Season of Mist: Vendettas Bittersweet by Mac Donald Dixon. Vero Beach: Strategic Book Publishing, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948858106. 272 pp. Paperback.
Mac Donald Dixon is one of a number of Saint Lucian (and Caribbean) writers who have emerged in the postcolonial period, a generation or so after fellow countrymen Nobel Laureate Sir Derek Walcott and the less well-known novelist Garth St Omer. Along with contemporaries John Robert Lee and Kendel Hippolyte, as well as Jane King, Adrian Augier and, more recently, Vladimir Lucien, he is a clear affirmation (if any more was needed) that the Saint Lucian lexicon is to be taken seriously in Caribbean and world literature.
Although MacD, as he is fondly known in the small Saint Lucia writing circle, has been writing since the Sixties, he has not gained as much prominence outside of his native Saint Lucia as Lee, Hippolyte or the younger Lucien. The locally prestigious M&C Fine Arts Awards or local acclaim accorded to plays like Kesnoe are hardly reflective, in my view, of the breadth, depth and import of his literary work.
The photographer, actor, playwright, poet, and novelist demonstrates this in his first novel (revised edition), Season of Mist: Vendettas Bittersweet. In this compelling bit of writing, he sets out to do what many novelists have found difficult: to write a piece of historical fiction that is believable and authentic. This is a particular achievement especially when one considers that he is engaging with a period some two hundred years removed from the present.
The story is set in late 18th- into 19th-century Saint Lucia, in the midst of the French Revolution, and in the social and revolutionary foment that it helped generate in the French Caribbean colonies, of which Saint Lucia, like Haiti, was one. The universality and the international appeal of this narrative is found in how a 238-square-mile island is drawn into the maelstrom of the revolution for Liberté, Fraternité and Egalité taking place in Europe—into the struggle for human dignity and freedom. Here, the enslaved population of African descent, people of mixed heritage, free people of colour and republicans rose up to challenge the status quo.
The intricate threads of Dixon’s story are all the more sensitive because this social upheaval is melded into the struggle of two colonial world powers, Britain and France, for military and economic pre-eminence.
While Season of Mist is the story of a revolutionary epoch that engulfed France and its Caribbean possessions, it is not only a story of heady slogans and political passion. It is also a very human story of the interpersonal relationships honed in such an environment. It is a story of love, hate, passion, the pursuit of revenge, compassion, appreciation of beauty, as much as it is of daring raids, the struggle to exist, murder, mayhem, revolutionary justice, reactionary reprisals, and brutal suppression.
The main protagonist in Dixon’s l’histoire is Madlienne Des Voeux, a freeborn woman, an affranchie leading a band of young rebels in the forests of La Soufrière in the Island’s southwest. Madlienne, a natural-born leader and daughter of Desolée, Leader of the Camp, is unwittingly drawn into the larger fight for freedom having lost the innocence of her early teen years through the brutal murder of her father and the wiping out of the elders of their Camp by the Royalists. At first, it was essentially a matter of survival and of avenging the slaying of their forebears. It, however, became the necessary joining up with L’Armée Francaise dans Les Bois (the French Army in the Woods) who sought to overthrow the Royalist order. The story seems to be fashioned after the legend of Flor Gaillard-Bois, a Black woman warrior who is reputed to have led a band in the Brigands War, making common cause with the French Army in the Woods. This was an alliance of Republicans and Black and Coloured freedom fighters, who were fighting the French; and then the British, who sought not only to recapture this island strategically placed in the centre of the island-arc, but to shore up the colonial slave economy. This, of course, meant the reimposition of slavery in the small colony of Sainte Lucie.
The alliance of Black and Coloured freedom fighters along with French Republicans had forced the French Governor of Saint Lucia to declare the freedom of the enslaved people in 1794, only for slavery to be reimposed less than one year later. The insurrection continued in 1795 with the support of French Republicans.
One wonders whether Madlienne, who emerges as an icon, a veritable Jeanne d’Arc in a society where everything saintly and sacrosanct is white, is a reflection of the powerful influence that Dixon’s mother clearly had on his life and on his view of the world, as well as of the legend of Flor Gaillard-Bois that remains misted in the uncertainties and closely guarded intelligence of that revolutionary period. A period that witnessed the birth of the Republic of Haiti, the first land liberated from settler colonialism in the New World.
Madlienne seems to have slowly accepted the imperatives of the revolution, rising in the ranks to command a company in the revolutionary forces, all the while keeping a longer, parallel mission at the forefront of her mind—that of avenging the brutal slaying of her tribe. At first her freeborn status did not seem to allow her to understand the urgency of the cause espoused by the revolutionaries, especially given that most were White Frenchmen, many of whom still seemed to carry the same condescending attitude toward those of her skin colour.
In the course and aftermath of the revolutionary insurrections, in victory and defeat, and the eventual final capitulation of French colonialism to British colonialism, the all-consuming obsession of forty years to get even with M. Gimat, her father’s murderer, is eroded by the intricate relations that she cultivates. The story moves through the familial love for her tribe, the apparently erotic love for Louise, which clashes with her feelings for Theodule, the sexual relationship between Louise and Theodule, her eventual softening up to Gimat, whom she waits a lifetime to deliberately murder, as he had done her father. Her discomforting discovery after everything is that Gimat is actually likeable, and she flees his Moulin-a-Vent estate as a means of resolving the contradictions.
The plot is authentic. It is based on the real story of the attempt to liberate Saint Lucia from Royalist France, and the substantial role played by Black freedom fighters in the cause, their freedom being the condition of their participation. While Dixon’s descriptions and metaphors are often a bit mellifluous, and while his language cannot be critiqued for being spare and stark (as in the case of his compatriot Garth St Omer), Season of Mist has an authenticity to it that is the hallmark of a good story. The minute detail with which he treats day-to-day living in the towns and settlements, Madlienne’s visits to la Convention or Castries, life in the great house at Moulin-a-Vent in Gros Ilet, the smell of molasses and the manufacture of sugar at crop time, the sadistic whippings meted out to those who dared infringe the rules of plantation life, the dining and partying of the privileged few at Moulin-a-Vent, the tranquility of her home at Trois Pitons, and the goings-on and intrigues of personal relationships all ring true. Madlienne’s visit to Guadeloupe, Dixon’s attention to the physical detail of scenery and geography as she enters the harbour, give the narrative an authenticity and believability that many an author of such a work would envy.
This tale makes Caribbean history come alive, and the role of Caribbean people in making their history is placed at the centre of it. Moreover, Madlienne’s Season of Mist shows us that the passions of love, hate, the need to avenge, the compulsion to freedom and dignity are universal across time and geography. Dixon is perhaps not a perfect craftsman, but he is indeed a Master Griot who should be taken seriously. His novel makes a good companion read to the late Michael Aubertin’s Neg Maron, also of Saint Lucia, recently reviewed for Caribbean Literary Heritage by John Robert Lee.