Lavil
Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verso Books
Published:23rd May '17
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
Moving stories of life in a country enduring an ongoing crisis
Half a dozen years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, but the international community no longer seems interested. This immersive and engrossing book, based on five years of research and scores of interviews translated from Haitian Kreyol, gives voice to the continuing struggle of Haitian people to reconstruct their nation from the devastation of the earthquake, and from many decades of political and economic disaster.
The earthquake killed more than 200,000, rendered more than a million and a half homeless, and wiped out what little infrastructure existed in the country. But prior to the quake, half the country was illiterate and two-thirds of Haitians lived in poverty. This book makes clear the long genesis of the ongoing crisis and illuminates the depths of the continuing problems, and does so through some of the most marginal and least-heard people in the world. An interview with a restavek--a child sent by poor parents to work as an unpaid servant in a wealthier household--is an example. A recent study determined a figure of 173,000 restaveks--about 8 percent of the population of children.
A book about choosing to live and not to die, to fight, to survive, to thrive. -- Edwidge Danticat
Nothing is more eloquent than the voice of those who endure and try valiantly to survive. -- Noam Chomsky
Lavil brings to the fore the voices of the people of the wounded city of Port-au-Prince ... these stories are redolent of both pride and fears of an uncertain future. -- Paul Farmer, author, Haiti After the Earthquake
Lavil is a powerful collection of testimonies, which include tales of violence, poverty, and instability but also joy, hustle, and the indomitable will to survive. * Vice *
"To read a Voice of Witness book is to feel one's habitual sense of disconnection begin to fall away." -- George Saunders
"[Voice of Witness] books are amazing.beautifully produced, with incredible editing and literary sensibility. Voice of Witness has done a better job than I've seen anybody do with having people tell their stories in a way that really engages you." -- Rachel Maddow
"In a time when history is told in cheap television re-enactments, if at all, and personal tragedy is gobbled up in rapidly digestible magazine photos and reality shows, this project goes against the grain." * Guardian *
"The Voice of Witness series is a megaphone for [America's] most marginalized voices." -- Van Jones, former special advisor to the Obama White House, author of Rebuilding the Dream and The Green Collar Economy
Lavil is not just a recitation of complaint and tragedy, though those are certainly included within it. It provides, instead, a chorus of stubborn and lively persistence-of a kind one can usually only imagine. -- Amy Wilentz * Los Angeles Review of Books *
ISBN: 9781784786823
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 25mm
Weight: 430g
336 pages