Scripps Professor Miriam J.A. Chance discusses an account of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the plight of refugees – Orange County Register

Myriam J.A. Chance did not plan to write a novel about the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Chancy, Chair of the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, is a respected academic focusing on feminism and the history of Haiti as well as having written numerous historical literary works.

“I had no plans to write this novel,” says Chancesi, “What Storm, What Thunder,” now out of publisher Tin House. The novel shifts perspective into a new Port-Au-Prince character with each chapter, as readers plunge into the wreckage of a devastating earthquake and the physical and emotional toll that followed.

Chancy grew up in Canada, the daughter of Haitian immigrants and says she spent so much time in Haiti as a child that she often felt like her home.

“Every time I start a new creative project, I think, ‘I’m not going to write about Haiti this time,’” she says. “But you know a lot about a place and have emotional connections to it and the creative process allows you to tap into parts of yourself and your experience that you can’t benefit from as an academic and as a journalist. .”

“The way I think, my imagination is still deeply Haitian,” says Chancy, who will talk about the book with author Zenzi Clemons during a virtual event at Froman Library on October 11.

As an academic, she was constantly required after the earthquake to give lectures on Haiti. People will want to talk to her about what they have seen and experienced. “It wasn’t that they wanted me to tell their personal stories,” she says. But people were confiding in me their feelings about what happened. Three years later, I realized that I needed to write the novel.”

Chancy, who cited James Baldwin as an influencer, said she did not tell the real-life stories she had heard but only tried to “amplify the facts” of what happened.

“I wanted to record how people react. In news reports, you can’t really capture individual responses. Although it’s not directly present in the novel, I tried to portray how my friends and family who were in Haiti express their experiences,” she says.

Speaking recently by Zoom about the book, Chancy said that writing is eventually becoming a healing experience for her, but she hopes to make a different impact on American readers. “I try to create a feeling for the reader so that they can’t get away from what happened, so they practically feel it as if they were going through it themselves.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: The book begins with sadness and sorrow but turns toward anger as efforts to help suffering are poorly managed.

In the beginning for people who have lost loved ones, there is a long period of shock due to the number of people who have just disappeared. But with Reconstruction, many promises were made early on and dissipated very quickly. So much money went to Haiti that the average Haitian did not see much of it and their lives did not improve with this help.

Q: To what extent did your writings about women and the history of the region influence your novels?

Usually, there are a lot of things that I can’t express in academic work and it starts to nurture creative work. There is no real place for the outrage that Olivier’s character gives in academia. But the creative work is about engrossing the reader and hopefully they will end up feeling something new about a place or human condition.

Being a feminist in Haiti is not easy. Haitian society is highly patriarchal, and is structurally largely male-dominated. But the culture is run by women, who are the backbone of Haiti, even though they don’t have much power to effect change. I tried to capture that in the novel. Women must do a lot of rebuilding, not physical structures, but emotional structures, to keep family units going.

Women in the market are the least valuable but most visible part of Haitian society. I had an example of this with my grandmother, who was not considered someone who had done much in her life but left so much behind in the care of her family.

Give voice to the reality of women who are working hard to create better spaces in a place where they don’t want them to have a voice. I give women a greater voice in my work. With men, I either try to show a different version of masculinity, or show what happens in terms of masculinity.

s. With characters like Sarah and Olivier, who have lost their three children, it seems that the question shouldn’t be “How can you totally break down”, but rather, “How can you not?”

I tend not to use the word “resilience” about Haiti because people in the news expect that no matter what happens, people will survive. Oliver is a character who thought she had that flexibility, but he didn’t. That’s why I use the image of the “wazo”, a reed; Some people break out and sometimes people slowly disengage over many years from what they have seen or experienced.

This happened to many people. I had an uncle who had an earthquake in 2010; He later came to America but returned two days later. He had PTSD and at least there he felt surrounded by other people with PTSD as well, who were suffering the same way and you feel like you suffer to a lesser degree.

Q: You offer glimpses of hope towards the end. Worried it might ring false, especially given the events of this year?

In fiction, which is a contemplative space, I want to give some hope, although some Haitian readers have told me that there is a lot of hope.

I wanted something in between. I want people to leave with a new feeling that we need to pay more attention to the places where we hear about these disasters, and in nurturing more, we need to understand that there are people who won’t be able to recover from these traumas, whether they are physical or psychological. And there are people who will push themselves over the edge to bring others in. I wanted to leave the novel with a note of hope, but by the time you get to that note it comes at an enormous cost.

Q: You said that racism and “otherness” were the root cause of how quickly Americans stopped caring about the plight of Haitians after the 2010 earthquake. This still seems like a problem today.

I don’t know to what degree people in any administration are aware of the racial discrimination that is taking place. Some are very conscious – such as the classification under the last Bush administration of Haitian refugees as terrorist risks in official documents. It is still in the books.

Now, with 14,000 Haitians deported and we see Texas Rangers hunting down Haitian refugees near Rio, which looks like slaves and slave hunters. It’s shocking.

The way the United States deals with Haiti has not changed back with the Louisiana Purchase, and it’s very clear that it has to do with ethnic dynamics, including those within the United States. After the assassination [of Jovenel Moïse, the country’s president] In Haiti this summer, we heard the Biden administration talk about providing all kinds of support.

But while there were talks in 2011 about the Marshall Plan for Haiti, there was no such thing because the Marshall Plan involved respect for other countries — and these were Europeans, and they were our partners and we believed in their citizens.

This has never been the case for Haiti, especially when you consider that Haitians are being positioned in the global market as a cheap labor force, and that’s it. I hope that work like mine and others will eventually change the way Haiti is seen.

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