On Jan. 12, 2010, Montreal journalist and novelist Dany Laferrière was having dinner with a friend at a Port au Prince hotel when he heard what he thought was a “terrible explosion.” What he actually heard were the first effects of a 7.3-magnitude earthquake hitting the region, levelling or severely damaging many of the city’s concrete structures, including the Presidential Palace. The final death toll was estimated at 300,000 – a staggering figure, especially for a small nation.

Laferrière and his companion escaped without injury, only to find themselves in a landscape of suffering and destruction where survivors desperately searched for loved ones and, as time went on, food and water. The author captures his experiences in a memoir based on journal entries he wrote while in Haiti before, during, and after the quake, and on a return visit to the country a short time later to attend his aunt’s funeral.

Laferrière was in his native country on that first trip for an international literary festival, and he recalls his excitement about the unexpected attention the event received. “For the first time,” he writes, “literature seems to have supplanted politics in the public mind. Writers are on television more often than elected officials, which is rare in a country with such a political temperament.” Laferrière was also excited about introducing several Quebecois writers to the Haitian populace, a dignified, hard-working people too often overshadowed in the media by stories of government corruption, poverty, hurricanes, and exotic religious practices. The earthquake seemed only to confirm Haiti in the eyes of the world as a place suffering under a supernatural curse.

Though his experience as a journalist serves him well in observing the country’s trauma and halting recovery, Laferrière anchors the memoir in subjective experiences and conclusions. This narrative strategy is intentional and well chosen: the disaster, he tells us, fractured his sense of a fixed self in a changing – but ultimately predictable – world. “For ten seconds, those horrible ten seconds, I lost what I had so carefully accumulated all my life,” Laferrière writes. “The veneer of civilization that I’d been inculcated with went up in smoke – a cloud of dust like the ruins of the city. All that took ten seconds. Is that the true weight of civilization?”

The author writes from inside the darkness of the disoriented self, a darkness he shares with other survivors – his mother, sister, and extended family, and the artists, journalists, and other Haitians he encounters. Those dialogues and records of human interaction often expand into reflections on Haiti’s history, culture, and politics, or memories of Laferrière’s childhood and early years as a journalist, a profession that brought him and many of his generation under the eye – and often the gun – of the oppressive Jean-Claude Duvalier regime. (Laferrière was forced to flee Haiti in 1976.)

Laferrière’s elegant prose is tinged at times with a bitterly ironic tone, as in this description of the terrible destruction visited upon Port au Prince: “The earthquake attacked what was hard, solid, what could resist it. The concrete fell. The flowers survived.” In another scene, in which Laferrière risks a return to the damaged hotel dining room to search for food, he honestly captures the survivor’s feelings of guilt and primitive wonder:
“The breadbasket is sitting where we left it. I feel like I’m stealing an offering from the gods.”

Laferrière avoids the comforting neutrality of numbered body counts when considering the scale of loss. “Figures are bandied about. It’s all so abstract: 100,000 or 200,000. Add or subtract 10,000 dead, as if each death wasn’t worthy of particular attention. All that is designed, of course, to keep you from going crazy. No one wants to be the first to go running naked down the street.” Here, as in many passages, Laferrière shades his work with mordant humour and images of surreal horror. Some might argue that such a literary treatment is inappropriate when chronicling human suffering, but Laferrière’s subjectivity and highly personal writing style ultimately demonstrate that each of the hundreds of thousands of lost lives is, in fact, “worthy of particular attention.”

With all of its stubbornly idiosyncratic twists and turns, Laferrière’s moving memoir resists the levelling, numbing flow of disasters that have befallen Haiti since its revolutionary birth in 1804. The work also goes a long way in answering a distressing question its author raises early on: “What is the value of culture in the face of a disaster?”