(Re)Reading the Ruins: Yanick Lahens’s Post-Earthquake Narrative Revisions

Abstract

Haitian author Yanick Lahens, while attempting to describe the unthinkable devastation of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, addresses the conundrum of the writer who faces such vast tragedy with the limited tools of language to exercise her craft and who must at the same time “write back” to a canon of clichés and reductive images that close Haiti into a discourse of disaster. Lahens published her account of the earthquake, Failles , in 2010, wherein she discussed the earthquake’s interruption of a fiction project she had begun before the quake. In 2013, she published that project as a novel entitled Guillaume et Nathalie . Lahens highlights the relevance of Haiti’s disaster and trauma narratives to the fields of trauma studies and postcolonial studies by foregrounding the ongoing process of remembering and representing trauma through rereading the disaster in her two works.

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