When the Haitian earthquake of 2010 first hits, Dany Laferrière describes how he initially “thought of those disaster movies and wondered if the earth would gape open and swallow us up” (15). Once the tremors are over, he notes how “We slowly got to our feet like zombies in a B-movie” (16). Laferrière’s ability to articulate the experience is directly gleaned from the popular imagination, and this opens up avenues to view Laferrière’s account as informed by popular culture. For my part, I’m interested in how The World is Moving Around Me dialogizes with apocalyptic narratives, prevalent in both fiction and non-fiction, film and literature alike.

James Berger, in his survey of representations of the post-apocalypse, notes how “historical events are often portrayed apocalyptically – as absolute breaks with the past, as catastrophes bearing some enormous or ultimate meaning” (xii). Laferrière distinctly recognizes the break in worlds between pre-earthquake and post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. “I understand now that a minute can hold the entire life of a city,” (62) he writes. Like the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, “something of unimaginable depth had occurred” (28).

But it is Laferrière’s remembrance-filled tour of the ruins that most connects him to the act of post-apocalyptic writing:

The writer and reader must be both places at once, imagining the post-apocalyptic world and then paradoxically “remembering” the world as it was, as it is. (Berger 6)

And like the post-apocalyptic narratives that “serve varied psychologically and political purposes” and in particular “put forward a total critique of an existing social order” (7), The World is Moving Around Me implicitly criticizes the class and politics of pre-earthquake Haiti; Laferrière is quick to point out that “For once, in this city ruled by social barriers, everyone moved at the same speed” (25). “For one night,” he writes, “the revolution had come” (30).

But the “study of post-apocalypse is a study of what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed” (Berger 7). For many science fiction narratives, Berger claims, it is “Human in its essence… is what these apocalypses unveil” (10). In George Romero’s Land of the Dead, the same petty jealousies that plagued the old world continue to mar human survival in the undead landscape. In Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, the survivors of a quarantined Scotland break into warring factions (some of which actively practice cannibalism). But for Laferrière it is, as Michaelle Jean notes in the foreward, culture that remains:

… when everything else collapses, culture remains. (Laferrière 59-60)

It is a positive portrayal, revealing that even beyond culture Laferrière believes in some goodness of the human spirit. His post-apocalypse, as short-lived as it may be, reveals a worldview in which humanity, stripped of its institutions and technology, does not revert to base animal instinct. The positive essence of humanity is unveiled through culture.