Writing the Haitian Earthquake and Creating Archives

HOW TO TELL THE STORY OF THE HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE? Ever since 4:53 p.m. on 12 January 2010, this is the question many of Haiti's writers have been asking. In the face of such a catastrophe with widespread death, destruction and suffering, what can writers do? In terms of aftershocks, how have the thematics and representational form of Haitian writing developed in the wake of this seismic event? This article examines responses in Haitian writing to the earthquake through the prisms of a premonitory play entitled Melovivi ou Le Piege (The Trap) by Franketienne, and of chronicles and essays written by Dany Laferriere, Yanick Lahens and Gina Athena Ulysse, who, this article argues, react to threats to and material culture by creating a unique 'aura' of archival documents in the very form of their books themselves.1In terms of archival matter, my reading is based upon the literary manuscripts of Franketienne's play Le Piege, and Yanick Lahens's Failles (Fault Lines) and Guillaume et Nathalie.2 For the analysis of the actual manuscripts, this article exploits methodologies for studying literature in statu nascendi from genetic criticism - a predominantly French phenomenon, which has rarely been considered in the same context as postcolonial studies.3 Genetic criticism's methodology for studying the dynamics of stages of creation from first to final drafts of literary manuscripts is here extrapolated beyond the point of publication to the printed works. In the Haitian context, this article proposes that there is no clear-cut dividing line separating manuscript genetics from textual genetics; instead the transitions between the two zones are more blurred. Normally, the cut-off point for genetic critics falls at the publication of the text, but my approach to Caribbean and Haitian literature also considers multiple printed versions of the works in question.In previous work, I have shown that rewriting is one of the foundational pillars of Caribbean literature.4 Here, I explore how that process of rewriting is linked with another: that of archivisation, through which chronicles and essays on the Haitian earthquake try to preserve what remains.5 Archival and rewriting impulses highlight a preoccupation with Haitian in written works that seek to produce them textually as well.6 In the Haitian context, these archive stories and rewriting practices are at their most highly concentrated because the stakes and the scale of the destruction are more widespread and catastrophic. Caribbean writers, especially in Haiti, had always been archivists preoccupied with saving the word long before the earthquake struck and the cultural search and rescue operations began. As for rewriting, this is a process to which almost all authors subject their literary texts. Yet, while all writers rewrite to some extent, Caribbean, and particularly Haitian, writers subject their own texts and essays to a near-obsessive degree of rewriting. My argument is that these rewriting and archival impulses have become even more concentrated since 2010, and nowhere more so than when they are shaping and reshaping the accounts of the Haitian earthquake which are examined here.This article contributes to debates around by suggesting that gaps and silences in the colonial archive, as identified by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, are now increasingly being actively and transitively challenged and filled in by the emergence of new postcolonial archival-type writing.7 This article builds especially on the approach of Laurent Dubois, who puts historians and novelists in the French Caribbean (Guadeloupe) in dialogue, discussing how Guadeloupean creative writers use archives in the fiction, highlighting what is missing from in this context by using the archive itself as a literary form in their work.8 However, this emphasis on fiction does not quite fit the Haitian earthquake narratives discussed here, many of which concern non-fiction and the recounting of real events

Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Literary criticism · Literature · Political science · Reading (process · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Law

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