First impressions of a disaster
Montreal writer Dany Laferrière recalls horrors of the Haitian earthquake in a quiet, dispassionate memoir
The World Is Moving Around Me By Dany Laferrière, Arsenal Pulp Press, 183 pages; $15.95
It was only by chance that Dany Laferrière was in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010. Long one of the bestknown figures of his native country’s diaspora, the Montreal-resident writer was back in the country for the Étonnants Voyageurs literary festival, and having a fine time.
Noting with satisfaction how “life seem(ed) to have got back to normal after decades of trouble” — hard-won words from a man who had been forced to flee the country during Baby Doc Duvalier’s tyrannical reign — he was relaxing with a friend in the restaurant of the Hotel Karibe when, without warning late in the afternoon of a day near the end of his scheduled stay, “the earth started shaking like a sheet of paper whipped by the wind.”
In that moment and in the days that followed, he kept his eyes and ears open.
The result, first published in French two years ago and now translated by David Homel, is The World Is Moving Around Me (Arsenal Pulp Press, 183 pages, $15.95).
“We slowly got to our feet like zombies in a B-Movie,” Laferrière recalls of the first moments after the initial shock, and one of the first things he saw on venturing out of the hotel courtyard into the devastated city was a woman sitting with her back against a wall, selling mangoes as if this were a typical day and not the immediate aftermath of the greatest disaster in the history of a trauma-prone country.
“These people are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope down to hell,” thinks Laferrière, and as his account makes increasingly clear, as he takes up the writer’s responsibility to bear witness and describe the seemingly indescribable, bringing hope down to hell was pretty much what the people of Port-au-Prince had to do.
The general tone of Laferrière’s on-the-spot memoir — calm, dispassionate, told in measured sentences — may surprise some. His impressionistic account, arranged anthology-style under headings like The First Bodies, A Man in Mourning and The Desire to Help, is confined at any given moment to what one person could see and perceive in that moment.
But what might at first seem a limitation turns out to be a perfectly apt strategy: the enormity of what has happened is pieced together only gradually, subject to the same shocks and roadblocks affecting anyone else on the ground at that time.
Besides, selective perception is a natural human defence against an upside-down world where death has become “so abstract: 100,000 or 200,000. Add or subtract 100,000 dead, as if each death wasn’t worthy of particular attention.”
Such numbing-down, as Laferrière writes, is “designed, of course, to keep you from going crazy.
We avoid considering reality, because reality is the problem.” It also turns out to be a perfect metaphor for a people and country long forced by history and circumstance to develop a grace under pressure that most of the world can only regard with humbled wonder. The book ends with Laferrière holed up in a Paris hotel, having begged off his publisher’s deadline for a completely different book, intent on getting it all down while the impressions are still fresh, “so that other people wouldn’t feel alone with their emotions.”
In the end, of course, every death is worthy of particular attention. If it’s not absurd to say it, we’re lucky Laferrière was there.