5 - Literature of Reconstruction: An Architextual Assessment of Post-Earthquake Haiti in Yanick Lahens's Failles and Guillaume et Nathalie

Summary

[C]onstruire une ville est une opération […] ambitieuse […]. Sur le plan simplement technique, cela exige un savoir-faire qui requiert la présence de plusieurs corps de métier. Le matériau le plus important, c'est encore l'esprit.

Dany Laferrière, Tout bouge autour de moi

Les formules toutes faites, les prêts à appliquer ne sont pas qu’à jeter, mais nous ne pouvons pas oublier que c'est nous qui allons vivre ici, nous ne pouvons pas oublier que nous portons une histoire dont nous reconnaissons les erreurs et les accidents, mais qui reste cependant le ciment entre nous et peut nous aider à remettre en question, redéfinir, sans oublier, sans faire table rase.

Emmelie Prophète, “Cherchez la faille”

Major events such as earthquakes inevitably invoke new experiences of lived reality, which in turn lead, again almost inevitably, to generic tensions, the sense that texts are in active, at times abrasive and discordant relationships with genre.

Martin Munro, Writing on the Fault Line

In Maximin's L’Île et une nuit, the house of the solitary protagonist, Marie-Gabriel, is besieged over the course of one night by a hurricane's gale-force winds and rain. As demonstrated in Chapter 4, the external forces battering the Maison des Flamboyants from the outside are paralleled by a bevy of equally powerful forces that, in the form of latent intertexts found throughout the house, effectively threaten to compromise the protagonist's position from the inside. For this reason, the scope and trajectory of L’Île is exceptionally concise. As a narrative of resistance, the text is limited to a specific space within what is furthermore the precise time frame of the storm's passing. In fact, given the closely intertwined and codependent nature of the house's and inhabitant's respective struggles for survival, the narrative itself can be considered to exist conditionally—on the basis of Marie-Gabriel's and Les Flamboyants’ survival of the storm. Hence, when, in the seventh and final hour of the hurricane, the house collapses and Marie-Gabriel emerges, alive, from the rubble, the narrative comes to an end.

As might be expected, then, the narrative of L’Île provides scarce details as to what Marie-Gabriel will do next. In short, these aspects of her (and the house's) future, it would appear, fall outside of the text's purview as a narrative of resistance.