American Disaster Stories: Unearthing Reality in Évelyne Trouillot’s Absences sans frontières

Abstract

In a jarring instant, the attack on the World Trade Center ushered America and the world into the post-9/11 era. Likewise, in a matter of minutes, a devastating earthquake embedded January 12, 2010 in Haitian collective memory as a catastrophic day of loss. In juxtaposing the attack on the World Trade Center with the 2010 earthquake, Évelyne Trouillot’s 2013 novel, Absences sans frontières, invites a comparison that asks how catastrophe is lived on local and international levels. Framed within a discussion of Disaster Studies, this article considers how catastrophic events in both the United States and Haiti are experienced in the novel and what impact catastrophe plays on the Haitian imaginaire. Trouillot’s investigation of catastrophe considers how international disaster is experienced differently within Haiti and the United States revealing Haitian attitudes toward catastrophic events whose horrific singularity are contradicted by their seemingly incessant recurrence. Indeed, the reality that Trouillot depicts follows a cycle of cover-up and discovery powered by an interplay between image and disaster: catastrophic events uncover artifice while photos distort and obscure reality. This article considers what the reality unearthed by disaster in Absences sans frontières reveals about relations between the U.S. and Haiti and to what extent disaster influences these relations.

Keywords:

• Évelyne Trouillot
• Absences sans frontières
• Disaster Studies
• 2010 earthquake
• September 11^th
• Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Notes

Notes

1 Still, Munro warns that disaster is, “an ideologically charged concept, related to long-standing conceptions of Haiti as a failed, ill-starred nation, for example in political or religious discourse, where it may be used to justify Western economic, military, and political interventions” (1–2). So, while we may consider the impact of disaster on Haitians, it would be rather short-sighted to view Haiti itself as destined for disaster (see Jenson, Deborah. “The Writing of Disaster in Haiti: Signifying Cataclysm from Slave Revolution to Earthquake.” Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro, UWI Press, 2010, pp. 103–110).

2 This repetition of the number twelve is taken up in Makenzy Orcel’s text Les Immortelles. The earthquake itself is only mentioned euphemistically, as cette chose (10), and the number twelve appears throughout the text.

3 Laferrière, Dany. Tout bouge autour de moi. Paris, Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2011.

Lahens, Yanick. Failles. Paris, Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2010.

St. Eloi, Rodney. Haïti kenba la!. Neuilly-sur-Seine, Michel Lafon, 2010.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Sapp

Robert Sapp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies at the College of Charleston specializing in literature from the Francophone Caribbean and Québec. His current research focuses on the expression of the past in contemporary Haitian novels. His work appears in French Review, The Journal of Haitian Studies, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Romance Notes and The New Zealand Journal of French Studies.