Archiving Narratives of Maternal Loss and Queer: Life in Haitian Fiction in the Wake of the 2010 Earthquake

Before the aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti subsided, writers had already begun to record their eye-witness accounts. These ‘provisional writings’ served as the basis for the creation of new literary archives as authors drafted, refined, and published their non-fiction accounts over time. Authors of fiction similarly imbued their fiction with details from life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, instilling an archival quality into their work. This chapter asks how fiction might serve as an archive. I examine how it preserves two specific narratives in the aftermath of the earthquake: Haitian mothers searching for their lost children, and the lives of queer and gender creative Haitians living in Port-au-Prince. I illustrate how fiction can record and center the lives of mothers living with the new realities imposed by the earthquake. I then focus on the depiction and portrayal of queer and gender creative individuals in novels that perform archival work by imagining and documenting individual walks of life in post-quake Port-au-Prince, preserving a record of queer Haitians’ lived struggle for visibility and acceptance.