A review by just_one_more_paige
What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

 
This is the sixth book in my slow-but-steady read-through of the 2022 Aspen Words longlist. They just announced the shortlist, actually, and, while I still plan to finish the read-through, I have to say that my totally random reading order choices were quite on point, because of the 6 I have now read, 4 were in the final 5 on the shortlist! 
 
What Storm, What Thunder is a literary recounting of the 2021 earthquake that struck Haiti; the before, during, and after, of the disaster, from a number of different perspectives. Told in vignette style, each of the characters get a single (though encompassing) chapter of page time to give witness to their experiences, with the one exception of the elderly market woman, Ma Lou, whose voice both opens and closes the novel. While their stories are completely individual to their own lives, internal and external reckonings, and truths, there is a theme of interconnectedness among them, as each ties into the others in some way (think Girl Woman Other style). 
 
This novel carried with it enough emotional force to rival the strength of the earthquake whose devastation it enumerates. I must start by pointing out that there are CWs for almost everything you can think of in these pages, death (including child and parental), physical and sexual violence, (general) environmental trauma, grief, a variety medical/injury content, and likely more that I am missing. But for all that, Chancy is able to keep the story focused on the characters themselves, and their reactions and day-to-day experiences of both the natural and man-made aspects of the destruction. We get glimpses into the lives of characters like Richard, a wealthy businessman back for a big sales pitch meeting in the home country he left behind for good; Sonia and Dieudonné, business partners in some less-than-socially-accepted lines of work; Didier, a young Haitian immigrant cab driver in Boston; Sara, a mother living now in an IDP camp and mourning the loss of all her children; Olivier, a father forced to leave his family by grief and the need to find work; Taffia, a young girl who experiences unspeakable violence in an IDP camp after the violence she lived through during the earthquake; Jonas, a young boy just celebrating his 11th birthday; Anne, an architect working for a global NGO. They are visceral stories. Full of life (and death) and truly tangible. Which, in reading the Afterward and a bit more about the author, makes sense, since many of these vignettes were informed by real stories of of the earthquake, by survivors or families of those who died, that were told to Chancy over the years (both solicited, through her work in connecting/networking in the aftermath, as well as unsolicited). 
 
It was profoundly affecting to read (and listen - as I also had access to the audiobook) this sweeping collection of stories of the effects of this natural disaster on the country and people of Haiti. And the ring of truth in these stories makes it all the more intense. I honestly haven't read anything fictional (or, really, nonfictional, outside the news I read at the time) about this earthquake in Haiti. And though reading this was an emotional cataclysm, it was also breathtaking in the stark portrayal of physical and psychological tragedy in the face of unmitigated environmental destruction. We see snippets of the characters pre-earthquake, as well as in the moment it hits, the immediate aftermath, throughout the longer term recovery, and including those with a variety of coping mechanisms and resiliency, as well as those who descend too far into grief and loss to make it back out. There are myriad introspections and explorations of before and after, and especially of the not-knowing in between, the reality of suspension within a nightmare. And as you can tell from the example characters listed above, we hear from those who have always lived in Haiti, those that had come back, those that had left Haiti and never returned. We hear from the natives and the transplants, the young and the old, the families and the single people, the dreamers and the realists, the victims and the “helpers” and those that span the divide, the physically present and the emotionally distant, the emotionally distant but physically present. It’s such a fully encompassing representation. 
 
The vastness of the violence in the moment and the aftermath is incomprehensible. And yet in the final chapter, when we revisit Ma Lou, we are left with a pervasive hope for renewal, and looking forward. Overall, this was a stunning work of literature, one that gives voice to so many who haven't had that chance (and many who now never will). A few times throughout this novel, characters ruminate on the many people whose names and lives will be remembered by only their few family/friends who survived and, with time, no one. And yet, their bones are part of the land of their country now and forever, and, here, Chauncy's words memorialize them for the world, if not individually, than in honor and spirit. Gutting, staggering, and completely deserving of its shortlist spot (and more). 
 
“We treated everyone alike. They had become all the same, were always the same.” 
 
“What we had learned from the hustle was that once you got to the top of the hill, no one cared how you got there.” 
 
“It’s like this: when everything becomes chaos and disorder, you begin to understand that control is only illusion and repression.” 
 
“Douz: when something terrible happens to you, it feels like a dream at first. Not until the pain and the panic settle does it seem real. […] We all know – however is it we will ourselves to move through this: afterward, the terrible thing never goes away. It dims but remains, lurking, an uninvited guest, a leech. The more you try to forget, the more it hangs on. One side is scissor to the other, back and forth, conjoined, not able to leave. The feeling uniting dream and pain lasts eternally, but you yearn for the return to a blank space, the in-between suspension between the two before they came to be jointed. You yearn for the sweet, open-eyed innocence, the comforting warmth of the blankness, to never become aware of the jointing itself, of then having to live in the after, always, remembering the before.” 
 
“…sometimes, I do think that the dead are luckier than we are.” 
 
“No one will know the difference between the good and the bad. The bones won’t give up the secrets of who they once were.” 
 
“…I was struck by a simple realization, that there was a beauty and majesty to ruins: they lent testimony to the past.” 
 
“Ruins had meaning: they revealed time like nothing else could, outlived bodies, love stories, everything. They should stand.” 
 
“All that was man-made fell, including time, buckled into the sky with nightfall.” 
 

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