ABSTRACT
The 12 January 2010 earthquake in Haiti 'caused' the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives and futures. The fictional and non-fictional accounts of the 2010 disaster, through their polyphonic form and sharing, to a varying extent, in their thematic preoccupations and ethical motivations, draw the reader into the experience of the earthquake. The exploration of the multiple histories of the 2010 earthquake and the many roots of the January disaster, as well as their quotidian and abrupt manifestations to which many of the narratives of the 2010 earthquake testify, 'hinged chronologies' of the disaster. Narratives of the 2010 tremors give expression to and articulate the deeply heterogeneous lived experience of this extended temporality of the disaster and its longer histories. The process of narrativising the January tremors then becomes a search for a form and language which can approximate this testing experience and communicate the particularity of these at once local and global, hinged Caribbean histories of disaster.
