As a point of departure, allow me to illustrate the idea of an “eco-archive” with a brief analysis of the above passage from Louis-Philippe Dalembert's L’Autre face de la mer, one of his earliest works and a stunning novel of twentieth-century Haiti. Dalembert depicts the tight relation between subjective experience and surrounding land and sea as sites of communal struggle against larger political forces. Grannie, the narrator of the first section, tells the story of her family’s journey, during the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), from Port-au-Prince across the border to the Dominican Republic, where her father took up work on a sugarcane plantation. Nearing the end of her life, Grannie marks the historical distance from this period by naming hurricanes, alleged by some, she remarks dismissively, to be “aussi fantasques et imprévisibles que nous” (31). Grannie understands so-called “natural disasters” as much for their periodic disruption of the delicate balance between human populations and non-human nature as for their capacity to delineate social boundaries between order and disorder. Grannie's narration might be read to go against the grain of what Mark Anderson refers to as a “modern grammar of disaster,” or the political mediation of catastrophic events whose syntax of control includes “key concepts such as risk, vulnerability, trauma, and normalization” (Disaster Writing, 20). Over time, Anderson continues, disasters do not so much disrupt the normal order of things as expose historical processes that have long left certain populations vulnerable. Grannie suggests as much when she laments that the Haitian people are said to be as “unpredictable” as hurricanes. In the Caribbean zone, the ferocious convergence of water and wind whips up a two-sided “natural” character in the people who suffer such force: they are helpless and resilient. Grannie is wise to these stereotypes, as she speaks truth to power with her own rhetorical move by personifying hunger and granting it an alarming agency. In her mind, this dire social condition will be more devastating than an angry ocean.

This chapter examines the literary witnessing of Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière. Consistent with the preceding chapter, it pairs testimonial texts and fiction (Danticat's Create Dangerously and Claire of the Sea Light, along with Laferrière's Tout bouge autour de moi and L’Énigme du retour) to consider the creative reconstruction of Haiti through its “living archive.” The critical literature on these two authors is voluminous. As such, after a brief comparison, the bulk of the chapter is devoted to Danticat. This decision is both practical and strategic. Camus plays a leading role in Danticat's Create Dangerously, and therefore I continue to analyze Haitian rereadings of the French-Algerian. In pursuing this lead, I am in good company. J. Michael Dash writes eloquently of Danticat being inspired by Camus's varied depictions of the solitary artist in pursuit of unbounded solidarity.3 More recently, Christian Flaugh underscores Danticat's admiration for friends of her parents in their secretive staging of Camus's play, Caligula, in Duvalier’s Haiti. “This particular popular theatre,” Flaugh contends, “revealed a transcultural performance practice by way of a twentieth-century French- Haitian traversée” (“Engaging Reality and Popular Performance,” 48). Flaugh's characterization of this intertextuality as a kind of crossing is richly suggestive of the historical and cross-cultural depths of the literary archives treated in this book.

This chapter focuses on a different Camus than the more uplifting figure resurrected by Lahens. Although both writers reflect on the ethics of the writer in times of crisis, Danticat evokes the Camus whose literature was celebrated by the Nobel Committee at the same time that his peers rebuked his political stance on the war in Algeria. Camus was beholden to the myth of the Mediterranean as a space of timeless humanism and hospitality. Yet the colonial setting would also induce a sense of alienation, a feeling of distance and estrangement that Camus famously explored in L’Étranger and the short stories of L’Exil et le royaume.

Yanick Lahens and Edwidge Danticat are literary witnesses to political and natural catastrophes and their unsettling effects on the experience of time and space. Part Two has drawn attention to the ways that each attests to overlapping temporalities of past, present, and future inherent to aftermaths. Their fictions shed light on communities that remain haunted by the shadows of political violence and that continue to struggle with deteriorating environments and economic deprivation. Lahens and Danticat write and rewrite stories of migration and refuge that are animated by an acute awareness of the dispossession of Haitian experience and a deep sense of environmental justice. Yet if their essays are bolstered by the desire to re-center the place of Haiti within the Americas and to critique reductive, politicized ideas of disaster, they also betray apprehension in the face of an obscured future.

Having considered the synergies of testimonial and creative writing, this final chapter returns to the imbrication of geological and human fault lines. In the introduction to this book, I suggested that questions raised in Failles offer a way to rethink the emergence of the Anthropocene and to check its increasing influence in academic and popular circles – indeed, one might say, its tendency to colonize these discursive spaces. Crucially, Lahens suggests that the well-being of humanity lies not simply in a future-oriented awareness of “our geological age,” but rather in the recognition of the unfinished “Age of Revolution” and the failure of Western European modernity to “humanize the black Man.” As opposed to the universal human of the Anthropocene, perceived to be outside the politics of difference, Lahens underscores the continuous history of subjugation and political and environmental injustice.

This chapter extends the opening analyses of Failles by arguing that the open-ended conclusions of Dalembert's Ballade d’un amour inachevé, Victor's Maudite éducation and L’Escalier de mes désillusions, and Pierre-Dahomey's Rapatriés go against the grain of two widespread narratives that shape the interpretation of disaster. The first is the humanitarian storyline, which I briefly summarize below before turning to the second – the narrative of declension proper to most, if not all, theories of the Anthropocene.

In the prologue to Dalembert's Avant que les ombres s’effacent, a historical novel that retraces the migration of a European Jewish refugee to Haiti during the Second World War, the narrator recalls Article 14 of Dessalines's Constitution of 1805. Along with Articles 12 and 13, it inaugurated a radical reconception of race and citizenship in the Atlantic world: “All distinctions of color will by necessity disappear among the children of one and the same family, where the Head of State is the father; Haitians will henceforth be known by the generic denomination of blacks.” Sibylle Fischer has underscored the many tensions that held together the early Haitian constitutions, among others, between universal and particular claims, between provisions for asylum and declarations of non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and between their national and transnational aspirations. Dalembert's narrator is less interested in historiographical nuance than in the legacy of freedom on Haitian soil passed down since the country's founding. As the narrator puts it, “Premier pays de l’Histoire contemporaine à avoir aboli les armes à la main l’esclavage sur son sol, le tout jeune État avait décidé lors, pour en finir une bonne fois avec la notion ridicule de race, que les êtres humains étaient tous des nègres, foutre!” (Avant que les ombres s’effacent, 11). It might very well have been a “foundational fiction,” more dream than reality, but the narrator does not give a damn. These constitutions were radical because they abolished slavery and established racial equality. For the narrator, this is the promise that future generations would take seriously.

The novel's prologue is meant to provide context for the remarkable, transnational journey of its protagonist, Dr. Ruben Schwarzberg, who is born in Lödz, Poland, flees with his family to Berlin, survives temporary internment in Buchenwald, is welcomed by the Haitian community in Paris, and eventually finds safe haven in Port-au-Prince in the fall of 1939.

As an archive in the dual sense articulated above – a collection of documents and a creative process that makes sense of the present by revisiting the past – the texts examined in Part One understand history as an invisible border of fluid temporalities and ever-changing environments. Published during the transition from the late stages of the Duvalier era to the Aristide years, they attest to environmental and ecological dimensions of historical migrations of Haitians. The principle of the archival function continues to inform the historical frame of this second section. In the transition from Part One, the eco-archive lives on, reread and updated, in the works of succeeding generations. To borrow from Stuart Hall, it is a “‘living archive,’ whose construction must be seen as an on-going, never-completed project” (“Constituting An Archive,” 89). Hall is influenced by Foucault's understanding of the discursive boundaries of the heterogeneous materials of the archive, which, as I reviewed above, are marked by the play between rupture and continuity. Hall adds a diasporic perspective, focusing in part on the question of origins and locations, to underscore the inherent incompleteness of archives. He writes:

It is impossible to describe an archive in its totality. The very idea of a ‘living archive’ contradicts this fantasy of completeness. As work is produced, one is, as it were, contributing to and extending the limits of that to which one is contributing. It cannot be complete because our present practice immediately adds to it, and our new interpretations inflect it differently. An archive may largely be about ‘the past’ but it is always ‘re-read’ in the light of the present and the future … (“Constituting An Archive,” 91–92)

Much like Jean-Claude Charles, whose protagonist in Manhattan Blues proclaimed that history always begins somewhere else, Hall draws on Walter Benjamin's concept of jetztzeit, or the constellation of past and present of the “now-being.” The danger, as Benjamin forewarned and as Hall recalls here, is to imprison the past in a single idea in the name of forward progress. As Hall conceives it, archiving is to contribute to a collection within a given cultural authority but also to contest it with a view to the future.