We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Writing the Post-Earthquake Haitian Body in Makenzy Orcel's Les Latrines.
- Authors
Munro, Martin
- Abstract
This article engages with post-earthquake Haitian writing, and the stakes involved for Haitian authors following 12 January 2010. Writing specifically about the 2011 novel by Makenzy Orcel, Les Latrines, I discuss in detail issues of style and language, and themes relating to the body and the porous border between the human and the animal. Acknowledging Orcel's debt to his Haitian predecessor Jacques Stephen Alexis, the article argues that the novel is not so much a homage to Alexis as a re-imagining of how Alexis might have written about present-day, post-earthquake Haiti. It argues that in terms of style and content, the novel reflects, however distortedly, a lived reality that is at the limits of the human, and in which the body becomes the primary, perhaps the only, means of exchange and communication, form of currency, and marker of identity. Orcel as ‘janitor’ or Janus himself sits between worlds; his characters are in a kind of limbo between catastrophic pasts and radically uncertain futures – a present marked by absence and lack.
- Subjects
HAITI Earthquake, Haiti, 2010; WRITING; EARTHQUAKES in literature; ORCEL, Makenzy
- Publication
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2014, Vol 50, Issue 3, p305
- ISSN
0015-8518
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fmls/cqu022