ABSTRACT
A polyphonic and carefully intertwined account of one family's life, told by several voices and spanning across time, Louis-Philippe Dalembert's The Other Side of the Sea (2014 [1998]) hopes to capture the longer histories of violent departures, crossings and ruptures that shape life in the Caribbean. The conceptual and methodological insights offered seek to forge a critical vocabulary, contributing to a 'living lexicon' of living through and living after the violent manifestations of disasters. Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures is then one such contribution to this rigorously hopeful lexicon, one that can give 'words to refashion futures/like a healer's hand'. The 'region's problem', its hazardous history, captured in an illustrative and dryly ironic description, is the ongoing multi-scalar vulnerability – a knot of processes, practices, history and politics, omissions and neglect – that amplified the force of geological tremors and continues to render hazardous environmental phenomena deadly and disastrous.
