The World Is Moving Around Me

Dany Laferrière

4 ideas

1. Sixty Seconds at the Hotel Karibe

   On January 12, 2010, just before 5 p.m., Laferrière was at the Hotel Karibe in Pétion-Ville with the Haitian editor Rodney Saint-Éloi, in town for a literary festival, when a quake of about one minute leveled much of Port-au-Prince. He spent the following nights outdoors on the hotel grounds among other survivors, jotting brief observations in a notebook, and published those fragments as the book within weeks. It is a firsthand record of how people behaved in the first hours and days, before outside rescue and media narratives arrived.

2. Naming Catastrophe to Domesticate It

   Haitians quickly nicknamed the earthquake 'goudougoudou,' an onomatopoeia for the rumbling ground, instead of using the clinical word for it. Giving the event a playful, sound-based name turned an incomprehensible force into something that could be spoken of, joked about, and shared. It was a collective psychological act that restored some sense of agency.

3. Culture Survives When Infrastructure Collapses

   When buildings, institutions, and possessions are destroyed at once, what keeps a society standing is its intangible culture: songs, stories, humor, religious practice, and habits of mutual aid. Laferrière argues that Haiti's material poverty had forced people to invest in that culture, which is why survivors organized, sang, and cared for one another in the rubble instead of descending into chaos.

4. Reject the 'Cursed Nation' Frame

   Outside media tend to explain repeated disasters in poor countries as a curse or fate. That framing turns people into passive victims and hides both the concrete causes and the dignity and initiative of survivors. Laferrière counters it by recording small, specific acts, such as calm, silence, sharing, and neighbors digging out neighbors, so the people remain the subjects of their own story.

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