Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010
What are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, and which endure? Are the various effects immediately discernible, or do they manifest themselves over time? What is the relationship between natural disasters and social change? What roles do artists, and writers in particular have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? These are the fundamental questions I have addressed in my work on disasters, and specifically on the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010, a uniquely destructive event in the recent history of cataclysmic disasters, in Haiti and the broader world.[1] I have argued that Haitian literature since 2010 has played a primary role in recording, bearing testimony to, and engaging with the social and psychological effects of the disaster. While Haitian writing has arguably always had a social and political function, the sheer scale of the destruction caused by the earthquake posed an unprecedented challenge to authors, as well as other artists. Although many authors expressed initially their feelings of helplessness and of the futility of their art, virtually all established and many new and original voices published works soon after the earthquake, some of which write directly of the event, while others make no reference to it at all. There was and has been no single, unifying literary reaction to the earthquake; rather there is a proliferation of works that share certain thematic preoccupations, but which insist on the freedom to express those themes in original ways, thus making new and daring explorations of form a crucial part of the meaning of the event as it is processed through the workings of the individual text. If, as many authors initially said, art is useless in the face of catastrophe, that uselessness has a paradoxical value, in that it can be used to liberate an author from the potentially restrictive expectation to act as a faithful chronicler of a social event. In many cases, this freedom, and this fundamental inutility, have formed the basis for stylistic innovations that are meaningful in themselves, in that they suggest potential new modes of thinking and being that are some of the unexpected, creative effects of the disaster. Therefore, far from treating recent Haitian writing as a straightforward extension of social reality, or as a simple littérature de circonstance, I would argue that daring literary invention—what Edwidge Danticat calls “dangerous creation”—constitutes one of the most striking and important means of communicating the effects of such a disaster, and that close engagement with the creative imagination is one of the most privileged ways for the outsider in particular to begin to comprehend the experience of living in and through a time of catastrophe.
Nothing, writes Mark Anderson, “shakes one’s worldview more than the experience of a natural disaster.” Disaster is by definition “conceived of as a rupture or inversion of the normal order of things; natural disaster denotes that moment of disjuncture when nature topples what we see as the natural order of human dominance” (Anderson 1). In the case of an earthquake, the metaphorical solidity of the land, fundamental to the construction of identity is uprooted, “sweeping the ground from beneath our feet and reducing to rubble our literal and conceptual edifices” (Anderson 1). The effects of natural disasters depend not only on the inherent forces of nature but also on the economic, social, and cultural conditions in which human communities exist.[2] Traditionally invested with divine or supernatural meanings—as messages from God or nature—natural disasters call for interpretation, and these interpretations are largely determined by the culture of the human community, as the events themselves have “no inherent meaning discernable by humans outside that which we assign them” (Anderson 3). These meanings change according to the particular place, but also over time, and in places like Haiti that are prone to natural disasters, it may be that meanings not only change but dissipate, to the extent that they become relatively meaningless, or at least impossible to decode in any coherent way.
The second Haitian Étonnants Voyageurs festival was to be a great celebration of a literary tradition that had just attained unprecedented international recognition.[3] In 2009, Haitian authors had garnered thirteen major international prizes, and the festival was set to recognize those achievements in a series of activities across Haiti. The event was due to start on 13 January 2010, and by 12 January, many authors, critics and journalists from Haiti, North America and Europe had already arrived in the country. When the earthquake struck at 4.53 on the afternoon of the 12th, the terrible human tragedy rightly overshadowed the disappointment of the cancelled literary festival. Literature seemed to be of minor importance faced with an overwhelming human and social catastrophe, and one was left to wonder what the role of writing and art in general might be in a country so deeply scarred by an unrelenting, unforgiving history, of which the earthquake might be read as a kind of point culminant, a dramatic finale yo, though not an ending of hundreds of years of environmental, social, and political degradation.[4]
The earthquake seemed also to have marked an abrupt end to the literary cycle that culminated in the successes of 2009. Almost immediately, works from before January 2010 appeared like chronicles of a past time, epilogues to a long historical cycle that stretched back at least to 1804. Haitian authors were now facing a new reality, one in which their roles and functions risked being altered considerably. If, for example, virtually everyone in Haiti now had at least one remarkable true story to tell, we might ask what purpose it serves to invent stories. What can fiction add to the great mass of first-person narratives that are already so remarkable that they require no embellishment? Apart from the human calamity it brought about, the earthquake risked provoking a crisis in Haitian fiction, so long one of the most productive and fertile spheres in which Haitian reality has been explored and brought to life. Aside from the question of the intrinsic worth and purpose of inventing stories in the post-earthquake period, there are also ethical issues that potentially make fiction writing in Haiti a fraught and troublesome activity.[5] Is it possible to write fiction about the earthquake without a ghoulish sense of exploiting the event and advancing one’s career as an author over the bodies of the dead? What role, then, did and does fiction have in the post-earthquake period[6]
Remarkably, virtually all of the major authors in Haiti at the time of earthquake survived, with the notable exception of Georges Anglade, the essayist, critic, and promoter of Lodyans as a literary style particular to the Haitian tradition. It is striking, moreover, that many of the voices first read and heard in the international media were not those of Haitian politicians, but of Haitian authors of fiction, including Lyonel Trouillot, Kettly Mars, Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Evelyne Trouillot and Rodney Saint-Eloi. In the virtual absence of respected political figures, it was writers who were approached to speak of the event and who, perhaps unwittingly, took up to a large extent the role of spokespeople for Haiti. In effect, the earthquake made many major Haitian authors into internationally visible public figures, newly engaged with and committed to the fate of the nation.
Significantly, too, and understandably, the first published works of many of these authors following the event were chronicles, accounts of personal and collective experiences, and reflections on the fate and future of Haiti, very much in the spirit of the public intellectual. In this sense, then, not only have some of the authors ‘gone public’, but also their earliest post-earthquake works often have a public-oriented, manifesto-like quality. If we are looking for declarations of intent, explorations of the social and cultural stakes in post-earthquake Haiti, it is first to these works that one should look.
One of the most forceful and compelling works that deal with the changing literary stakes in Haiti is Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. SLIDE 5 One senses immediately in the title of the work an urgency, a supplication or imperative, and a manifesto-style declaration of intent. The book consists of twelve chapters, individual essays that date back to 2001, rewritten and updated to varying degrees in the light of the events of January 2010. That this is a text of the post-earthquake era is further suggested in the cover image, a reproduction of Pascale Monnin’s moving work and in the dedication to ‘two hundred thousand and more’. Perhaps more accurately this is not fully a post-earthquake text, but one that straddles the event, and sits on the fault line as it were between the pre- and post-January 2010 periods.[7]
In this work, Danticat meets head-on the ethical, literary and political challenges faced by contemporary Haitian authors, striking a new note of assurance and suggesting a renewed sense of mission. It seems that as the earthquake has literally and metaphorically weakened the foundations of Haitian culture and being, Danticat has been strengthened, and emerged with a new idea of her purpose as a writer and an even steelier resolve to fulfill that purpose. Indeed, in reading these essays, the earliest of which was originally published in 1999, one can trace a growing sense of confidence, a gradual crystallization of the issues that matter most to her and to Haiti, and an increasingly direct engagement with those issues. At the same time, she embraces the ‘danger’ alluded to in her title, which in general terms inheres in a refusal to bow to dictates on the form and content of national culture. Disobeying is considered a vital function, almost an obligation of the artist; especially it would seem those from Haiti, both in the pre- and post-earthquake periods.
The need to disobey and the danger that resistance creates are laid bare in the opening essay, which retells the story of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, two Haitian exiles who were executed in 1964 by François Duvalier for engaging in armed resistance as members of the Jeune Haïti movement. Through her careful description of the film of the executions, we get a sense of the stark images running through her own mind in a kind of loop, constantly reminding her of the sacrifices made by previous generations of Haitian patriot artists and intellectuals. Quite obviously, too, the images remind her of the dangers associated with disobeying, and specifically the risk for the Haitian artist of losing her life in pursuit of her principles. The patriotic artist exists it seems in a precarious situation, and to turn away from that danger is implicitly a kind of betrayal, a moral and creative death. The need to embrace this precariousness and the danger it brings appear all the more pressing for the diaspora or ‘immigrant’ artist, whose relative security in exile seems to lead to an even greater compulsion or obligation to disobey and defy.
This idea of the artist sacrificing herself for her country or her political convictions is in many senses a troubling one, especially in the context of recent and contemporary Haitian literature, which has tended not to insist on the writer’s obligation to tie her fate to that of the nation. Perhaps the author who has most insistently distanced himself from the nationalist tradition in Haitian writing is Dany Laferrière, who has developed through his work a distinctly introspective, self–reflexive, writerly sensibility. Conventional political causes mean little to Laferrière, who insists that his unique cause is ‘le style. Ou plutôt parvenir à l’absence de tout style. Aucune trace. Que le lecteur oublie les mots pour voir les choses. Une prise directe avec la vie. Sans intermédiaire. Voilà ma cause’.[8] In focusing on the minutiae of everyday life and in making the act of writing arguably the dominant theme in his works, Laferrière effects and reflects the shift in Haitian writing away from grand rhetoric and inflated political ideals, and away from the glorification of the author figure towards a fascination with the anonymous writer working, struggling to write in an often indifferent, ambivalent world.
<p>Danticat’s reworking of the notion of the engaged, self-sacrificing writer and the idea of dangerous creation mark to some extent a return to a previous set of concerns that largely tied Haitian writers’ fate to that of the nation. It seemed in this work at least that for Danticat the post-earthquake Haitian author was bound to re-engage with political and social issues and that the period in which writers from Haiti could decouple themselves from a set of specific expectations and ‘just write’ may have been over.[9]
Amid the devastation brought about by the earthquake and the political and social crises that have followed it, Haitian literature is alive and remains one of the nation’s most remarkable cultural phenomena. Haitian authors have taken the lead in addressing social and political issues and in speaking for their country in a time of disaster. If however they have done so, and if the Haitian people continue to exist in the most trying circumstances, it is not because they are innately resilient or born to suffer, but because they have to, they have no choice but to continue. The earthquake may have raised new challenges for Haitian writers, but it also calls for readers to re-engage in new ways with the texts and to read them on their own terms, to understand what they say about Haiti, and crucially, what they reveal about the world more generally, for Haitian literature has been and will remain a prism by means of which specific, localized experience is refracted far beyond Haiti, illuminating and resonating with all of our realities.[10]
MARTIN MUNRO
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
[1] Among the effects of the Haitian earthquake listed by the Disasters Emergency Committee are: 3.5 million people affected by the quake; 220,000 estimated deaths; 300,000 injured; nearly 300,000 homes destroyed or badly damaged. http://www.dec.org.uk/haiti-earthquake-facts-and-figures (accessed 24 October 2013).
[2] See, for example, Susan Bassnett’s essay “Seismic Aftershocks: Responses to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755” on the various interpretations of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which range from religious questions on the existence of God to Enlightenment-inspired rationalist understandings.
[3] The Etonnants Voyageurs website has a very comprehensive and useful page on Haiti-related literary news, particularly from the post-earthquake era. See http://www.etonnants-voyageurs.com/spip.php?rubrique148 [accessed 18 August 2011].
[4] This is not to say that disaster on this scale was inevitable, or that Haiti is alone in experiencing political, social and environmental upheaval. Following the earthquake, many Haitian authors remarked that the event signified a decisive break with the past. Edwidge Danticat, for instance, writes that there is to be no turning back from this moment, no comforting recollections of familiar places, as these memories now belonged to a previous Haiti, one that ‘no longer exists, the Haiti of before the earthquake’. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 161. See also the current visual art project run by the journal Small Axe, which considers the Caribbean to be a ‘measureless scene of catastrophe’, a region that is extremely vulnerable to ‘natural disasters, but also to social and political atrocities (invasions, enslavements, exterminations, tyrannies)’. ‘In fundamental ways’, the project statement argues, ‘the Caribbean has never overcome [the] founding colonial catastrophe’. ‘The Visual Life of Catastrophic History: A Small Axe Project Statement’, Small Axe 15.1 (March 2011), 133–36 (p. 134).
[5] There are also no doubt issues related to the ethics of reading and criticism to consider. Perhaps critics, especially non-Haitian ones, are increasingly obliged to pay proper attention to the primary works and to engage fully with the range of social, political and historical ideas expressed by Haitian authors. See Paul Farmer, Haiti after the Earthquake (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2011) on issues of the ethics of bearing witness to disaster.
[6] The earthquake quite clearly has cultural implications beyond literary fiction. See, for example, Arnold Antonin’s documentary film, Chronique d’une catastrophe annoncée: Haïti apocalypse now (Centre Pétion Bolivar, 2010), which details the destruction of key buildings of cultural value such as Jacques Roumain’s family house at Bois Verna. See also the remarkable post-earthquake works of the visual artist Frantz Zéphirin, some of which may be viewed here: http://www.indigoarts.com/gallery_haiti_zephirin.html [accessed 18 August 2011].
[7] Other works apparently largely written before 2010 but published following the earthquake include: Emmelie Prophète, Le Reste du temps (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2010); Evelyne Trouillot, La Mémoire aux abois (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2010); Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Noires blessures (Paris: Mercure, 2011); Kettly Mars and Leslie Péan, Le Prince noir de Lillian Russell (Paris: Mercure, 2011), and Gary Victor, Le Sang et la mer (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2010). Marvin Victor’s Corps mêlés (Paris: Gallimard, 2010) is considered to be the first full-length novel on the earthquake.
[8] Dany Laferrière, J’écris comme je vis (Outremont: Lanctôt, 2000), p. 44.
[9] On the other hand, some of the earliest post-earthquake works of fiction suggest that certain authors have re-asserted their right to creative and thematic freedom and have continued to resist such expectations. See, for example, Kettly Mars and Leslie Pean, Le Prince noir de Lillian Russell, and Lyonel Trouillot, La belle amour humaine (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011). It is also true to say that these authors are clearly historically and politically ‘engaged’ in their own particular ways. See also Lyonel Trouillot’s recent argument that ‘literature has not changed the world’ and that it is up to the citizen, not the writer, to do so; http://defend.ht/entertainment/articles/literature/1295-qliterature-has-not-changed-the-worldq [accessed 18 August 2011].
[10] For further reading on the earthquake, see some of the various collections published since January 2010: Haïti: Parmi les vivants: Pour soutenir Haïti (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010); Le Serpent à plumes pour Haïti (Paris: Du Rocher, 2010), Pour Haïti, ed. by Suzanne Dracius (Paris: Desnel, 2010), Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Eloi and Lyonel Trouillot, Refonder Haïti? (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2010), and Martin Munro, Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; and Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2010).