply and make him fight for what he believes in more firmly. The struggle to find his voice surfaces when he has to stand his ground with Thomas and come up with his own vision of the United States to compete with Thomas’ is one of the keys in understanding the novel. But the real battle turns out to be a personal one and it is that personal one that ultimately makes him questions his life
in America and sends him back to Haiti.
The disastrous marriage between Armand and Monica sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Armand comes to America surrounded by friends and family and ends up with a woman that nobody likes or trust, but he ends up with her anyway. Religious, political, and most important, personal fireworks happen and do not stop until the novel’s end. Monica is brought forth as a worthy rival to Armand’s religious and fundamental beliefs about God, marriage, love, justice, and humanity; all of his beliefs work their way out in this poisonous and passionate relationship between Armand and Monica.
What is central to the novel is that in Haiti the personal was submerged into the ever present struggle of the political, but in the United States, Armand discovers another and perhaps even more present struggle, the personal. New York City and United States are seen through the symbolic and personal lens of what Monica puts him through both privately and as a public figure in court. Though Armand has made the biggest mistake in his life by marrying Monica, his mistake, or tragedy as many of his friends and family call the marriage, still teaches him: religiously: he must remain strong in his faith; politically, that the private can become very public and personal: that his wife had betrayed him and tried to strip him of his dignity, money and most important, his children.
In the end, Armand’s gift was a misfortunate because what he thought he wanted out of life and out of the United States, he realized was not spiritually deep enough thought out or lived. Everyday lives were caught in the machinery of the different systems, in the case of Armand, marriage and the court system, and he saw the misery and unhappiness in America. Though he had come to U.S to pursue the American Dream, it became a kind of nightmare for him. He had to totally rethink what he believed was the most important things in life. His wife had betrayed and deserted him. She had lied on him and tried to get him in trouble with the law.
The novel helps us to understand the transformation that takes place in Armand’s thoughts and most important, his actions by the chronicles of a horrific and stressful trial that Armand had to go through because of Monica. He prevailed but in an America that made him think that it was not as free as the myth goes and particularly cautious about America’s treatment of men who become fathers.
What is ironic is that his other major influence, Thomas, tried to push on him a religious, political point of view, but Armand got a private, personal view of America that was just as powerful as a critique of the rich or the court system or the prison system. Fighting for child custody, trying to keep a job since the court case was interrupting it all the time, holding on to his faith and trying to keep a balance in his life with the madness of having his wife and the court deeming him a wife abuser and demonic. So while Thomas was key in the first part of the novel, in the second part, Monica takes over with an exceptional vehemence.
However, Thomas comes back powerfully strong and takes up Armand’s attention because he makes a momentous decision: he is leaving New York City, America to return to Haiti to fight and struggle with his people. For Armand, this was the end of an era.
After Thomas gets to Haiti, Armand and his family and friends in New York find out that Thomas has been killed in Haiti. With heavy hearts, they go to Haiti for the funeral. However, intrigue starts right before they are ready to leave Haiti. In fact, they don’t even get a chance to attend the funeral. This part of the novel becomes an adventure in trying not to get caught by the secret military police. They hide out in the crowded city of Port-au-Prince and then in the country and finally out in the country. While they were trapped now, Deborah was frantic because she never thought she would come back to Haiti because of her genuine disappointment in her native land, but Armand internally had already decided even before this happed that he might come back to do two things: to marry his childhood sweetheart who still was waiting for him and to work with the people as Thomas mandated him to do with his words and life. Armand decides not to marry his sweetheart from childhood with a very strange and yet familiar twist since we know Armand’s careful ambiguity about his homeland. But this gets ahead of us because Armand, Deborah, Phito, her husband, Thomas’ niece Martine and his nephew Tony are all trapped in Haiti waiting for an opportunity to escape the military that is after primarily Armand. They all get out of Haiti except Armand and Deborah who are still hiding somewhere in Bainet.
Thus the novel ends like it begins except travel is reverse. Deborah is finally rescued by her husband and the American marines, and they leave Armand in Haiti to travel back to New York City. Deborah can not change her vision of Haiti even though it pains her greatly that her brother has decided to stay there. But for her, Haiti is a shadow that became so impressive with its evil and violence, that she feels that she could never return to live there. Not so Armand. Armand is an interesting story at the end because the reader knows that he makes a choice to stay in Haiti even though he could have allowed himself to be been rescued with Deborah, but he did not. Yet the reader is not sure whether he stayed for good in Haiti or in a moment of desperation or enlightenment, came back to the United States, or killed by the government and military like his hero and mentor, Thomas. What we know for sure is that Armand will carry on Thomas’ legacy in some way. Armand will fight for the future and will keep faith with the future because of the experiences of his past with the committed Thomas, the deceptive Monica, the passive, good citizens like his sisters, and the fact that he lived in both Haiti and the United States and identified great similarities between these two cultures though finally he came to know and trust the differences with greater favor and discernment.

2009 Copyright by the author Joseph P. Policape