Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is an ambitious exploration of class, colourism and the limits of childhood connection, familial obligation and friendship.
It’s 1941 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and two girls from very different worlds form a deep bond that will develop in surprising ways and ultimately shape the very lives they lead.
Gertie is from an affluent and cold family, independent verging on neglected, and looking for connection and a place to belong.
“She is becoming used to the idea that family means waiting, and silence, absence. You are supposed to count on something invisible, unreachable. Sisterhood is like a loose net in which fishermen catch fish that never see the hands of their captors, a net full of holes and empty promises, that doesn’t let you go, but doesn’t hold you close either.”
Simone, or Sisi, comes from a working class family, raised by a houseful of women, and surrounded with love. When they meet, they each fill a void in the other until a deathbed confession alters everything—and they’re pulled apart.
As the girls grow, we see them continuously drawn back into each other’s orbit only to suffer more irreparable cracks in their relationship. But, in the sunset of their lives they come together once more in the hope that their bond might prove stronger than the faults of the past.
Chancy centres her story around this defining friendship, and yet we never experience enough of it to feel that connection ourselves. Instead, we follow the friends as they move in their own circles, further and further from each other. Through Sisi we experience the 1950s violent political upheaval of Haiti and her subsequent escape to Paris—
“No one can imagine what is to come. No one can imagine it because no one has ever seen anything like it: journalists disappear; men in blue carry guns throughout the city and countryside; gunshots ring out early in the morning, late at night; a soccer team is shot dead the morning of the big game; cadavers are left to rot in the streets, some opponents of the regime, others not; a fort is reputed to be a torture chamber: if you are taken there, chances are you never come out.”
A powerfully written time that we don’t linger on for long. We get glimpses of the men the women marry, the families they build, the choices they make but often the emotional resonance isn’t given time to fully mature or we simply move on too soon. Perhaps it’s the structure of the novel—moving between the women, the present and the past, with always this emphasis on the bond between the two girls that ultimately leaves me wanting.
A sprawling and often beautifully lyrical novel, Village Weavers never fully comes into focus, always a little blurred, slightly out of reach. It may have benefitted from a tighter knitting of its story, a stronger edit, and an ending worthy of its build up. Even so, Chancy creates a vibrant portrait of Haiti, its class and political struggles, and is worth reading for that alone.
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of What Storm, What Thunder, awarded an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, New York Public Library, the Boston Globe, and the Globe and Mail. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award; The Scorpion’s Claw; and Spirit of Haiti, short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
Publisher: Tin House (April 2, 2024)
Hardcover 5.8″ x 8.8″ | 300 pages
ISBN: 9781959030379
Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird is a mixed-Cree writer, editor and book hoarder. She currently hosts the Nimbus podcast Book Me where she talks local books and interviews authors. She holds a degree in English literature from Dalhousie and her writing has been published in The Coast and CBC among others. She can usually be found relentlessly online at @birdykinsreads. Her first children’s book Snow Day is upcoming at Nimbus for Fall 2024.
