Chapter 28 - Archiving Narratives of Maternal Loss and Queer Life in Haitian Fiction in the Wake of the 2010 Earthquake

Summary

Before the aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti subsided, writers had already begun to record their eye-witness accounts. These ‘provisional writings’ served as the basis for the creation of new literary archives as authors drafted, refined, and published their non-fiction accounts over time. Authors of fiction similarly imbued their fiction with details from life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, instilling an archival quality into their work. This chapter asks how fiction might serve as an archive. I examine how it preserves two specific narratives in the aftermath of the earthquake: Haitian mothers searching for their lost children, and the lives of queer and gender creative Haitians living in Port-au-Prince. I illustrate how fiction can record and center the lives of mothers living with the new realities imposed by the earthquake. I then focus on the depiction and portrayal of queer and gender creative individuals in novels that perform archival work by imagining and documenting individual walks of life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, preserving a record of queer Haitians’ lived struggle for visibility and acceptance.