Pawòl Fanm sou Douz Janvye (Women’s Words on January 12th, 2010): Introduction

This small collection of Haitian women’s reflections on the earthquake offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of how several women at home and in the diaspora lived through this moment, their responses and the continuous impact on our lives. The works are composed in various genres that they thought best captured their voices, their feelings. Thus, the words recounted here are in the form of personal essays, poems, photographs, and even a piece of fiction. Given Haiti’s place in the global racial imaginary, and since we are all only too aware of its historical condition, even in prose and poetry, our words from January 12th are laced with strands of critical observation. This collection seeks both to honor the feminist tradition of using different genres to tell stories and also to assure that the blurring of these genres does, in fact, offer a more nuanced landscape, a textured representation of this catastrophic moment. While the collection is by no means representative of the population, nor does it seek to be, it does demonstrate that, indeed, those left behind clearly have stories to tell that must not only be gathered and archived, as they are now part of another chapter of Haiti’s history, but also shared, especially as they are also evidence of how Haitians came to each other’s aid. Such stories were not the focus of popular media coverage. Within this collection there are stories of courage, stories of solidarity, stories of trauma, stories of hope, stories of despair, stories of contempt, and perhaps most important, stories of will. These are stories to pass on.