Special Dossier Le désastre naturel au féminin: Women Writing Disaster in the French-Speaking World Introduction

The Anthropocene, or the current geologic age, presents a challenge to many disciplines: certainly, the sciences, political science, history, and geography must all contend with the frightening realities of the climate crisis. Arts and literature, too, have understood the necessity of responding to the urgent state of environmental affairs. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, scores of literary works, fiction and nonfiction alike, rushed, flood-like, onto the literary scene, bringing to the fore the devastation resulting from (and leading up to) "natural" disasters. Following Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico, as well as other areas of the Caribbean, saw a similar reactive surge. Indeed, in The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (2018), published in the wake of the disaster, famed journalist Naomi Klein marshals the stories of the Puerto Rican people, pre- and post hurricane, revealing the extent to which "natural disaster" is not exclusively "natural." Warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures due to pollution, the deforestation of mangroves to clear ways for hotels along the coastlines, the poverty of the island, and rising sea levels all contributed to the increased severity of the storms and the massive destruction that resulted. This conflation of "natural" disaster with "human-caused" disaster renders the study of disaster discourse in contemporary literature all the more relevant.

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh suggests that natural disasters, environmental catastrophes, and even the more insidious, seemingly invisible elements contributing to climate change are unrepresentable events. Whether beyond or outside of our conceptual field of discursive representation, when disasters do emerge in literature it is often through a metaphoric language that they are able to breach the surface of the unthinkable: "It is indisputable, in any event, that catastrophes waylay both the earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways" (19). Ghosh posits that the most effective way to understand, expect, and prepare for disaster is to imagine it through storytelling. He insists that "the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination" (9), as narratives of climate change do not always make it into book form, while imaginative disaster writing (based on now probable expectations) has almost become a genre in itself. Yet, as Rob Nixon contends in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, "In a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses" (15). In other words, the imagination of conditions predisaster helps to materialize the possible effects of real-world disasters, thus allowing us to prepare in advance (at least psychologically) for catastrophic events.

In conceptualizing this Special Dossier, entitled "Le désastre naturel au féminin: Women Writing Disaster in the French-Speaking World," these ideas drove some of my questions. I asked how women's imaginative representations of catastrophe uncover invisible or imperceptible disaster conditions. How does bringing real-world disaster into dialogue with imaginative fiction provide a space for possible solutions to both social and environmental injustices? How do women writers interrogate disaster discourse? How might examining environmental catastrophe unearth questionable patriarchal practices leading to the subjugation of women? All four of the contributions to this dossier tackle many of these questions from the perspectives of women writers from the Caribbean, Canada, and Morocco. The first contribution, Linda Alcott's "Hidden in Plain Sight: Post-Quake Portraits of the Disenfranchised in the Writings of Emmelie Prophète and Kettly Mars," examines two Haitian novels that bring to light disaster truths, novels that describe the pre- and post-earthquake conditions of a Haiti confronted with seismic levels of poverty and misery. Alcott shows that what Prophète and Mars unveil are conditions that are equally as devastating as the earthquake itself, revealing that this "natural" disaster was in fact not merely "natural." Laura Loth's article, "'The Natural Elements Unchained': Trauma, Disability, and Gisèle Pineau's Poetics of Disaster also...