Saisons sauvages

A novel set in Port-au-Prince during the height of the Duvalier dictatorship, following Nirvah Leroy, a bourgeois mulâtre woman whose journalist husband has been imprisoned at Fort-Dimanche, as she enters a coerced and increasingly intimate relationship with the Macoute official who holds her husband's fate. Mars uses alternating focalization — Nirvah's interiority and the secretary of state's predatory calculation in free indirect discourse — to explore complicity, the gendered mechanisms of political terror, and the impossibility of pure positions in a surveillance state, inheriting the tradition of Marie Chauvet's Amour, Colère et Folie.