Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures by Kasia Mika (review)

It has been ten years since an earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. In the decade that has followed the disaster, much has been written about the event and its aftermath, even though much of what has been written has also noted that the disaster is, in some ways, beyond representation—it can never be fully narrated or accounted for, because it exceeds even language itself. In Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures, Kasia Mika makes an important contribution to the still-emerging archive of experience of the Haitian earthquake. In Mika's critical reading of a cross-section of fictional and nonfictional accounts, we get a "bold, futureoriented" account of the catastrophe (6).

Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives is composed of four parts, each made up of several chapters. The first part ("Disaster Making") contains several chapters that lay out the conceptual framework of the analysis. The focus here is on the now well-established argument that disasters are always multidimensional and multiscalar processes (rather than discrete events) that must be thought of in deeply historical terms. Mika builds on the insights of disaster studies to frame the earthquake not as a natural disaster but rather as a political disaster rooted in long-standing structures of violence and vulnerability. In an important conceptual move, she argues that we need to move away from "resilience" as a response to disaster and to think instead of practices based on what she calls "remnant dwelling": "a sense of living through the experience of violent fragmentation and an attempt to live through the fact of one's own survival and others' absence" (44).

Part 2 ("Disaster Time") is the first of a three-part analysis of seven earthquake texts that focus on the temporal, spatial, and subjective dimensions of the disaster and its effects. Here, Mika argues that the earthquake has produced a new sense of historical time and has reconfigured the meaning and experience of the past and the future, for both individuals who lived through it and the country as a whole. In this part, Mika explores two texts (Lionel-Édouard Martin's Le Tremblement: Haïti, le 12 janvier 2010 and Rodney Saint-Éloi's Haïti, kenbe la! 35 secondes et mon pays à reconstruire) that put the temporal experience of the quake at the forefront. Both texts, Mika argues, frame the earthquake as an experience that "escapes easy temporal categorisation" (59). Accordingly, Mika explores the temporal dimensions of the earthquake through what she calls "untimeliness," a term that for her "denotes the impossibility of differentiating between the trauma of the event and its aftermath while expressing the difficulty of 'returning from' trauma to untraumatized life" (63). This untimeliness is felt by individual as well as collective subjects and produces a common sentiment that nothing will ever be the same after the quake, even if this sense of singularity is tempered by an equally strong sense that the earthquake is part of a repeating disaster that continues to unfold in Haiti (83).

In part 3 ("Disaster Space"), Mika offers a critical reading of two texts (Dany Laferrière's Tout bouge autour de moi and Sandra Marquez Stathis's Rubble: The Search for a Haitian Boy) that attempt to make sense of the earthquake's reconfigurations of geographic and social spaces. In these chapters, Mika analyzes the ways in which Port-au-Prince is rendered as a space of ruination. She challenges Marquez Stathis's depiction of Haiti as collapsed "into a state of prehistoric rubble" (112) by contrasting it with the way that Laferrière writes about his experiences navigating the fragmented world that emerged in the aftermath of the quake. In so doing, Mika convincingly sheds light on the importance of moving beyond "the pastoral and the post-apocalyptic" modes of representation (102), although it would deepen the analysis were her critique tied more clearly to the larger literature on colonial modes of...