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Les grandes mutations et les métamorphoses traversent souvent des phases ténébreuses, chaotiques et douloureuses. Il m'arrive paradoxalement de croire dans la lumière tragique des désastres et la pathétique magie des catastrophes.1 This essay develops Jenson's very worthwhile exploration of the use of the term ‘disaster’ in relation to Haiti, and takes seriously her caution not to cast the nation and its people as inherently, inevitably disastrous. It reconsiders the usefulness of the term in referring to Haiti (and, to a lesser extent, the broader Caribbean), by engaging with the emerging interdisciplinary field of disaster studies; reflecting on the degree to which understandings of Haiti's political, social, and historical issues may be enhanced through this engagement; and considering, conversely, how the case of Haiti may affirm, complicate, or call into question some of the prevalent ideas in disaster studies. Disaster studies is a sprawling, multidisciplinary area of research that has developed at the points of convergence between ecocriticism, literary studies, historical studies, and postcolonialism, among other disciplines. ‘Disaster’ itself is a polyvalent and often-contested term; according to Charles E. Fritz's classic social-scientific definition it is ‘an event concentrated in time and space, in which a society or one of its subdivisions undergoes physical harm and social disruption, such that all or some essential functions of the society or subdivision are impaired’.3 It engages most fundamentally with the social, cultural, economic, and political implications of disasters. While there have been literary and historical accounts of disasters for thousands of years, it is generally agreed that the first social-scientific study of disaster is Samuel Prince's analysis of the 1917 Halifax, Nova Scotia disaster.4 The 1950s marked an important period in the discipline in the United States, when the National Opinion Research Center and the National Academy of Sciences carried out studies on the social and psychological effects of disasters. These findings were first analysed in influential articles by Fritz and Eli S. Marks, and later by George W. Baker, Dwight W. Chapman, and Allen H. Barton.5 In terms of methodology, social scientists have tended to engage in inductive field studies, visiting sites of disasters, usually after the disaster strikes.6 More recently, and as the theoretical work on disasters has developed, there has been something of a shift towards deductive approaches, applying theories from various disciplines to predict the data.7 In general, disaster studies is becoming ever more multidisciplinary in nature, and in particular there have been important studies of the cultural effects of disasters.8 As Robert Kastenbaum indicates, disasters have traditionally been considered to be divine messages, and as such they demand to be read and interpreted.9 Often, disaster is interpreted as a rupture in the ‘normal’ human–nature relationship, as a break with the understanding of nature as maternal and life-giving, and the irruption of the monstrous and the aberrant. Paradoxically, as Frankétienne suggests in the epigraph to this essay, disaster, or at least the recovery from it, is often understood in terms of rebirth and creation.10 While I argue here for the importance of disaster studies to the case of Haiti, there are also implied connections to other ‘cultures of disaster’ with which French and francophone studies scholars engage, and with, for instance, ecocriticism and work on contemporary and historical issues of genocide and trauma. The most significant and direct connection between some of the Haitian examples to which I refer in this essay and the emerging subfield of cultural disaster studies lies in the universal importance attributed to literature. One of the leading figures in the study of the cultural effects of disaster in the postcolonial Americas, Mark D. Anderson, writes that following independence many Caribbean and Latin American nations looked to the United States and Europe for models of development, but lacked the governmental and academic institutions for mediating unexpected events such as disasters: ‘In lieu of technical specialization, literature became a key space in which notions of risk and vulnerability were formulated and debated’.11 As such, literary works became the means by which disasters were theorized, in a way that allowed Latin American societies to stand back from disaster and ‘assume a more critical stance toward highly traumatic experience’.12 In short, literature in Latin America and in Haiti constitutes, in Anderson's terms, ‘a powerful means of persuasion’.13 Disaster studies insists that the relative effects of disasters depend not only on forces of nature but also on the economic, social, and cultural conditions in which human communities exist.14 Disasters have, moreover, ‘no inherent meaning discernible by humans outside that which we assign them’,15 and as such they call for interpretations that are largely determined by the culture of the human communities that bear witness to them. These meanings are inherently unstable, and change according to place and time. In places such as Haiti, so prone to natural catastrophes, meanings not only change but perhaps also disintegrate completely over time, to the extent that disasters lose all meaning, or at least become virtually impossible to decode in any coherent way. That said, since colonial times and particularly the eighteenth century, during which there were frequent earthquakes and other natural events, there has been something of what Anderson calls a ‘culture of disaster’ in Saint-Domingue and Haiti, one where natural disasters are not only physical events but also ‘agents of cultural formation’.16 In effect, cultures of disaster come into being when ‘frequently occurring natural hazards are integrated into the schema of daily life’.17 As Anderson argues, natural disasters involve ‘human interaction with the environment and as such must be mediated through culture’.18 In Haiti, literature in particular has often been a prime site in registering and memorializing natural and other disasters. Disasters also cast into sharp relief humans' relationship with nature, particularly if one holds that human subjectivity is created in and through nature, and that the earliest human cultures were created as a means of mediating and drawing meaning from the relationship with nature. For many early Western thinkers, politics and social organization were understood in terms of a dialectical relationship between nature and human culture. In his book Political Nature, an important work for disaster studies scholars, John M. Meyer investigates this relationship in Western thinkers such as Aristotle and Hobbes, arguing that both were fundamentally interested in the ‘nature of motion’.19 For Aristotle in particular, nature followed a teleological movement, and motion and change in nature were indications ‘of something striving to fulfil its natural potential or to find its natural place’.20 In Western religious thought, too, nature has often been understood in teleological terms. Dante wrote of a world understood as time and nature, and which, as Thomas J. J. Altizer puts it, ‘embodies an ultimate and eschatological goal’.21 Interpretations of contemporary disasters, in Haiti and elsewhere, tend to consider less the philosophical implications of catastrophe than their material, social, and political causes and effects.22 As Gregory Button writes, whether disasters are labelled natural or unnatural, they ‘highlight the asymmetrical distribution of power and foreground the struggle of the state, corporations, and human agency for the redistribution of power’.23 Thus notions of power and control are of fundamental importance to contemporary studies of disaster — who controls information, and thereby has the power to produce the meaning of a particular event? These meanings are often inflected by issues of social class or gender, such as in Susanna M. Hoffman's reading of forms of disaster narrative that present catastrophes as assaults on Mother Nature's inherently nurturing qualities. Metaphors of ravaged, abused nature are part of a broader narrative that presents disaster as one stage in a cyclical movement towards rebirth and regeneration.24 In many cases it is the male and the masculine element that intervenes, and that saves feminized nature through its technological interventions. Indeed, such a narrative is inscribed deeply into Haitian literature's most widely read work: Jacques Roumain's classic 1944 peasant novel, Gouverneurs de la rosée. In this book, the natural disaster is a drought, which turns the land to dust, which in turn has clear connotations of death and sterility. The male hero figure Manuel returns to this scene of disaster and in order to reverse it evokes his essential (and racial) connection to the land, saying that he has the land ‘dans le sang’.25 As in Hoffman's reading of Mother Nature's nurturing functions in disaster narratives, Manuel frames the deforestation that has led to the long drought around a narrative of a mistreated, feminized land, naked and without protection.26 And, much as in Hoffman, it is the male, technological interventions — the discovery of a spring and the channelling of its waters to the barren land — that saves the land and Mother Nature, or indeed Mother Haiti. Roumain was not the first Haitian writer to figure nature and the feminized land as guarantors of authenticity, or as ‘the source of a national ethos’.27 From the earliest articulations of Haitian nationalism in the nineteenth century, nature was presented as a marker of authenticity; as the long disaster of deforestation in particular took hold, nature became, as in Roumain's novel, associated with images of abused womanhood: a feminine figure to be saved and redeemed by masculine interventions. Hoffman's conception of the feminized land is, however, complicated in Haiti and other Caribbean sites through the dimension of race. When Roumain's Manuel says that he has the land in his blood, that the colour of the land is that of his skin, he evokes a racial element that reinforces the masculinism that Hoffman critiques. In saying that the land is ‘le partage des hommes noirs’,28 Manuel indicates clearly the doubled and exclusive sense of ownership of land and nature, and hints at the colour and class conflicts that have long shaped relations to and representations of the land in Haiti. Many of Haiti's political struggles have turned around notions of the land and a troubled or incomplete sense of belonging. As the Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon says, it was the desire truly to inhabit the land that compelled the slave armies to drive the French colonizers from the land; the dream ‘de devenir maître du territoire qui avait été au départ constitué comme un lieu d'exil pour l'esclave’.29 Thus one senses, in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean, something of the close and complex imbrication of natural disasters with other, historical and social catastrophes.30 In a similar way, issues of mass urbanization, of central importance to disaster studies, are reflected and rendered even more complex in the case of Haiti. The urban theorist Mike Davis writes of the ways in which mass urbanization transgresses notions of environmental common sense, so that what he calls the social construction of natural disaster is largely obscured by a system of thinking that ‘simultaneously imposes false expectations on the environment and then explains the inevitable disappointments as proof of a malign and hostile nature’.31 Davis also writes of a ‘planet of slums’, of how since the 1970s slum growth has outpaced urbanization, and how in many cities of the Global South there has been in the same period a ‘rapid urbanization of poverty’.32 Drawing on a diverse set of urban sites, Davis speaks of slum-dwellers as ‘pioneer settlers of swamps, floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides, rubbish mountains, chemical dumps, railroad sidings, and desert fringes’, and of how such areas are ‘poverty's niche in the ecology of the city, and very poor people have little choice but to live with disaster’.33 In this sense, Haiti's slum-dwellers are part of a global population of the displaced and dispossessed, living with — and through — endless disaster. Slums, Davis writes, in a phrase that seems particularly applicable to contemporary Haiti, ‘begin with bad geology’.34 The bad geology that led to the 2010 earthquake lies in the Enriquillo fault system: the 2010 event is considered to be a re-rupture of the source zone of the major earthquake of 1701, and may indicate a new period of seismic activity along the Enriquillo fault system.35 Slums also begin with bad economics: in Haiti's case, the mass urbanization of the 1980s — the result of neoliberal agricultural measures that created, in Mark Schuller's terms, a ‘“reserve army” of unemployed, the lumpen-proletariat, justifying low-wage industrial jobs as beneficial to this desperate and vulnerable population’ — which led in turn to Haiti's food crisis, most notably the riots of April 2008.36 In fact, mass urbanization dates back at least to the US occupation of 1915–34 and the subsequent ‘hyperconcentration’ around Port-au-Prince, the intensity and scale of which are indicated in the 2010 population figure of 3 million, in a city built for 250,000; and in the population density in the slums: the shantytown called Jalousie in the Pétionville hills houses 43,475 people per square kilometer, and 80 per cent of the city's population lives on 20 per cent of the territory.37 In contrast to Anderson's statement that Latin American countries should not be understood as experiencing ‘unending’ disasters,38 one might say that Haiti does indeed exist in something of a state of permanent catastrophe. Such a perspective is expressed by Hurbon, who writes of a contemporary experience of relentless disaster in Haiti that implicitly calls into question the existence of any notion of ‘normality’ as a counterpoint to disaster. Hurbon speaks of a condition of ‘catastrophe permanente’ in Haiti.39 The frequent, apparently incessant occurrence of disasters in Haiti — from the floods in Gonaïves in 2004, to the 2010 earthquake, to the cholera epidemic, to Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac in 2012 — in effect destroys any notion of non-catastrophic normality so that the population ‘risque de tenir pour naturel chaque calamité’.40 There are important political dimensions to this condition of permanent disaster in Haiti, for as Hurbon argues disasters are ‘aubaines’ for politicians in that they give those in power a source of legitimacy, which they would not otherwise have.41 One important effect of living in permanent catastrophe is that the memory of even the most deadly events fades quickly and merges into a general sense of ongoing disaster, without beginning or end. Writing in 2012, Hurbon feels already that nothing happened on 12 January 2010, and that ‘un saut a été réalisé avec dextérité au-delà de cette date’.42 Hurbon indicates that the government is not interested in a public memorial for the 2010 earthquake and, as such, the disaster is not considered past, but part of the catastrophic present. The population exists, Hurbon says, ‘sans avenir perceptible’ and in ‘la condition d’êtres superflus (flottant entre la vie et la mort)'.43 This in turn has serious for notions of for to live with and in permanent catastrophe is to any time in which disaster was not a daily and to have sense of what was there that to be In the of state there a natural to and to the experience of natural disaster. experience is at and and contemporary and and as such, of disasters are in nature and Haitian disaster may be in this and other in that disaster at least in Anderson's of it, a political of such The of disaster Anderson says, the and of social and political power and a that to or political This to a among a that and is the for political The of time here — — suggests a teleological or dialectical movement that in It also suggests an to the disaster, in a teleological way. that Haiti in a state of permanent such a sense of and of an past, and is more to the political and effect of Haitian disaster is by the of the Haitian state The of the Haitian state were perhaps more than following the 2010 The long of state and in effect the of disaster to as they in Anderson's as the for political the of a coherent state reinforces the sense of living in permanent disaster, an that is in turn the fundamental condition of the diverse — — that some of Haiti's most and contemporary of its culture of The question of time is, the most significant of this culture of it the case of Haiti to the broader Caribbean, to the catastrophic of the presented by In terms, the notion of the natural convergence between time and for itself has in a sense in the Caribbean and in the broader For in a of but or as a of The the past, and the present is not as a of and for the of the of social and political The causes of the sense of historical are the of the in the Caribbean and elsewhere, of and the to of ‘the new of its of human and the and governmental to and its As writes, in the where has so to has become more more more at more in The of the of a and political and social in the Caribbean led to that live in The narrative of Caribbean and of time, has from the of change and to one of which as a of the In terms of time, to read Caribbean as is to question whether the be truly from the present. In place of the of time, presents ‘a of and in time and that any sense of the of past, and In many in Haiti it is not so much the as the that has been by many and as a means of the in which the truly been In some the between the and the between Haiti and other Caribbean — that is, more of degree than nature, of being or in an sense of the present as time. In terms, of narrative are means of historical — the of disasters, and as much as technological The of an is for in the is as to as is to political In reading of he that to the of by which we or order and that human experience of time is not but to a degree on how we or the of key in time is that of which is for a human a that is way of registering the that the is than of time, and are ways of sense of of and disaster, which are but to time and to to it, when and its narrative of change and have been by the to of time, and the ways one to in it — — and of an ongoing experience of when writes of the of disaster in relation to Haiti, implicitly of time, and of how to of it in relation to a space that has been cast for more than as a site of catastrophe. to Haiti or it in terms other than those of disaster should not the of scholars with disaster studies. As I have this new field of study to the understanding of disaster out of the of colonial and of postcolonial In from the causes and effects of catastrophes, disaster studies a new critical that in Haiti's case that the of its and culture be considered in relation to other cases in the Caribbean and As I have to disaster studies scholars have much to from the case of Haiti, for in the of and colour and the experience of permanent catastrophe. As the nation has and to have developed a culture of disaster is not at all to have created a culture.
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