The World Is Moving Around Me – an account that emphasizes the panoramic view the media gave of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake

At 4:53pm on January 12 2010, Dany Laferrière (a Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist) was having lunch in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake unexpectedly hit the country. More than 300,000 people died – Laferrière was one of the lucky ones that survived. In his memoir, The World Is Moving Around Me, each small entry is a snapshot of his native country before and after the earthquake. Laferrière captures different angles of Haiti, highlighting how Western journalists paint a general and bias portrait of his country; the scene after the earthquake was seen as a panorama; resulting in international aid instead of help strategies that are more sustainable – “The country needs energy, not tears.” (Laferrière 147)

A panorama is a picture containing a wide view of the whole region surrounding the observer. Describing the reports journalists give to the Western world on Haiti as panoramic, makes it easier to understand how doing this limits people’s awareness of all the different (positive) qualities of Haiti. A panorama is very broad, much like the common misconception that all there is to Haiti is being “cursed” (Laferrière 76); the West’s “two favorite words… ‘dictatorship’ and ‘corruption.’” An example of how a panoramic view was created was when his friend (a photographer), Ivanoh Demers took the moving photo of a “young man lifting his eyes to us as a mixture of pain and gravitas” (Laferrière 59) that went viral and became one the most famous pictures representing the Haitian people after the earthquake.

Having such images of grief as the only images other countries see inevitably makes foreigners see Haiti through one lens. Laferrière is not saying such views of hardships and loss aren’t true about Haiti, but stresses how it’s simply one side to the story. He shows people beginning to go about their daily tasks: shopping at the Caribean market (Laferrière 35) and getting their cars repaired (Laferrière 152) – Haitians have “the ability to find a solution when everything seems blocked” (Laferrière 31).

Thomas G Couser in his book, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemprary Lide Writing, uses the term “rhetoric of emancipation” (Couser 44) – a strategy that aims to ‘represent many lives that go unrepresented’ (Couser 45) in disability narratives. This concept can be applied to what Laferrière is doing in his memoir – representing the Haitian population as hard working and resourceful, instead of corrupt and helpless (Laferrière 76). In his entry, “The Mango Lady” (Laferrière 32), a woman is on the streets of Port-au-Prince selling mangoes only a day after the earthquake hit. This shows how resilient the people of Haiti are – “people are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope down to hell”( Laferrière 32)…a quality the media doesn’t show. Laferrière’s memoir could be seen as a form of “autoethnography” (Couser 46), which is a form of research where the author uses personal experiences to connect to a wider social meaning (Couser 46), which in this case could be how the media misrepresents developing countries as a single story of poverty and helplessness.

Laferrière explicitly highlights the media’s panoramic view of Haiti before, during and after the 2010 earthquake and ‘frees’ (with the rhetoric of emancipation) his people from being viewed in a single negative light by the rest of the world (by the West in particular). This is of value to us as scholars because it questions the ethics of international journalism and research – is it’s main goal to bring awareness and help the disadvantaged or to entertain their market? Laferrière opens up the debate of immorality in international journalism – a relevant issue in our increasingly globalized world.

Works cited:

Laferrière, Dany, and David Homel. The World Is Moving around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2013. Print.

Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2009. Print.

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