Histories of the Past, Histories for the Future: Representing the Past and Writing for the Future in Rodney Saint-Éloi’s Haïti, kenbe la!

The history of a disaster is never a simple one. The ecological, historical, and political contexts preceding and following it define the ways in which a disaster unfolds in time. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that ravaged Haiti on January 12, 2010, is one such complex event. Its sheer force and deadly impact forever altered the lives of all those present in Haiti on that day, and its aftermath will also mark future generations of Haitians. This seemingly measurable event, lasting less than a minute, has its own distinct and complex post- and prehistory. Rodney Saint-Éloi’s partly autobiographical account Haïti, kenbe la! 35 secondes et mon pays à reconstruire (Haiti, never give up! 35 seconds and my country to rebuild),¹ written in the months immediately following the disaster, grapples with the personal and collective impact of the earthquake and the scale of the ensuing destruction. Haïti, kenbe la! is a wide-ranging work written by a Haitian author living in Canada. He returns to Haiti, on one of his regular trips, for the literary festival Les Étonnants Voyageurs, which is scheduled to take place in Port-au-Prince. There he hopes to meet his fellow writers (for example Dany Laferrière) and to visit some of his relatives who still live in Haiti. The earthquake strikes while Saint-Éloi and Laferrière are having lunch at the Hotel Karibe, soon after the two authors arrive. In a seemingly conventional form of narrative, marked by clear chapter divisions, the narrator recounts the days following the disaster and interweaves these immediate impressions with childhood memories and folk stories. By merging factual material with fiction, the text destabilizes clear generic classifications and undermines its own apparent status as an autobiographical piece.

The text’s autobiographical character is rendered more complex by its distinctly self-reflexive dimension. The writing of the disaster is not only a process of working through the catastrophe, but it also becomes an attempt to envisage and forge a new form of narrative writing that might approximate the experience of the earthquake and its pre- and posthistory. Previous conceptions of narrative temporality—marked by clear and stable divisions between past, present, and future—can no longer convey the narrator’s experience of the event, its individual and collective significance, and its complex temporal character. Through its formal features and thematic engagement, Haïti, kenbe la! unsettles conventional categories of narrative time and points to new ways of writing the history of this highly particular disaster. By doing so, it challenges the ways in which Haiti’s history has been portrayed and narrativized.

The work’s nuanced formal and aesthetic engagement partakes in a complex process of negotiation between competing cultural and political discourses on and interpretations of this specific event. In addition to its deeply personal dimension, the process of defining and textualizing the quake and other disasters acquires a collective political significance: it can be employed as a means of negotiating political power. Literary responses to natural disasters, more generally, tend to indicate the importance of a particular event. By pointing to the multiple histories underlying this event, they have the potential to unveil existing power dynamics that shape the different interpretations of a disaster and its aftermath. As Mark Anderson suggests:

The volume of literature written about a particular disaster and the involvement of canonical literary figures are prime indicators of its [the disaster’s] cultural and political relevancy for the nation. Likewise, more developed and sophisticated cultural production on a disaster allows for a deeper reading of the forces at work. It is for this reason that I do not study the recent (2010) disasters in Haiti and Chile. As horrifyingly mesmerizing as they may be, a modicum of historical distance is necessary to judge the implications of literary and artistic production for political change.²

Here, Anderson underlines the importance of literary production for our understanding of disasters and suggests that there is a directly political dimension to postdisaster cultural engagements. He...