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  • Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide by Beverly Bell
  • Allison Corbett
Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide. By Beverly Bell. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xix, 235 pp. Paperback, $18.95.

In Fault Lines, Beverly Bell offers us a rare glimpse of Haiti following the January 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated the already vulnerable country; what she presents readers is rare not in its disaster coverage—the devastating quake inspired much analysis—but rather in its commitment to highlight the voices of Haitians involved in grassroots movements and citizen-led responses to what many in Haiti refer to merely as “the event.” Bell has over three decades of experience working in Haiti with democracy and women’s empowerment movements; is the author of the collection of oral histories, Walking on Fire: Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); is the founder of the Center for Economic Justice in Albuquerque; and also coordinates work in Haiti with the nonprofit Other Worlds. She uses these experiences and knowledge in Fault Lines to help her document the structural injustices that have plagued Haiti’s history, pre- and postquake, as well as the enduring spirit of solidarity and strength that she believes have the potential to help rebuild the country.

The book opens with an impassioned foreword by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat (see, for example, Danticat’s Krik? Krak! [New York: Vintage, 1996], [End Page 150] Eyes, Breath, Memory [New York: Vintage, 1998], or Brother, I’m Dying [New York: Vintage, 2008]). Danticat anchors the stories in Fault Lines as much in Haitian’s historic, Sisyphean struggles, as she does in a globalized future in which multinational corporations and foreign governments place bids on the country. Will Haiti be devoured by predatory capitalism, or will it be recuperated by the people? The voices that Bell brings to readers are vital, says Danticat, though often absent from decision-making processes: “In this book, thankfully they too are heard, not as victims or beggars, but as self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti, and without whose full inclusion and participation the country will never fully succeed” (xiii).

Shortly after the earthquake, Bell spent the following year both in Haiti and back in her home of New Orleans helping to transmit Haitian perspectives on the crisis to the outside world. As part of this work, she interviewed hundreds of Haitians who had a wide range of experiences of the earthquake and its aftermath and came from different social and economic backgrounds: “the director of a UN agency and anti-UN demonstrators, former government ministers and former factory workers, environmentalists and those chopping down trees to make a living, architects, and those living under cardboard,” just to name a few (9). The book is organized chronologically and was written during the course of the first year after the earthquake. There are two chapters for each month of that year, and these chapters alternate between historical and political analysis, educating readers about the context from which narrators’ voices emerge, namely investigative journalism and stories from the street.

Fault Lines starts with a chapter entitled, “We Don’t Have Water to Make Tears,” which is dedicated to stories of surviving the earthquake, as the earthquake serves as a konjonkti—a conjuncture, a confluence of factors that increase or decrease the possibility of resistance—for Bell and a lens through which to understand Haiti’s present as well as its past and future. She uses this introduction of the event to readers in order to locate them within the framework that she will use for the rest of the book. But before providing a more detailed historical background of Haiti, she moves on to describe solidarity movements born from the disaster of the earthquake, again making clear the balance of narrative power she wishes to maintain.

Bell is particularly attuned to the history of Haitian social movements and foregrounds their current manifestations in a discussion of Haiti’s colonial roots and the legacy of US involvement there. She highlights US involvement in Haiti in the form of occupations and embargoes (1915–1934 and 1991...

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