Myriam J.A. Chancy
Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disaters
(University of Texas Press, October 2023)
This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake.
The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster.
In Harvesting Haiti, Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti’s post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians’ historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Praise for Harvesting Haiti
—Célucien L. Joseph, Indian River State College, author of Thinking in Public: Faith, Secular Humanism, and Development in Jacques Roumain
—Marisel C. Moreno, University of Notre Dame, author of Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art
Myriam J.A. Chancy, Ph.D. (Iowa) is a Guggenheim Fellow, and Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of the Humanities Chair at Scripps College. Chancy is the author of the award-winning book, What Storm, What Thunder (Harper Collins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), which was named a Best Book of Fall 2021 by Time, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, The Chicago Tribune, Vulture, Good Housekeeping, LitHub and Harper’s Bazaar and was awarded the American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. WS, WT was also shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Caliba Golden Poppy Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize & Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is the author of a new book of critical essays on the post-earthquake situation, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (UTexas Press, 2024), and the 20th anniversary edition of her first novel, Spirit of Haiti, a finalist for the Canada/Caribbean region Commonwealth Prize 2004 appears fall 2024 with SUNY Press. Other academic publications include: Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (U of IL Press, 2020), From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba & The Dominican Republic (WUP 2012), Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers 1997), and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple 1997), which won a Choice OAB Award. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels (winner of the Guyana Prize 2011), The Scorpion’s Claw; and Spirit of Haiti. Her novel, Village Weavers, will be published by Tin House Books in 2024. Her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature, and Guernica. She is a frequently invited guest speaker, delivering talks and creative readings on the subject of Caribbean, Haitian and social justice issues.