The World is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake

Foreword

The Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean

Special Envoy for Haiti for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and former Governor General of Canada

The “Étonnants voyageurs” international festival of books and film was about to take place in Haiti in January 2010 when, suddenly, all hell broke loose. The deadliest earthquake in the country’s history threw the nation into shock and horror.

Dany Laferrière was among the novelists, poets, and publishers staying at the Hôtel Karibe, overlooking the city of Port-au-Prince.

Not only did the ground beneath their feet betray them, as the earth let loose a deafening growl, but words failed them when it came time to describe that moment of truth, when brutal reality left the voice of fiction speechless.

The only solid things that remained in their lives were those everyday actions that helped them hold onto what had collapsed: the few landmarks still standing amid an inferno of rubble; the few loved ones left among the survivors, who were themselves damaged, riddled with cracks.

Dany Laferrière, faithful guardian and watchman, would work to recover his senses and his stability in the face of this catastrophe and try to make meaning of it.

One day he wrote, “No one can tell a story exactly as it happened. We piece it together. We try to find the essential emotions. In the end, we fall into nostalgia. And if there’s one thing that’s far from truth, it’s nostalgia. So that’s not your story.”

I read The World Is Moving around Me with this premise in mind — that this is a story that’s not his to tell. In the way he follows the stream of events, and renders impressions, images, scenes, and conversations in the midst of tragedy or on its periphery, on the path of nostalgia for places that have been destroyed, for those people who have vanished, for memories wounded and devastated, we feel his restraint, something akin to prudishness. There are no special effects. Nothing literary.

And yet, when a journalist asks him — as a man of letters who has witnessed all of this — what the value of culture is, when faced with such suffering, he answers, “When everything else collapses, culture remains.” In Haiti, nothing is truer. Witnesses will say, and Laferrière will confirm it, that after the initial shock and for the nights that followed, as the tremors continued to punish the city, people joined together to sing as a way of fighting their misfortune. He reminds us of the lesson and the imagery of Haiti’s naïve painters, who choose to portray nature at its most generous, a Garden of Eden, a paradise lost, while all around them, desolation reigns.

The original French-language edition of this book is published in Quebec by Mémoire d’encrier, Rodney Saint-Éloi’s company. Dany and Rodney were sitting at a table at a hotel restaurant in Port-au-Prince when “the earth started shaking like a sheet of paper whipped by the wind.” This book is filled with a sense of fraternity, informed by the love of a country that never deserts its sons and daughters who live far from it. And I’m one of them.