Claire of the Sea Light

“On the day of the motto taxi accident, though, the fabric vendor was the sole owner of that tragedy.” 

Nozias witnessing the car accident introduces an interesting perspective on grief. From his point of view, sadness and tragedy are tangled together with ideas of ownership. They are not simply abstract terms, but they can be possessed and disowned. For a man who has lost a wife and struggled to raise his daughter while being incredibly poor, this transactional idea of grief seems natural. To him, his emotional state is tied to his material state and only by solving the latter can he even attempt to solve the former.

“Nozias felt ill at ease with unsolicited kindness.”

Though Nozias is poor and depends on assistance to raise and educate his daughter, he still has his pride. This sort of “unsolicited kindness” (25) puts him on edge, causing him to fear that he might owe something in return, something that he cannot afford. His need for charity shames him, especially the knowledge that he can never truly repay any debt greater than a fish or a good deed. 

“But on other days, days like today, she felt as though she were carrying a nest of snakes in her stomach.”

The imagery surrounding Gaëlle’s pregnancy is ominous. With the temperature high, the frogs dying, and her belly feeling like a “nest of snakes” (33), the arrival of her daughter is occurring at an auspicious moment. Given what the audience knows about the tragic death of Gaëlle’s daughter, this description creates a sense of dramatic irony and calls on the audience to read into the ominous harbingers created by the literary language.

“Laurent Lavaud did not make it home in time to meet his daughter, Rose.” 

The ominous signs surrounding the gestation of Laurent’s baby had been pointing in the wrong direction. The portents, it seems, warned of Laurent’s death rather than the death of his daughter. This death is an echo of the birth of Claire; one person is born, one person dies. Like Claire, Rose arrives into the world via the death of a parent and, like Claire, her life will eventually be marked by tragedy. 

“But they still kept the place open, because the same blight that was destroying Cité Pendue was allowing them to prosper, to send their son to school with the heirs and heiresses of Ville Rose’s tiny middle class, to make contacts that one day might help him get a good job or find a decent match for marriage.”

The rise of the gangs around the town of Ville Rose presents a moral quandary for some. While Bernard’s parents, for example, are repulsed by the drugs and violence which surround them, they still take the money that the young men spend in their restaurant. They are profiting from the destruction of the local social fabric, yet the reason is their son’s education. This therefore places a great deal of pressure on Bernard: if he is unsuccessful in life, then his parents will have contributed to the moral decay of their community for no reason. 

“But with ‘Pa,’ a Creole prefix meaning both ‘his’ and ‘not his,’ the child’s first name could either mean ‘Maxime’s’ or ‘Not Maxime’s.’”

The use of the Creole language in the novel allows for the subtle introduction of the cultural world the characters inhabit. In the small Haitian town, the use of the name “Pamaxime” carries a significance. By introducing the audience to these cultural specificities, the author is able to slowly envelope them in the significance and the intricacies of the local world, thus creating a more meaningful and lasting impression on the reader. 

“This gave him another opportunity to touch his son as he held the child’s hands, guiding him to settle in the backseat.”

Meeting his son for the first time, Max struggles to come to terms with the emotional weight of the situation. His desire to touch Pamaxime is a reflection of his need to process the introduction; he uses as many senses as possible in order to form as many bonds as possible with his son, making up for lost time. This tactical introduction reassures Max that his son is real and present, allowing him to learn as much as he can as quickly as he can. It becomes a sensory overload to match the emotional overload, one which has made him forget entirely about Jessamine. 

“Louise was not in love with him; she did not think herself capable of being in love with anyone.”

Louise lives a hard life, beset by medical conditions from an early age, and she never married. These difficult experiences have formed around her as a protective shell. It is not quite that she does not consider herself capable of love, but that she is scared of what effect it might have on her should it go wrong. Pessimistic and cynical by nature, the skills which make her such a renowned radio host also close Louise off from the world and prevent her from making true, lasting bonds with others. 

“It was as if he had hit her.”

In the office, Odile slaps Louise. The physical pain quickly fades, but the real pain stems from the way Max Senior—Louise’s lover and longtime supporter—has arranged this situation, almost as a form of punishing Louise for breaking his school’s rules. Their friendship has been threatened, with Odile being the tool by which Max severs the relationship and delivers the killing blow. That he is not able to do this himself affects Louise. 

“This slap, she knew, he perversely considered a gift to her, a convoluted act of kindness.” 

The madness of the meeting still ringing in her ears, Louise exits the school with a new realization: that Max wishes to separate from her, and his parting gift is a slap, designed to strengthen her resolve. She considers this perverse, realizing that he is treating her like one of the children in his school rather than the middle-aged woman that she is. Any hopes of rekindling their relationship died in the room, as Louise now understands Max’s true character. 

“No matter how long you soaked the cloth in the dye, as long as the fabric was waxed the color wouldn’t change.”

The death of Gaëlle’s husband hits her hard. Without him, in an attempt to quantify her grief, she reaches for a metaphor which is inextricably tied to Lavaud. In this metaphor, she is the waxed fabric, just like the kind her husband used to sell in his store, when the smell of the fabrics was linked in her mind to Lavaud. Now, as she tries to explain how much his death has impacted her, she returns again to the fabric store. His memory will not leave her, and she will not change. The fabric store, like her husband, will always be a part of her. 

“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain.”

Max Senior levels this charge against Gaëlle on the first night that they sleep together. Though she initially dismisses the comment, she comes to see the value in what he had told her, and she recognizes that he is right. This understanding is the foundation of their relationship, even though the comment itself is a tacit acknowledgement that she will never be able to love him as much as she misses her dead husband and daughter. 

“She liked her ghosts nearby.” 

As if to confirm Max Senior’s diagnosis, Gaëlle acknowledges that she will never truly be able to leave Ville Rose. The town is a part of her life and, as an extension, those who died in the town are a part of her. Not just the ancestors buried in the cemeteries, but the husband and daughter she has lost in the town. Their memories are a part of the fabric of the community, and to leave the town behind would be, in a way, to forget them. Gaëlle can never do this, as much as she might desperately want to forget and as much as she might desperately want to leave. 

“Still, she thought she’d give him a hint of her temptation by sitting on his cot.”

On the anniversary of her daughter’s death, after running into the man who was involved in her accident, Gaëlle is in an emotional state. Not only does she agree to take Claire into her home after previously refusing to do so, she also considers sleeping with Nozias. Both have lost spouses, and she believes that he may be able to offer her emotional comfort and help her numb the pain that her double loss causes. Before she can discover whether her temptation will work, Nozias exits the shack. Once again, Gaëlle is left all alone.  

“There was no point in locking the door—she knew that now.” 

Approaching Flore in the middle of the night, Max takes advantage of Flore’s social status to rape her. He does not ask for consent or even speak at all; Flore is too frightened and worried to deny him. She has already locked the door, signaling her desire to be alone, but Max has burst the lock open. Arriving in the penultimate chapter, this shift in perspective allows the audience to understand why Flore is cold and distant to Max 10 years later and does not want him around her son. 

“Both men looked solemn and stone-faced, their eyes focused on the hail-crushed flowers as they inspected the storm damage.”

The morning after the rape, Flore cannot help but equate herself with the parts of the house that the previous night’s storm damaged. Like the flowers, these two men view her as property with little agency of her own, just a pretty adornment to the house that has broken during the storm. Though Max might seem “solemn and stone-faced” (109), she knows that he does not truly understand what he has done. 

“The vomiting was so bad that I sometimes vomited in the food I was preparing for them.”

The aftermath of the rape leaves Flore in a precarious position. She cannot afford to leave her job and, until she begins vomiting, she does not even know that she is pregnant. Once she does begin vomiting, it becomes almost as though her body is physically rejecting what has been done to her. She vomits in the Ardin’s food as a visceral means of revenge, though one she can never truly exact. 

“She should have slapped him back after he’d made that woman slap her.” 

While this chapter ostensibly tells the story of how Max Junior raped Flore, there is also a subtext based on a different relationship. Louise is revenging herself upon Max Senior, who orchestrated the slap across her face. By broadcasting the story of his son’s rape, she is embarrassing Max Senior, dealing in the currency he values most: social status. The well-regarded school master becomes, as a result of the interview, the architect of a rape cover-up. 

“There was something tragic about a generation whose hopes had been raised, then dashed over and over again.”

Forced to consider his son’s existence, Max Senior sees the tragedy in his son. This tragedy reflects poorly on the father’s efforts to raise his son, while the radio broadcasts the truth about the rape, implicating both father and son. As a result, the “generation” (119) could refer to either Max Senior and Max Junior, both of whom have had their hopes dashed by this particular radio broadcast. 

“Until he’d met his son, he’d felt as if every other love were a phantom version, a shadow of the one he’d once had.”

Max Junior, as revealed in this chapter, has spent the last 10 years lusting after a love that never was. His feelings for Bernard—and the guilt he felt over not even being able to return for his friend’s funeral—have defined his relationships ever since. Even his rape of Flore is, in some way, informed by this love, as he was desperately trying to prove to his father that he was not homosexual. That the only love he has ever felt came close to this is his son is equally tragic; though Max Junior is not aware, Flore wants to go far away from him and never return. Max is doomed to live without love. 

“When zombies ate salt, it brought them back to life.” 

Claire, whose life has been marked by so much death, sees the life-bringing utility of salt. Her father goes out fishing on the saltwater every day, bringing them food to eat. To her, a zombie is not necessarily a scary prospect, but an opportunity. Salt, her childlike reasoning presupposes, might even be able to bring her mother back to life. For all the superstition surrounding salt in the village, it is the little girl without a mother who sees the positive side of the folkloric beliefs. 

“She had no idea what it was to have a mother rather than a string of motherly acts performed by different hands.”

In a novel which focuses a great deal on the difficulties of parenthood, the girl without a mother comes to define motherly love by its absence. Claire has a series of proxy mothers, women who perform the same functionality, but she has come to recognize the difference. Though she has never truly had a mother, she defines this vacuum as motherhood and feels it most palpably when it is absent. 

“They became other people’s children in other lands that they’d never even known existed.”

For a little girl like Claire, the concept of the diaspora is hard to comprehend. The idea of being sent off to a distant land is like something from a fairy tale or a song, rather than an economic reality. The thought of it is enough to make her run from her home, saving her father from the impossible decision which she knows awaits him. Claire does not want to become one of the lost children of her imagination, so she flees into the darkness and runs to the lighthouse.