Content area
Full Text
Fault Lines: Views across Haiti's Divide. By Beverly Bell, with foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8014-7769-0. 256 pp. $18.95 paperback.
Review by Mark Schuller
Haiti's 2010 earthquake has inspired at least two dozen books in English so far. Charles Forsdick has published an excellent review of this now crowded field.1 Four years after the earthquake, particularly after another season of mega-disasters that included Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines, Haiti fatigue has set in. It is no longer enough to publish on Haiti, or even the earthquake. Scholarship has to contribute more broadly relevant ideas, and ideally should contribute to the construction of new narratives, as Gina Athena Ulysse implores us to do.2
When the rubble clears, Beverly Bell's Fault Lines will remain an essential text, a useful archive of the many "ordinary" and quite extraordinary Haitian people and theiryoun-ede-lot (helping one another), their activism, and their visions for a better Haiti. As Edwidge Danticat concludes in her foreword:
There is rarely a representative of grassroots urban or rural sectors in the international commissions and panels that will decide the future of the country. In this book, thankfully they too are heard, not as victims or beggars, but as selfreliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti, and without whose full inclusion and participation the country will never fully succeed, (xiii)
Bell's conversations with hundreds of such grassroots activists in the earthquake's immediate aftermath constitute the strength and major contribution of Fault Lines. Bell, a solidarity activist whose work in Haiti began in the 1980s, had a unique ability-and responsibility-to write this book. The stories were first published on scores of blogs, including the Other Worlds website, and were reposted on sites like Huffington Post. Some of the most widely circulated...