Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 by John Patrick Walsh

Abstract

Reviewed by: Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 by John Patrick Walsh Robert Decker Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017. By John Patrick Walsh. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. ISBN 13: 9781786941633. 254 pp. £90.00 hardcover. John Patrick Walsh's book Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature represents a new and important approach to Haitian literary studies at a moment when an increasing number of scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with existing models of postcolonial scholarship. Although, as the title suggests, Walsh primarily examines narratives of human displacement, he breaks away from conventional paradigms of hybridity and identity formation by centering questions of political ecology. The book addresses the imbrication of ecological, geological, and social catastrophes in Haitian literature during a period beginning in the final years of the Duvalier era and continuing into the contemporary moment. Drawing inspiration from Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence," which designates "a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all," Walsh proposes to read Haitian literature as what he terms an eco-archive.1 "At its most basic," he explains, the eco-archive "denotes a body of literary texts that depict ecological change over time and its impact on matters of social and environmental justice. The prefix 'eco' refers to the shared, lived space of ecological problems, between humans and non-humans, and 'archive' to the accumulation of texts that reveal overlapping histories of past and present" (3). As this book convincingly demonstrates, contemporary Haitian literature portrays social and environmental catastrophes such as the violence of the Duvalier regime or the 2010 earthquake not as discrete, exceptional events but rather as part of the longue durée of Haitian history. Walsh's study begins with a quotation from Yanick Lahens's Failles (2010), a narrative of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. The prominent position of Lahens's account centers the disaster within Walsh's book (indeed, the central section, Part II, engages with explicitly postseismic texts), and this focus on the heavily mediatized event of the earthquake might seem to contradict Walsh's stated interest in more expansive models of time. However, Lahens's elaboration of the concept of the fault line gestures beyond the immediate effects of the earthquake itself and comes to serve as a central critical metaphor in Walsh's work: whereas the disaster itself takes on the character of a discrete event, the underlying fault line belongs to a time-scale of wholly different proportions. Furthermore, as Lahens [End Page 144] argues and Walsh underlines, the earthquake "exposed a crosshatching of social, economic, and political fault lines" (2) that likewise belong to deeper histories that radiate outward and come into relation with broader narratives of globalizing modernity. The geological fault line responsible for the seismic event in 2010 thus connects with dividing lines of human invention: the class lines separating the wealthy Haitian elite from their impoverished compatriots, the forbidden shorelines of the United States' southern coasts, and the color line that continues to fracture societies of the greater Americas well into the twenty-first century. This understanding of ecology as including both human and nonhuman actors and involving a set of histories more conventionally understood as the purview of the social sciences may surprise readers expecting an ecocritical perspective focused on literary descriptions of plants, animals, or landscapes. However, the expanded scope of Walsh's conception of the notion of ecology constitutes one of the great strengths of this book. His comparative reading of Lahens along with philosophers such as Michel Serres and Bruno Latour convincingly indicates "the gap between the environmentalist concerns of European and North American writers and those in the Caribbean" (9) and provides a valuable corrective to more Eurocentric notions of ecocriticism that assume a homogenous understanding of humanity and the way it interacts with the environment. In Part I, "The Eco-archive," Walsh reflects on the ways in which Caribbean thought has postulated the sociocultural ramifications of a history of human migration, beginning with the...