A Geography of Trauma

"Do you want to see the house?" We were driving up towards Petionville as the mid-afternoon rains started to mist the windshield. We drove past rows of painting that are mounted on the side of the road. In one, a the Marron Inconnu pulls the Haitian flag out of the crumpled National Palace; in another, dust settles on a post-earthquake destruction landscape. "Uh, sure. Why not?" I shrugged. I always wonder what they do with the paintings when it rains. Do they just leave them there? We turned off the main road, parked the car and got out. At the top of the driveway, he stopped. "This is where I stood in my boxers and called to report that there had been an earthquake." We continued down through the mist towards a small piece of land freckled with garbage, rubble, and few dumpsters. "And this was my house." I looked out over the emptiness. There was nothing there, but he spread out his arms. "Here's where the desk was, this where the wall fell down." Then he walked a few steps to the left."Over here, the kitchen. Here are where the stairs would have been, and here" he said, taking a few more steps and pointing to the sky, "was where my room was. I was sitting on my bed, right..about... here." He planted himself on the spot, defiantly alive and full of sadness.

The tour went on. I stood in the mist, kicking pieces of the kitchen floor and standing on top of a pile of rocks that used to form the walls. There were some shoes, a crushed video tape. "The landlords are happy. They've been wanting to tear this place down for years. They probably called America and asked for the earthquake just to get us out," he joked. He pointed to a flattened patch in the gray slum on the hillside and said that was where the church had been. "I knew it was bad because when I ran out, the neighborhood behind me was completely gone." We walked back up the drive way to the nearby hotel, which had stayed open after the quake despite that in certain parts the ceiling was elegantly cascading onto the floor. That's where he stayed for the weeks following the quake, sleeping in flowerbeds, writing reports, and feeling the terror of the first time with every aftershock that rolled through. As he told me his story, play by play, peppered with "This was where I was when...", I started to feel that I was full of ghosts. It's one thing to know that it happened, to know it was terrifying and that people were dying all around, for days. It's another to be standing on the spot with someone who points out the various places in eyesight that he saw people die. As witness to his rising anxiety, to the uneasy way he eyes the cracks in the walls, I was scoping out breadth and magnitude of that horrible moment with my heart. Standing there amid the ruins of his home, his loss of innocence could not be abstracted. It was on the ground all around him, beneath our feet. There is no good reason he survived, and he knows this.

I have known ruins. Despite the earthquake, the ruins of Port-au-Prince are still living. In fact, they maybe aren't ruins at all. They don't have the luxury of being ruins because they are still needed spaces. There is no where else for people to go, and so they live on top of, in front of, and even inside the spilled city. They are also soaked in living memory. Nearly every single fallen building is someone's profound loss of innocence, a place that full of someone's worst memories. With all these buildings taken together, we could compose a geography of collective trauma.