On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferrière had just ordered dinner at
a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He
survived; some three hundred thousand others did not. The quake caused
widespread destruction and left over one million homeless.
This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake
and its aftermath. In a series of vignettes, Laferrière reveals the
shock, rage, and grief experienced by those around him, the acts of
heroism he witnessed, and his own sense of survivor guilt. At one point,
his nephew, astonished at still being alive, asks his uncle not to write
about this, this being too horrible to give up so easily to those who
were not there. But as a writer, Laferrière can't make such a promise.
Still, the question is raised: to whom does this disaster belong? Who
gets to talk and write about it? In this way, this book is not only the
chronicle of a natural disaster; it is also a personal meditation about
the responsibility and power of the written word in a manner that echoes
certain post-Holocaust books.
Includes a foreword by Michaëlle Jean, UN special envoy to Haiti and the
former Governor General of Canada.
Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953. He is
the author of fourteen novels, including Heading South and How to
Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. His awards include the Prix
Médicis and the Governor General's Literary Award. He lives in Montreal,
Quebec.
