Q&A with Myriam J.A. Chancy, author of What Storm, What Thunder

interview by Emily Donaldson

(Myriam J. A. Chancy, Santa Monica, 2019 © N. Affonso)

Myriam Chancy’s tour-de-force fourth novel, What Storm, What Thunder (HarperCollins/Tin House, 2021), captures the 2010 Haitian earthquake kaleidoscopically through the eyes of a series of interlinked characters. Among them is Sara, whose husband abandons her in a Port-au-Prince IDP camp after all three of their children die as a result of the disaster; Sonia, who works as a prostitute in a tony hotel overlooking Port-au-Prince; Richard, the owner of a designer-water company, now relocated to Paris, who has returned to Port-au-Prince to attend the funeral of his daughter’s mother; and Didier, a Haitian musician struggling to make a living as a cab driver in Boston, who is forced to follow the events of January 12 agonizingly, from afar. At the heart of the novel is Ma Lou, a market woman whose reliable presence on the streets of Port-au-Prince has, until now, always provided its residents with the illusion of constancy.

Chancy was born in born in Port-au-Prince and raised in Haiti and Canada, where she attended Manitoba and Dalhousie universities. Having held several tenured professorships at various American universities, she is currently HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Chancy has won or been nominated for numerous awards for both her fiction, which includes 2010’s The Loneliness of Angels, and her trailblazing academic work focused on Haitian and Afro-Caribbean women’s literature. In 2014, she was made a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. She is also on the Board of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

(Safety Hazard/Graffiti, Pétion-Ville, 2011 © MJA Chancy)

What’s your connection to Haiti, past and present?

I was born in Port-au-Prince in 1970 to Haitian parents, both also originally from Port-au-Prince, but who met in France. I was surrounded by a large, doting family, which buttressed me from the political realities of the time and also anchored me in Haitian culture. Most of my cousins were young adults and had one set of grandparents and so I was nurtured on Haitian foods and way of life in ways that shaped my identity and understanding of the world, something for which I remain grateful for to this day. What I mean by this is that I was born into a majority Black society, which is a very different experience than being born into a world in which one is a minority. This has shaped my outlook as I've navigated Canada and the US, respectively.

In my early years, I was shuttled back and forth between Haiti and Canada. Ultimately, my parents settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba. We went back to Haiti every summer for extended periods. After that, I went back to Haiti only after the end of the regime, in my early twenties. I re-engaged with Haiti creatively around this time, and also as a scholar, as I had, by then, become a specialist in Caribbean women authors.

I returned to Haiti for several consecutive years after the earthquake, making connections between grassroots groups and US-based donors and institutions, for academic conferences, and also to see family members. My family is now very dispersed throughout the world, but Haiti remains a focal point. Even if I return less, Haiti will remain a North Star for me for both historical and personal reasons.

(Cathedral Ruins, Port-au-Prince, 2011 © MJA Chancy)

What were you doing when the earthquake happened in 2010? Did you have family and friends who were affected?

I was about to go teach a seminar at the university where I was teaching in the mid-South. I had had an eerie feeling all afternoon then received a phone call from a friend telling me that something had happened in Haiti. I had to go teach my class, so I didn't know what had happened for several hours. It was a very dark time. In my family, there was one direct death due to the earthquake and another family unit lost their home; some elderly family friends were displaced because their houses were destroyed and never returned to their homes. Many colleagues I had known through the Haitian women's movements lost their lives on that day.

It took about two weeks to track all our loved ones; even those who survived, without loss of life, limb, or housing were deeply affected. Some family members didn't leave their homes for weeks; others suffered from PTSD or developed other coping mechanisms, some of which were healing, some of which were not. I think that the sheer magnitude of the loss means that it was impossible not to be affected.

For me, it meant reliving previous moments in Haitian history, personal and national, when I/we had to wait to find out what had happened to family members. It was a shattering event, even for those of us who were not there physically, who consider Haiti home.

("I Want For Nothing,” Port-au-Prince, 2011 © MJA Chancy)

What compelled you to write a novel about it?

Well, I didn't plan to write this book. In fact, because I initially heard from people that I should write a novel about it, I refused to do so. What changed, for me, is that every time I gave a talk in the months and years immediately following the earthquake, Haitian audience members would come tell me their story afterwards, in Kreyòl, French, English, of those who perished, were never found, had survived, or fled. I concluded, after seeing the work of other artists in the Caribbean, particularly the work of painter Leroy Clarke, in Trinidad, after meditating on the realities in Haiti post-earthquake, that the stories that had been conferred to me in those early days after the earthquake were a responsibility that I carried. I needed to do something as a writer. Those who shared their stories with me, inspired the characters I developed, stories received from housekeepers, pool boys, businessmen, schoolteachers, artists, fixers, both in and out of Haiti, and sometimes in the most unexpected of settings. Listening, I realized years later, was a large part of the process of writing this novel. Those conversations fueled me when the work seemed too heavy to carry forward.

(Ruins, Jacmel, 2013 © MJA Chancy)

The novel has a circular structure based on the interconnectedness of its characters. When did you decide on this approach?

I think that the circular nature of the novel was less intended than in others of my works. My goal here from the onset was to be lean rather than expansive and to continuously bring the reader back to the historical moment of the earthquake, to not lose sight of this. In that sense, I think of it more like stitching, returning to the last thread and picking it up again. It took some time in the final drafts to organize the sections in a way that had an organic flow and to tease out the interconnectedness to make it more transparent. I think of the final organization as having concentric circles within circles; that’s a little more opaque, probably, to the reader, but some of the sections respond to one another spatially in terms of family connections.

(Dignity: Wash Day, Port-au-Prince IDP camp, 2011 © MJA Chancy)

How did you come up with your characters’ individual stories? Are some composites?

Some survivors told me their stories, or those of family members, in passing, usually after Q&A, in brief, fleeting encounters after I was giving talks or readings, sometimes at the side of pools or in conversation if I was in Haiti, or elsewhere doing the work of connecting groups to one another. I wasn’t taking notes on what anyone shared with me since I wasn’t planning on writing a novel or doing anything with those stories. I was thus left only with fleeting impressions and maybe a memory of a striking description or situation, some of which informed aspects of the stories I created in the novel. Nothing that was someone else’s story to tell was taken into the novel. Only one storyline is more concrete—that of the hotel survivor—but only this fact remains in the story I told: that he survived the hotel falling and was of Caribbean origin. The rest is fiction, down to that character’s nationality and backstory.

(Girl walking by débris and street salesman near fallen parliamentary buildings, Port-au-Prince, 2011. © MJA Chancy)

Haiti only seems to penetrate the headlines during dramatic, catastrophic events like the earthquake, or the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Your novel, on the other hand, focuses on the lives of everyday citizens. What do you wish non-Haitians knew about your birth country and its people?

Haiti is a beautiful country. Haitians are a very proud people who know the depth of their history as the first (Black) Republic in the Western Hemisphere. It is a culture rich in literary, musical, and visual arts in ways that defy the constraints imposed upon it precisely because it is a country born from the sweat and perseverance of a formerly enslaved population that created the grounds for a new society which hoped to be unconstrained by racial or ethnic difference. Of course, in the current world, it has not been possible to uphold those foundational ideals: Haitian society is beset with classism and colorism. Nonetheless, I know of no other country of majority African descent so rich in spirituality, in history, in artistic production, where the grassroots and general population strive to improve the lives of the collective over the individual, following in the West African concepts of the "konbit" (collective organization) and the "lakou" (yard), in which the group is more important than the one.

Haitian people are human like people anywhere else, experiencing daily difficulties, fragility and sometimes impossible impasses. What I hope my book conveys is the roundness of the Haitian experience, that the everyday can be alternately and at once, heartbreaking or inspiring.

(Papier Maché Bowls, Jacmel, 2013 © MJA Chancy)

Market women play a significant role in the lives of your various characters. Can you talk a bit about them?

Well, my mother's grandmother, my great-grandmother, was a widowed market woman so I grew up hearing a lot about her from my mother directly. She was a very tough, stern, no-nonsense woman. She was also successful enough, over time, that she had a stall in Port-au-Prince's steel market, and employed a number of other women. She even purchased her own home in a lower-middle-class area of the city, close to the Cathedral, which housed her daughter and four grandchildren. My mother's mother was a seamstress and the two raised my mother and her siblings through this humble work. Theirs was a woman-led household and I learned from this a great many things about how Haitian society revolves around women's work and the fortitude of women.

More generally speaking, though, market women—known as "madan sara"—are ubiquitous both in the markets and the streets of any city and town in Port-au-Prince. They are the women from whom most people get their food staples and household goods, even as larger supermarkets have been built, especially in the Capital. The market is where one goes for daily foods but also to talk to people, to see what is going on. It's a social, even political, lifeline.

Market people are often dismissed as too simple, yet these are women who provide for families out of nothing, who know more about global economics than outsiders imagine because they have to understand the flow of markets in order to stay on top of their own small businesses, to know why certain things are selling or not at any given time, to pivot to other wares if they must. These women were not consulted [after the earthquake], and so I wanted to make them central to the experience of the novel, as they are central to the society, as my great-grandmother was central to my own mother's ability to have a future. I wanted non-Haitians, but also Haitians, to consider these women and their role in the society, to honor them in some way.