8 - Constellations of Primal Fear in Josef Haslinger's Phi Phi Island

Summary

THE EARTHQUAKES THAT shook the Indian Ocean region in the early morning of December 26, 2004 with a force of 9.3 on the Richter scale resulted in one of the worst natural disasters in centuries. The tsunami, which left about 230,000 people dead, is also one of the best-documented transnational media events since 9/11. Over the New Year transition period 2004–2005, countless amateur videorecordings were shown on the news programs. The immense interest, which was clearly radically different from the way the media dealt with other natural disasters such as the earthquakes in Iran in 2003 and in Haiti in 2010, was, on the one hand, a result of the large number of Western victims in this popular holiday paradise. On the other hand, the tidal waves triggered by the earthquakes happened to conform nicely to the visual requirements of television. The all-destructive force of the water and the fascinating images of a world turned upside down, a world in which the topological order seemed to be in disarray, triggered mixed feelings of shock, fear, pleasure, sublimity, and dismay that had audiences riveted to television screens.

Josef Haslinger's Tsunami: A Report from Phi Phi Island was not published until 2007, when the catastrophe had already disappeared from the short-term memory of the event-driven mass media. For Haslinger the situation was rather different. He, his wife, and his two children had spent their Christmas vacation on Phi Phi Don Island, on the West coast of Thailand, and had barely survived the tsunami. Haslinger's eyewitness account was written roughly two and a half years later and describes those experiences, “aimed at healing a physically and psychologically damaged self.” Even after such a rather long time the catastrophe was still very much present as an event that made it impossible for the Austrian intellectual Haslinger to return to normal life—in particular in a structured and purposeful writing process:

meine erinnerung an die flutwelle war wie eine barrikade, die mir in den weg gestellt war, obwohl ich sie eigentlich hinter mir lassen wollte. es schien keinen weg um diese barrikade herum zu geben. das vergangene lag hinter mir, aber es lag zugleich auch vor mir, es umzingelte mich. ich hatte ein schreibjahr in aussicht und begann mir gedanken über einen neuen roman zu machen. […]