“It was on this day one year ago that a huge earthquake struck Haiti, the worst in that region in more than 200 years. The earthquake had a magnitude of 7.0, and its epicenter was in the town of Léogâne, about 15 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. Geographically, Haiti is a small nation — only about 10,000 square miles — and more than 2 million of the nation’s 10 million people were in Port-au-Prince. So the earthquake devastated the entire country.
The San Francisco Earthquake was caused by the San Andreas fault, which runs through California. Similarly, Haiti sits on a fault line between the Caribbean plate to its south and the North American plate to its north, called the Enriquillo fault. At first, everyone assumed that the Enriquillo fault was responsible for last year’s catastrophe — scientists had already predicted that the fault was poised for an earthquake. But last summer, scientists discovered that there is actually a previously unmapped fault that runs along the northern border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and it was this unknown fault, now called the Léogâne fault, that caused the earthquake in January.
Haiti was already in a tough position to be able to deal with such a massive disaster. Haiti was once a profitable French colony called Saint Domingue, filled with sugar and coffee plantations. The French made a fortune by importing slaves from Africa, who outnumbered colonists on Saint Domingue by 10 to 1. In 1791, the slave-led Haitian Revolution threw out the French colonial government. But after that promising beginning — winning its independence in 1804 — Haiti never really had a chance to establish itself. France demanded compensation from Haiti for the loss of labor and resources — an amount worth about $21 billion by today’s standards. It took Haiti until 1947 to pay off that debt. Leader after leader came through, trying to get Haiti back on its feet, but with such terrible debt it was always a lost cause. Haiti has had 22 leaders in 65 years, and various leaders exploited Haitians, put the country further in debt, and encouraged deforestation and overfarming.
In 1915, the U.S. invaded Haiti, and controlled it until 1934. In 1957, François Duvalier, or “Papa Doc,” was elected president. Papa Doc was a populist, and he gave more rights to poor black people, but he was also a brutal dictator. He passed on leadership to his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc.” Both of these dictators were backed by the United States because they were opposed to communism. In 1986, Baby Doc was overthrown, and Haiti was run by the military. A series of coups and military regimes followed, until Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1990, the first democratically elected president of Haiti. He was overthrown in a coup, reinstated, and then served out his term. His prime minister, René Préval, was elected president, served his term, and then Aristide was re-elected in 2000. But in 2004, he was overthrown again in a coup and forced into exile. After an interim president, Préval was elected for a second time, and served through last year. In 2008, a series of storms and hurricanes killed almost 800 Haitians. Even before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, with the average Haitian living on less than two dollars a day.
The earthquake completely devastated the country, and a year later Haiti is still working to recover. Although plenty of nations pledged foreign aid, it didn’t always come quickly — a lot of that money still hasn’t made it to Haiti. And in the days after the earthquake, with the whole country in chaos, it was almost impossible to get basic resources to people that needed them. Last November, a wave of cholera swept through the country.
The Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat (books by this author) spent her childhood in Haiti but immigrated to America when she was 12. She writes novels, short stories, and essays about Haitians and Haitian-Americans, books like Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and most recently, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010). She said: “From now on, there will always be the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. And after the earthquake, the way we read and the way we write, both inside and outside of Haiti, will never be the same. Daring to speak for the collective, I will venture to say that perhaps we will write with the same fervor and intensity or even more as before. Perhaps we will write with the same sense of fearlessness or hope. Perhaps we will continue to create as dangerously as possible. But our muse has been irreparably altered. Our people, both inside and outside of Haiti, have changed. In ways that I am not yet capable of describing, we artists too have changed.”
Danticat said she wishes that people would understand that there is more to Haiti, and to Haitians, than poverty and tragedy and political instability. She writes about the beauty of the land there, the warm, close families, the delicious food and beautiful art. She wrote a children’s book called Eight Days (2010), illustrated by the Haitian-born artist Alix Delinois. It’s the story of a boy named Junior who is trapped in the rubble of the earthquake for eight days, and survives partly because he spends his time thinking of all the beautiful things about Haiti, imagining something new each day. She wrote: “On the sixth day, I went to the countryside with my sister, like we do every summer. A warm rain fell and we went outside and jumped in all the puddles. We got soaking wet and muddy. We opened out mouths toward the sky and each caught a mouthful of rain.”
The Quirky Minority 