A New Pastoralism?: Nature and Community in Lyonel Trouillot’s La Belle amour humaine

For many Haitian authors, the earthquake of 2010 shook not just the physical space of Haiti but also its cultural and social foundations—indeed, everything. This idea is suggested, for example, in the title of Dany Laferrière’s first postdisaster book, Tout bouge autour de moi (Everything moves around me).¹ The image the title evokes is of the author standing at the center of a still shifting world, shaken and alone. One gets the sense that he wants to resist being redirected, thrown off the singular literary and intellectual path that he has carefully shaped for himself for over a quarter of a century. He says that he had decided when sleeping out on the tennis court at the Hotel Karibe not to let the earthquake “shake up” his agenda.² Now is not the time for tears, he says, but to “continue on our path.” He does not accept the idea of a “year zero” for the Haitian people or that the collective memory can be easily erased.³ The earthquake is part of the historical journey that stretches back to Africa. Nothing could change that journey, he says; “we continue.”⁴ The vocabulary and imagery he uses suggest a continued forward movement; one must continue to walk down these paths, without standing still or looking back.

This contrasts to some degree with Edwidge Danticat’s idea of a radical break with the past and of the post-earthquake period as a new epoch in Haitian history. In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat writes that there was to be no turning back from the moment of the earthquake, no comforting recollections of familiar places. These memories now belonged to a previous Haiti that “no longer exists, the Haiti of before the earthquake.”⁵ Reading Laferrière’s 2009 chronicle of return to Haiti, L’Énigme du retour, she finds it to be already like a “historical novel.” The cultural and creative stakes have also been radically changed for Danticat, as in post-earthquake Haiti the practices of reading and writing “will never be the same.” Everything has changed, including artists like herself, who find that their muse has been “irreparably altered.”⁶

Many of the earliest post-earthquake works of Haitian writing were chronicles. For example, Laferrière’s Tout bouge autour de moi and Rodney Saint-Éloi’s Haïti, kenbe la! were attempts to record the authors’ thoughts and observations in the largely neutral style of the chronicler. There is analysis and they do offer reflections on broader issues, but formally these works remain in great part standard chronicles, recording events in a largely chronological manner; in this sense they remain faithful to the event itself. Fidelity to the truth seemed to be a primary motivation for many authors. One was left to wonder, however, what the role of fiction might be in the post-earthquake period. Does the drive for truth and the need to bear witness necessarily exclude fiction and render it a sign of vanity, a luxury almost?⁷ Fiction in a sense was a victim of the earthquake. One wondered at the time how long it must itself stay buried under the rubble and, when it was finally pulled free from the ruins, what condition it would be in. Would it have retained its force and vitality, or would it have to start anew, its memory either erased or forever traumatized by the event? What was the point of writing fiction after January 12, 2010?

This article begins to address these questions through close analysis of Lyonel Trouillot’s first post-earthquake novel, La Belle amour humaine. This book suggests that the author agrees with Laferrière’s idea that the Haitian writer must not be diverted from his or her literary path, and that the earthquake itself does not—must not—become the primary point of reference for Haitian literature. To do so, the work implies, would be to fall into a trap, whereby the creative freedom of the author is limited and forever circumscribed by the events...