Before Sandy hit New York, it hit the Caribbean, killing more than 50 people in Haiti and destroying homes and crops along the way. New York doesn’t often face natural disaster, but for Haiti, Sandy’s blow came just months after Tropical Storm Isaac made landfall in August, and a little more than two years after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
Haitians are, then, somewhat more practiced in dealing with the calamity of natural disaster. At the Miami Book Fair International, writer Edwidge Danticat, whose work most recently appears in a trilingual (English, French, Creole) anthology, “So Spoke the Earth,” sat down to explain how Haitians approach natural disaster.