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The Scorpion's Claw. By Myriam J. A. Chancy. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2005. ISBN 1-900715-91-0.188 pages. $15.95 paper.
Myriam J. A. Chancy's The Scorpion's Claw recounts the narrator Josèphe's quest to recover her identity, a casualty of the family's move from Haiti to Canada. In Canada, Josephe is at a safe remove from escalating domestic and political violence at home, but she sees herself as less Haitian as a result. Her sense of dislocation and alienation is exacerbated further when, on a return trip to Haiti at the age of eight, she is raped by a family acquaintance. Unable to get beyond either the assault or her cultural isolation, the narrator remains spiritually adrift and emotionally aloof. The temporal and geographical distance separating the narrator from her past increases, rather than diminishes, her psychic vulnerability, and she at one point contemplates suicide: "Never have to think I was in the wrong place. Never have to wake to the smoke of my breath suspended in the air because everything is frozen except my brain, which keeps asking me, over and over again: How did I get here? How do I find my way home again?" (23).
The novel skillfully blends the real and the fictional by situating the narrative against the backdrop of the Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes, but Chancy uses the past not in an attempt to dramatize history but rather to personalize it. The author is less interested in casting blame or explaining the causes of Haiti's traumatic political past than in exposing the destructive effects of this past on individual inhabitants. Toward this end, the author focuses her narrative attention on the complex relationship between the primary narrator, Josephe; her cousin Alphonse; and her best friend Désirée. Each of these characters narrates his or her own story in one of the novel's three main subdivisions. Prefacing each of these main subdivisions is a shorter vignette recounted by yet another character who is in some significant way connected to the narrator at hand.
The thread that weaves the narratives together is Josephe's maternal grandmother, Carmel, and it is her story that opens the narrative, preceding Josèphe's first-person account. Grandmother...