Village Weavers
Myriam Chancy’s two-family story of Port-Au-Prince in Haiti begins in 1941 with two young girls, a world apart economically but drawn into a deep and lasting friendship. Simone and Gertie have in common their ages and their city, although each is enfolded differently by the families around them. The warmth that Gertie didn’t know enough to crave comes to her through the more rural family; in turn, Simone learns about power and politics and the way wealth entitles dominion, through observing Gertie’s life.
Young adulthood pulls them into romances continents apart, although Simone remains hungry for sisterhood. With each new friend, she dreads the separation that split the original pairing: “they will drift away from each other until all that is left of their bond is a memory, a longing for something, once experienced, that can never be fully recovered.”
Chancy continues to rotate friendships among the women, in parallel with struggles of their rapidly changing nation and its political upheaval; forces keep tugging them back into each other’s orbits, and Gertie is not as far away as Simone fears. Chancy draws their story through decades of struggle and efforts, before she spins the women back toward each other in 2002, with a chance to name and forgive the betrayal and fractures between them.
Readers looking for a languorous exploration of affection and its deeper currents will savor Chancy’s unhurried exposition of the island nation. Some of the Creole portions of her conversations wobble between French and the intimacy of an independently changing language for a place where heritage is a mixed blessing, so the dialogue can feel forced at times. But sustained revelations of activism and women’s friendships redeem and enrich the novel’s progress.
