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Part I
Disaster making
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1 12 January 2010
From hazard to disaster
The 12 January 2010 earthquake in Haiti ‘caused’ the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives and futures. There was no right place or time when the first 35-second long shock, described by one survivor as lasting ‘less than a minute’,1 hit and rocked the island. The earthquake happened at 4.53 pm local time (21.53 UT) approximately 25 km WSW of the capital city of Port-au-Prince (18.443°N, 72.571°W).2 The magnitude Mw7 tremors, with a depth of 13 km,3 became a disaster. Over 80 per cent of Port-au-Prince and the nearby Léogâne were levelled, leaving behind anything between 19–40 million m3 of debris.4 The tremors destroyed around 80 per cent of schools in Port-au-Prince, 60 per cent of government buildings located in the capital as well as 60 per cent of schools in Haiti’s South and West Departments.5 The estimated number of casualties, an uncertainty which might never be resolved, ranges from 100,000 to 300,000.6 In the days following the disaster, cries of grief and stories of loss and pain joined expressions of joy and relief and came together in a distinct urban chorus, filling the void of the ravaged city and countering the ‘executive silence’ of the Haitian government.7 The tremors changed everything, thrusting the country into a new time, one of an ongoing aftermath. Similarly to the redefined landscape of the capital, the lives of those affected by the disaster, whether living in Haiti or elsewhere, were, from now on, rooted in and re-routed by the echoing roar of goudougoudou, an onomatopeia for the earthquake.8 Anchored in narratives of the January tremors, this book centres its inquiry on disaster ontologies. It questions the very notions of what disasters are, interrogates the imbricated layers of causes and structures they reveal, attends to the types of relations and they form and representations they call forth. Or, in Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman’s words: ‘The choke and sting of experience only becomes real – is heard – when it is narrativized.’9
Disaster accounts – such as the seven texts by Rodney Saint-Éloi, Lionel-Édouard Martin, Dany Laferrière, Sandra Marquez Stathis, Nick Lake, Dan Woolley and, and Laura Wagner to which I turn throughout Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s Futures – give voice to such stings of experience, reflect the global nature of the January earthquake and creative responses to it, capture the varied and oft discordant memories of the event, its personal, collective and global meanings and translations. The narratives also help to understand what disasters and long-term vulnerability are and how they are experienced by individuals and communities. These selected texts are characterised by their networked and enmeshed positioning which goes beyond and problematises easy and binary categorisations of insider/outsider, testifying, at the same time, to the multiple, simultaneous points of reference, coordinates, from which these authors write and around which their narratives are organised. Together, the subsequent chapters all work towards advancing these new visions of Haiti and nuanced definitions of disaster, vulnerability, reconstruction, remaking and recovery that are attentive to the long-term processes and histories of unequal power relations that shaped the Caribbean. These categories are rooted in specific understandings of time, space and self which, in turn, are a point of entry into wider examination of the three-way relationship between complex disasters, aesthetic and narrative conventions, and the wider conceptual frameworks used to explain the event’s history and its individual and collective impact.
As expressions of various forms of enmeshed and polyvalent witnessing to the disaster and its aftermath, as well as one’s attachment to Haiti, these narratives stand at a crossroads (kalfou/kafou in Haitian Kreyòl) – caught between wor(l)ds, epistemologies, imaginaries and pointing to new relations and necessary crossings of methodologies.10 These narratives witness to loss, provide a testimony for such a traumatic event, are attempts to give and negotiate its meaning, while offering a way to reveal and rework the cultural framework through which disasters, their past, present and future, are perceived.11 In effect, these selected narratives share in their effort to bear the weight and bear the record of the disaster while also forming an attempt to take one’s bearings, that is ‘to determine one’s position’ (OED),12 with regards to the radically changed, and oft unrecognisable, surroundings. Moreover, by engaging with material contexts as well as the collective and individual meanings of the disaster, distinct ways of making sense of its past, present and future, these narratives of the earthquake draw out the many histories of the event, demonstrating, at the same time, how overlapping factors – ones that extend well beyond Haiti’s borders or categories of the nation-state, and include but are not limited to issues of history, politics and ecology – determined the scale of the 2010 disaster and shaped the immediate responses to it. In the process of doing so, these texts call for processual definitions of disaster and ruination, call forth differentiated notions of remaking, rebuilding and reconstruction, and try to envisage non-linear and non-teleological recovery.
The January 2010 disaster is a process, not a closed-off event, with hinged chronologies and pre-disaster multi-scalar vulnerability defining its scale and the ways in which it continues to unfold into the future. Similarly, post-disaster ruin and ruination extend beyond the immediate post-earthquake destruction. For one, these categories can refer to specific depictions of devastated urban landscapes; and, for another, their temporal signification may connote either a sense of permanence and impenetrability or point to the long-term processes that contributed to this state of ruination. Consequently, recovery emerges as a state of remnant dwelling among and beyond the ruins; that is a dual attempt to remake and conceive of one’s life after the tremors have ended. As these texts suggest within the realm of personal and collective experience, post-disaster futures start with everyday remaking; that is a process of making anew and weaving again of the ripped and complex fabric of one’s life, knowing that many of its defining threads are not there and cannot be replaced.
In effect, the future that the narratives try to envisage from the various positions they take is an unhealed one. It is one which carries through and carries on the knotted work of healing as a multi-fold process. It encompasses, among other things, after Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, ‘engaging in repair of relationships in the deep processes of family, neighborhood, and community […] resuming the task of living (and not only surviving)’,13 knowing, at the same time, that ‘while everyday life may be seen as the site of the ordinary, this ordinariness is itself recovered in the face of the most recalcitrant of tragedies: it is the site of many buried memories and experiences’.14 Against illusions of an achievable wholeness, one that is often equated with the recovery of the pre-disaster past, this future-oriented perspective seeks to reconfigure and repair discourses and structures of vulnerability all the while recognising that even if some structures can be amended, the personal losses and absences will never fully be alleviated. Still, such lack of closure emphasises an open-ended outlook which allows and calls for a non-catastrophic conception of Haiti’s future, one beyond equally confining notions of repetitive, cyclical or unalterable, linear and ongoing time of the disaster.
Narratives, and for Yanick Lahens novels in particular, give the reader ‘sense of the world’, creating a ‘moving proximity’ to and participation in one’s life and live stories. These complement – are distinct from but not in opposition to – the types of knowledge and information about the world that hard and social sciences can provide. For the Haitian writer:
When you look at social sciences, when you take statistics, economics, you have information about the world. But what will give you the sense, the taste, of the world? It will be the reading of a story of someone who lives biology and physics in his/her life. That we live too, and that we see, and that is why we feel moved when reading this proximity.15
The fictional and non-fictional accounts of the 2010 disaster, through their polyphonic form and sharing, to a varying extent, in their thematic preoccupations and ethical motivations, draw the reader into the experience of the earthquake. They hope to provide this ‘taste of their world’, that is the here and now as well as the aftermath and the reverberations of the January tremors.
Far from the sensationalist accounts of extreme suffering or exceptional survival, for the communities left behind, post-disaster present and future are characterised by the ongoing experience of structural violence, one that is countered by the everyday, unspectacular yet no less significant, ordinary practices of resistance and being in the world. For those who survived, as they attempt to find and live a daily life, trying to accept the shocking memory and loss as permanent, the enduring material destruction of the city space continues to be a visible reminder of the haunting experience. Both the post-disaster present and future are defined by the labour of slow healing – an open-ended and non-teleological process.16 The challenge and difficulty of living in the post-disaster everyday lies precisely in having to confront and to battle against this seemingly ordinary – yet no less violent – vulnerability which halts and disrupts any attempts at linear recovery. In effect, the post-disaster everyday emerges as a liminal and intermediate site. The disaster is not over yet and still haunts the present, and this post-disaster present remains a work-in-progress; an attempt to formulate and slowly move towards a non-spectacular, non-catastrophic, everyday future.
With news-reports filled with images of yet another disaster unfolding in the Caribbean (e.g. the 2017 Hurricane Irma), it is easy to give into apocalyptic visions of Haiti and the wider region as one, ongoing crisis. Yet, rather than just demonstrating the relevance of disaster studies, such images and reports should push us, the scholars in the field, to rethink and reformulate the coordinates and ambitions for our inquiry towards futures that are less disastrous and, since this is the core of the issue, more just. Part of the book’s undertaking is to engage an interdisciplinary analysis of notions of disaster, ruination, reconstruction and recovery; that is to go beyond critique. If critique is often founded on disagreement, then my book calls for a move away from the pointing out of what the various perspectives on disasters – whether those coming from quantitative or qualitative sciences or humanities – ‘fail to see’ via an acknowledgement of ‘what we do do’ that can be complementary and enriching towards, more importantly, an imaging of ‘what we could do’. My monograph expands discipline-bound approaches, challenges confining cha...
