Vancouver Writers Fest: Myriam J.A. Chancy examines human resilience in What Storm, What Thunder
The Haitian-Canadian writer’s fourth novel is based on the 2010 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the island of Hispaniola
What Storm, What Thunder author Myriam J.A. Chancy is the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College.
Vancouver Writers Fest (October 18 to 24) presents Myriam J.A. Chancy in conversation with Barbadian author Cherie Jones on the topic of Caribbean masterpieces, moderated by Lawrence Hill, at Performance Works on October 21. Chancy will also appear at the Afternoon Tea with Linden MacIntyre, Casey Plett, Jael Richardson, Ian Williams, and Alix Ohlin, moderated by Bill Richardson, at Performance Works on October 24.
LATE IN THE afternoon of January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the island of Hispaniola, with its epicentre just 25 kilometres away from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The effects were immediate, and devastating. Hundreds of thousands of structures—from modest homes to cathedrals and legislative buildings—collapsed. A massive tsunami scoured the waterfront. And an estimated 300,000 Haitians perished; to this day the true number is unknown, and many thousands of deaths went unrecorded in what has come to be known simply as Douz.
These are the facts behind What Storm, What Thunder (HarperCollins Canada), the fourth novel from Haitian-Canadian writer and academic Myriam J.A. Chancy. From this dismal accounting, however, has come a marvellous book, one that’s insightful, illuminating, and even inspirational in its examination of human resilience and nature’s healing balm.
Chancy is perfectly placed to write this novel. In a way, she’s inside the story: having been born in Haiti into a family of middle-class professionals, she has close relatives who survived the earthquake and who have been intimately involved in their country’s ongoing process of reconstruction. Having grown up in Canada, however, she has the emigrant’s ability to make What Storm, What Thunder a big-picture overview, with action taking place not only in Haiti, but in the United States, France, and Rwanda. An esteemed academic and Guggenheim Foundation fellow, she brings the skills of a researcher to her depiction of the earthquake, its aftermath, and the injustices of the international response to Haiti’s tragedy, But, as she notes, she’s “a writer first”, and she also brings a brilliant sense of pacing to the otherwise complex framework of her story.
“I was fairly young, I would say, when I went to college and when I got my PhD, but I had been writing since childhood,” Chancy explains in a telephone conversation from Claremont, California, where she’s the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College. “And so the academic training gave me, I think, a kind of insight into the structure of novels, the structure of fiction, that maybe someone who wouldn’t have that training might have a harder time getting around. I think it really helped me to see what, for me, works in fiction and what does not—or at least what I wanted to emulate in my own work, or strive to do better as I continued in my writing.”
Chancy has specialized in the study of Afro-Caribbean women writers; her academic publications Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile posit “gender issues, race issues, [and] issues of the post-colonial condition” as key issues of concern for her predecessors and peers. But she also recognizes that Caribbean writing, in general, is as polyphonic as Caribbean music: the multi-voice narrative is a defining aspect of the region’s oral culture as well as its written literature.
In What Storm, What Thunder, that interweaving of narrative lines is especially complex. Chancy employs 10 different narrators, all linked by either proximity or blood, and while in her book the 2010 earthquake can be read as an extended metaphor for the prior cataclysm of colonialism and the looming one of climate change, she stresses that those interpretations are secondary to the human stories she’s chosen to tell.
Her aim, she says, is to focus on “the actual facts of 2010, and what did not occur in terms of reconstruction afterwards, in term of how individuals and of course the whole population have had to recover almost single-handedly on their own, despite the billions of dollars that went into Haiti for that reconstruction.
“I guess I’m wondering why there is a need to look for a different kind of metaphor,” she continues. “I mean, there are lots of metaphors in the novel that have to do with philosophical questions, [including] the question of being. How does a group of people think of their space in time? How do people think about death and their place in time when something like an earthquake shatters their sense of time? I think there are a lot of existential questions that the novel asks and refracts from the Haitian point of view that might be dissimilar from a European/Continental point of view, for example.”
It’s not that the past and the future have no place in the book. Chancy offers a clear explanation of how the international community’s long-standing attempts to stymie the success of Haiti’s late-18th-century revolution led to the infrastructural conditions that amplified the effects of the earthquake. She also stresses, in the least didactic way possible, that Haiti is already suffering from climate change, in terms of the deforestation and desertification of a former rain forest by international logging consortiums. Water, in fact, is the eleventh protagonist in What Storm, What Thunder, both as the destroying angel that sweeps the bottled-water tycoon Richard out to sea from an exclusive beachfront resort and as the ultimate source of purification and renewal for the elderly market woman Ma Lou and her extended family.
As this summer’s drought here in the Pacific Northwest has made especially evident, water is something that concerns us all. So while What Storm, What Thunder is explicitly aimed at humanizing the news reports that all of us saw in 2010, it also asks us to consider the fragility of our own lives.
“What I tried to do with those 10 voices was to not only give voice to so many people who we’ll never hear from—the 250,000 to 300,000 who died in the earthquake—but also to humanize Haiti and Haitians for readers, so that they could empathize and understand something more profound about the effects of the earthquake. And also maybe reflect on how they might respond to a disaster in their own community….What would we do if our city were to disappear, if most of the people were to disappear overnight because of a disaster?” she asks. “At the same time, I know that some of the readers, whether they’re Haitian or not, will have gone through personal losses or community losses. My hope is that they’ll find some peace or healing or refuge within the novel, within some of the characters’ experiences, so that it will speak to multiple audiences at once.”
For a full festival schedule and ticket information, visit Vancouver Writers Fest.
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