Myriam J.A. Chancy, WHAT STORM, WHAT THUNDER
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[0:38]Miriam J. A. Chancy is the author of What Storm, What Thunder, A Novel.
[0:42]Miriam is a Haitian, Canadian, American writer, the HBA chair in the humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California,
[0:49]and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
[0:53]Welcome, Miriam.
[0:54]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
[0:57]To discuss What Storm, What Thunder?
[0:59]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:00]It's gonna be, I've been following your podcast, and I love it.
[1:03]I'm really happy.
[1:04]And you're the first podcast or two.
[1:06]Contact me about What Storm, What Thunder, so I really appreciate your attention to it.
[1:10]Yeah.
[1:11]Wow.
[1:12]You're the first person to book us.
[1:13]You know, I have to jump on the good things.
[1:15]I don't know what to say.
[1:16]I just, you know, I know a good thing when I see it.
[1:19]I'm so happy to hear it.
[1:21]Oh, that's awesome.
[1:22]I do like the advance notice.
[1:23]It's good to, you know, book.
[1:25]Anyway, whatever.
[1:26]Delighted.
[1:27]Delighted that that happened.
[1:28]Would you mind telling listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?
[1:33]Which in the space?
[1:34]Sure.
[1:35]Fairly obvious.
[1:36]But anyway, keep, you tell them.
[1:37]Yeah.
[1:38]I'm, so I'm originally from Haiti and from Paul Price.
[1:42]And, you know, the earthquake of 2010 was really shattering for, you know, people,
[1:48]in Paul Price for my family, acquaintances and colleagues.
[1:52]And I spent several years, I'm also an academic.
[1:55]I'm a scholar of Caribbean literature and Haitian women's literature specifically.
[2:00]And so I was known for having written on those topics.
[2:02]And so I was booked for a lot of talks about best practices,
[2:06]what would happen to vulnerable communities after the earthquake of 2010,
[2:10]which killed upwards of 250,000 people and left 1.5 million people homeless.
[2:16]And I wasn't planning to write the novel at all.
[2:19]You know, I had another novel come out in the UK in 2010,
[2:23]which was about a hurricane season, which had been devastating around 2004.
[2:27]And I really did not have writing a novel on my mind at all,
[2:31]especially because, you know, at that time,
[2:33]we were really just in the process of helping survivors, you know,
[2:36]with, you know, all the material needs that people had and also grieving, right.
[2:41]And but every time I gave a talk, people, especially Haitians, you know,
[2:45]who had survived would come and talk to me about their experience of the earthquake
[2:50]or who they had lost.
[2:52]And, you know, several years later, I was actually in Trinidad,
[2:56]speaking to Trinidad in painter Lior Clark,
[2:59]who unfortunately just passed away a couple of weeks ago,
[3:01]elderly painter sort of a national treasure in Trinidad.
[3:05]And he had been painting as a result of the earthquake,
[3:08]he had been moved to continuous series.
[3:10]He had started at the end of a Duvalier regime in 1986.
[3:13]It was a large scale painting.
[3:15]He had started but never finished.
[3:17]And then after the earthquake, he started a series.
[3:19]And when I saw his paintings,
[3:21]he was at 77 and he went on to paint, I think, 111 paintings.
[3:26]And he didn't quite know what they meant.
[3:28]And when I came into his studio, I just started weeping.
[3:31]And he said, what do they mean?
[3:33]And I started telling him what I saw.
[3:35]He had never been to Haiti.
[3:37]He had never met Haitian painters.
[3:39]He's not studied Haitian painting,
[3:41]but they really spoke to me about what was happening in Haiti.
[3:44]And so when home from Trinidad,
[3:46]and I just started thinking, what did this mean for me?
[3:49]And the novel just came, an outline for the novel, the characters.
[3:53]And I'm sure that part of a process was just be accumulated knowledge,
[3:57]but I had gathered all those years of giving talks,
[4:00]listening to others, my own experiences going back to Haiti
[4:04]from 2011 forward.
[4:06]It just coalesced into a sort of clear message
[4:09]about what I needed to do.
[4:11]In a sense, it was like people were telling me various stories
[4:14]because I was a writer, but until I met Leroy,
[4:17]I didn't get the message that, you know,
[4:19]your writer, you should do something, you know, on our behalf.
[4:22]And that's what I ultimately did.
[4:24]So I started writing in 2013,
[4:26]which was several years after the earthquake.
[4:28]And then it took me several years to write it.
[4:31]And so were the stories in the book about all the different characters?
[4:34]Were any of them real or were they based on composites or?
[4:38]No, none of them are real.
[4:40]The only, you know, seed that is factual
[4:44]was that I did meet someone who survived the falling of a well-known hotel
[4:49]in Haiti, where most of the people who were reported
[4:52]as surviving that hotel were UN and NGO workers.
[4:57]And he and the person I met was a person of color
[5:00]and I had not heard of anyone in the hotel who was of color,
[5:04]who was Haitian surviving.
[5:06]And he didn't tell me a lot of information.
[5:08]Just I was there, I survived.
[5:10]It changed my life.
[5:12]And that when I got to writing a spawn three characters,
[5:16]Sonia, who is a sex worker in the hotel,
[5:19]Giudone, who is a fixer and her best friend,
[5:21]and both of them think of themselves as M,
[5:24]which is the categorization for queer in Haiti,
[5:27]and then Leopold, who is trapped in the hotel itself
[5:31]and is Trinidadian.
[5:32]And so that was also my homage to Trinidad and the connection to Trinidad.
[5:36]Did Leopold or Leopold?
[5:37]What did you say?
[5:38]It's Leopold.
[5:39]Leopold.
[5:40]Did he do the painting on the cover?
[5:42]No.
[5:43]He's one of the characters, and he's actually...
[5:45]I'm sorry.
[5:46]I'm sorry.
[5:47]I'm sorry.
[5:48]Are you talking about Leopold?
[5:49]Sorry, Leopold, yeah.
[5:50]Leopold.
[5:51]Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[5:52]No, Leroy, Leroy, no, I did not ask him for a painting for...
[5:57]for the cover.
[5:58]The cover was designed by Diane Schenette,
[6:00]who's an in-house art director,
[6:02]and she did a wonderful job.
[6:04]She was inspired by a passage in the novel,
[6:07]where I talk about the flap of hummingbird wings,
[6:10]the noise of the earthquake.
[6:12]Various people have different ways of talking about that noise,
[6:15]but I talk about the flap of hummingbird wings,
[6:18]and if you've ever had a hummingbird come really, really close,
[6:21]it's just like a little bit like a thunderclap.
[6:23]It's really stunning.
[6:24]And so she was inspired by that,
[6:26]and I don't know if your listeners would know about this,
[6:29]but James Audubon was actually born in Sandilvang,
[6:33]and I've been researching that fact for years.
[6:36]And so she didn't know...
[6:38]She didn't know that when she designed the cover.
[6:40]The cover is taken from images by Audubon's rendition
[6:44]of hummingbirds in Haiti.
[6:46]Wow.
[6:47]Interesting.
[6:48]Yeah.
[6:49]So that's all connected.
[6:50]You're willing to share what your family's experience was in 2010.
[6:55]Sure.
[6:56]You know, most of the family that I have left in public places is older,
[7:00]is elderly.
[7:01]We had one of my father's half-brothers.
[7:04]His mother was crushed in the earthquake passed away in that way.
[7:08]We had some family members who lost homes.
[7:11]They were able to rebuild years later,
[7:13]but there was a lot of material loss in that sense.
[7:17]I was connected to a lot of Haitian women's movements at the time,
[7:21]and all of the leaders of Haitian women's movement died.
[7:25]A lot of people like Miriam Melle,
[7:27]and so women's groups had to rebuild in that time.
[7:31]And then I also had a number of friends who had either students
[7:35]or colleagues who were in Haiti, but they were trying to track down.
[7:39]And there is a passage in one of the characters' sections and section,
[7:44]actually true to life to what happened to me,
[7:48]which is that I had a friend who was in Puerto Rico
[7:50]was trying to track down a student who had supposed to report
[7:54]to the University of Puerto Rico around, you know, after January 12th of 2010,
[7:58]and had not been heard from,
[8:00]and she asked me if I could track him down.
[8:02]And at the time, the only thing that worked were things like Facebook,
[8:05]which I had not been on.
[8:07]Actually, a student of mine put me on Facebook,
[8:09]and she said, this is how you'll be able to connect.
[8:11]And she was right.
[8:12]I connected to colleagues and writers who were friends of mine,
[8:15]who worked at the University of Dakota in Haiti.
[8:18]And I gave them the names that I had,
[8:20]the contact names with student's name.
[8:22]And the reply I got was, you know,
[8:25]your student is alive, but all of your contacts are dead.
[8:29]And I had five or seven contacts.
[8:31]And so then I had the unfortunate,
[8:34]the awful position of having to contact my friend
[8:38]and say, you know, the person you're looking for did survive.
[8:42]But all of your contacts for that person are dead.
[8:45]And that was only about three, four weeks in after the earthquake.
[8:50]We're still trying to find out if people were alive, you know, are not.
[8:54]And I remember at that moment thinking,
[8:57]this is going to be one of the hardest things I'll ever have to go through.
[9:01]Because I realized so many people were counting on me to make connections
[9:05]and find people and from that point on that was the case that often
[9:10]you would find the person you were looking for.
[9:13]But the people you thought would help you find them had passed away.
[9:16]So it's really been, you know, it was an arduous time.
[9:20]And one of the compelling reasons for me to write the novel
[9:24]is that I realized a few years later that even though I was still very much
[9:28]working on issues in Haiti and assisting as much as I could,
[9:32]most people who were not related to Haiti had forgotten what had happened.
[9:37]You know, so when the anniversary would roll around,
[9:40]there were fewer and fewer news reports about it,
[9:43]fewer things going on.
[9:45]And now, you know, there was just a never earthquake on August 14.
[9:50]And one of the things that has come up are how many people who went through 2010
[9:56]who are newly traumatized by this event.
[10:00]And, you know, everything come, everything coming back up because it isn't ongoing kind of healing process and for me writing the novel was a healing process.
[10:10]And I think just to complete my thought on this to go back to my family, a number of members of my family who were older passed away in the last three to five years, some of whom had been through the earthquake.
[10:23]And one of the things I observed with them is how differently everyone coped with the experience of the earthquake, where I had, you know, some elderly relatives who were right in the after center like we're right in the middle of bubble plants saw everything would not talk about the earthquake, their experience of it, but then clearly had a kind of descent after in terms of their coping for ability to cope.
[10:48]While others, you know, stayed in Haiti, you know, were very implicated, they tended to be younger. And so I think that was one of my motivating factor for having an elderly woman, you know, sort of be the bookends for the novel, you know, the opening and ending piece market woman because I wanted to give voice to, you know, to an older person who lives through the earthquake.
[11:13]And, and copes as best she can. And in her case is able to cope, but I know from my lived experience, not everybody is able to do that.
[11:23]Well, it's amazing how an entire nation sort of gets through something and the way they do that and the history and what it means to be one person going through something that is such a collective trauma.
[11:36]It's not unlike here except the scale of it is so much bigger there. I mean, it's like it's hard. It's really hard to wrap your mind around that number of losses and, you know, I mean, it's just it's hard to process, especially when you feel that you're like in charge to some extent or that, you know, that must have been such a, I mean, to have to shoulder that is a lot.
[12:02]And I think what I wanted to try to do in the novel was to give voice to because one of the things people hear a lot when, when they hear about Haiti as the word resilience.
[12:11]And I wanted to maybe shift that discourse a little bit more towards persistence, you know, because I think in the word resilience, do you have this idea that a group of people, a culture can take anything on, you know, or, you know, as you were mentioning mentioning with 9 11 that New Yorkers can soldier on.
[12:29]And I think I think that does a disservice to those, you know, individuals who may not have the support systems or the coping skills.
[12:40]And that is as valuable and a story to know about, you know, that that these traumas are very complex and though they are talked about as if groups of people, you know, survive and move on.
[12:55]And so a kind of way in which not everybody can move on, not everybody should move on.
[13:01]In fact, it should be a kind of integration of what has has happened and a kind of honoring of those people that have been lost.
[13:10]You know, I, one of the things that has stayed with me is that, you know, I may have known the names of a few people who passed away.
[13:18]I don't know the name of upwards of 200,000 people, you know, I will never know them.
[13:24]Because, especially in Haiti, there are not necessarily roles, you know, people are not necessarily registered in terms of birth certificates, death certificates and so on.
[13:34]And there are whole family groups that disappeared.
[13:37]They can't be quantified. We don't know who they are. So in some way in a very small way that, you know, a humble way I'd like to say, you know, taking 10 people, 10 stories and putting a kind of face even both fictional face to them was a way to kind of stand in for all those thousands of people whose stories will never be told.
[13:58]So this book took you about seven, eight years, ish, right?
[14:03]Yeah, five years for the, for the main writing and then probably never three years of revision as it went through editorial process.
[14:10]Oh my goodness.
[14:11]So do you have like parallel projects? Are you going to start another one or do you work on a lot of things at the same time or what's your presence like?
[14:19]Yeah, normally we work on two books at the same time in academic book and the creative book. The parallel book for this one that has actually already appeared and most people won't see the parallel.
[14:30]It's an academic book.
[14:32]It got a Guggenheim, which is, which is lovely, but it was about reading the work of people of African descent through their own lenses and how that might create a different discourse for all of us that is not really race based, but more about culture.
[14:47]And I use a lot of Haitian concepts to do that, like the black crew, the yard, the complete, which is the idea of the collective, but the connection between the two books is actually a film by a Haitian filmmaker.
[14:59]I would pack who also did a film on the earthquake on the post earthquake situation, a documentary, which is called fatal assistance, but the film for the academic book was sometimes in April, which is his film on the genocide in Rwanda.
[15:14]And so I was really, you know, taken by the idea of a Haitian filmmaker chose to make a film about what happened in Rwanda.
[15:23]And I started thinking about what's that conversation like.
[15:26]And I have the chance to speak to him about the fact that there are some parallels with Haitian history in terms of friction between Haitians and Dominicans because we occupy the same island and a massacre that took place in 1937 under Trujillo.
[15:42]And he said, yeah, I wasn't thinking about that, but there is a connection there.
[15:47]And so the connection to the novel is that I did, I did spend a little bit of time in Rwanda and visited women's cooperatives there.
[15:55]And it felt a lot like Haiti. And I really could see why he was drawn to that story. And this is why one of the characters then you'll find her in Rwanda.
[16:04]Try to make parallels between Haiti and Rwanda in her experience of what people are grieving there at the time that she's there, which is in early 2010.
[16:15]And having written a bunch of us, including your award-winning academic work and all the rest. What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[16:23]You know, my one big piece of advice, which goes back to when I started publishing in Canada actually as a team short stories and essays is to work with editors as much as you can.
[16:34]I was very lucky to have a professor as an undergrad who was also an editor who really helped me with my writing and just, you know, told me send the work out, you know, send it out.
[16:45]She taught me how to write a cover letter, you know, and the one big thing she told me is always asked for feedback.
[16:52]She said, you may not get it, but if you have a line in your letter that says the feedback is welcome, they will feel compelled to send you something.
[17:00]And that's been true nine out of 10 times, even when the feedback has been a little bit rough, which can be at the beginning.
[17:07]You know, I've gone feedback and I find that editors are the most selfless people in terms of giving you feedback on your work because they want the work, especially in literary fiction.
[17:18]They want the work to be the best that it can be. And so I've learned a lot. My editors at HarperCollins Canada in 10 house, Maisie Cochran at 10 house have been just amazing.
[17:30]And if I didn't listen to them, I would be my work would be the poor for it.
[17:34]And what do you like to read? Like, what are some of your favorites or what are you reading now?
[17:39]So I just read after parties by so, which I thought was a wonderful collection. Let me see.
[17:45]I'm of course reading theory, which is probably not what a lot of people are reading, but I like as she said, my bambays work.
[17:52]He has a new book called Out of the Dark, which I would recommend.
[17:55]And of course I'm reading the new book by Jeffers.
[17:58]The love songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. I just started that.
[18:02]I think it might take me a few months to get through.
[18:05]It has a great beginning. So I'm looking forward to it being a nice winter read.
[18:10]Excellent. Amazing.
[18:12]And just last question on Haiti. Like what what can people do now? Like what for someone who cares and wants to have been, you know, what can people do?
[18:23]Yeah, thank you for asking because I know there's been a bit of controversy around this since the last earthquake and the month before the Haitian president was assassinated.
[18:32]So I know Haiti has been in the news. But just after the last earthquake, there was a lot going on around.
[18:38]Should people give to Haiti because of mismanagement of funds after the 2010 earthquake.
[18:44]So just a couple of quick things to say about that is that less than 1% of funds went to the Haitian government.
[18:50]So the mismanagement wasn't, you know, wasn't Haitians who mismanaged both funds.
[18:56]I always say try to give to grassroots organizations that have a long-standing record in Haiti of doing work, of having low overhead and really working with the people, you know, and working with in the sense of finding out what people need on the ground.
[19:11]Haitian led organizations tend to do a better job because they know what's happening in country.
[19:17]I would say, you know, try to find out, sometimes, you know, you can find out through groups that you're already connected to.
[19:25]There might be church groups, there might be community organizations where you live, especially in New York, especially in Miami, Boston, where there are large, large Haitian communities.
[19:35]I've been in touch with a number of groups that I was in touch with because of 2010 and before and asked for a list.
[19:42]So one of the key things this time around is that help is really needed in the southern peninsula, less so in public place.
[19:49]But there are some organizations in public place like Focal that have units in the southern peninsula and are redistributing funds there.
[19:58]I did also collect from those.
[20:00]groups, lists of groups that they recommend. And I have a list on my website of hate TV
[20:05]leaf funds so people can also go there. And I always say to people when you find a group that
[20:09]is something that you're interested in, you know, do the research, find out if you have a transparent
[20:14]plan, find out what their reports are, you know, from past giving and what they've done,
[20:19]do they have images, you know, reporting back and what it be accomplished. And can you have
[20:24]confidence in them? And if you do, then please, please, please, if whatever you can, give
[20:30]because a little bit in a place like hate TV goes really far. So if, you know, somebody only has
[20:36]$10 to give, that's amazing. It will do a lot, you know. It's amazing. Well, Miriam, it was lovely to meet
[20:44]you. My second Haitian theory in my life now. That's so great. There's so few of us actually.
[20:51]Yeah, she's not a common name. She's from Holland originally, but has spent her family spent
[20:57]and in fact, they still live there. But anyway, so I hear, as I've told you,
[21:01]Haiti is is often discussed in our home. And, you know, she's there a lot and all the rest.
[21:06]So anyway, thank you so much for your time. Good luck with the blood. And thanks for letting me
[21:12]snag your first spot. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I'll keep listening to the podcast
[21:18]to you. Thank you, please. So nice. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.
[21:23]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[21:27]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zebioans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[21:46]and now trim music.