On January 12th 2010 a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti. The impacts of this event were catastrophic, more than 220,000 people were killed, 1.3 million people were made homeless and 1 in 5 people lost their jobs. However, despite these traumatic events the Haitian people “are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope down to hell” (Laferrière 32). In the memoir “The World Is Moving Around Me”, Dany Laferrière provides an intimate eye witness response to the events that occurred during the Earthquake and in the following weeks.
In my ASTU class, when discussing this memoir we identified Laferrière as both an insider and outsider to Haiti; he is a writer in Port-au-Prince for a conference, however, Haiti is where he was born and raised. He alternates between the pronouns “I” (as an individual, both Haitian and foreign) and “we” (both as Haitian people as a whole and as western cultures) in order to show his fluid identity; he can identify with both those who have experienced the traumatic event and those witnessing the event at home. In the section of “January 11” in the book Laferreière is asked by a reporter to show them Port-au-Prince, because they want “to see the city through [his] eyes” they want his “private” (131) Port-au-Prince. I believe that this is due to this duel identity. He understands what so many of the Haitian people are struggling with and why the Haitian people are able to continue with life so quickly after the earthquake (as a means of survival). However, he is equally knowledgeable of the Western stereotypes that surround Haiti. His awareness of these stereotypes is prevalent due to his lack of description of historical and cultural aspects in the book. He choses not to always accommodate western readers by not explaining the history of slavery, the colonization of Haiti or the current/past political state, aspects that are very important, which I was very uneducated on. It leads me to question how writers decide which cultural and historical elements in their work constitute as important enough to explain. Do the aspects in which they chose to explore represent their desires for the autobiography, do they want it to act as a counter-narrative, do they want to inform people of events or experiences or is it a personal story of success which hopes to inspire many others. These questions can be applied to the many genres of life narrative and can lead to research the responses to life narratives as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith do in “Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights”.
