In Darkness is a novel by Nick Lake published in 2012. Ostensibly a story about attempts to survive the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti from which the island nation is still recovering more than a decade later, the novel is a much more expansive historical overview of the revolutionary origins of the country that brought it to independence from out of the darkness of slavery and European oppression.
The novel begins in literal darkness. A first-person narrator asserts his dire situation in a way that may seem figurative but is not just that that. "I am the voice in the dark, calling out for your help." The voice calling out for help is a teenage boy called Shorty. Shorty's story begins with his having been in a hospital that fell victim to the devastating earthquake. As a result, Shorty lies buried in the darkness beneath the rubble. The tale he tells is one of descending into a kind of victim madness. His memories of the past are intertwined with conversations with ghosts around him that identify as zombies. Shorty's life is one of abject poverty and gang violence. He lies buried in literal darkness but has known it in metaphorical terms all his life.
The path of the trek of this narrative takes an unexpected turn well into the book when Shorty's victim madness transforms into a parallel story about the Haitian revolution led by the legendary Toussaint L’Ouverture. The man who is celebrated as the founder of an independent Haiti is juxtaposed against a much lesser present-day counterpart, former Prime Minister Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haiti was brought out of the darkness of slavery and French oppression by Toussaint and would spend much of the 20th century being forced right back into the darkness by a series of corrupt despots.
The story of Shorty trying to survive the darkness of the aftermath of the earthquake and the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture struggling heroically to fight for independence and an end to bondage are thematically connected. Despite his success in becoming one of the greatest revolutionary figures of the modern age, he would die in darkness in prison. The fate of Shorty is foreshadowed by his lament near the end of the book: "We are in the darkness. We are always in the darkness."
In Darkness is a novel that gains its power as much from the telling as the tale. The story of Toussaint is very precisely related and will offer no surprises to anyone familiar with the facts. The story of Shorty contains no surprises because it has been told again and again under varying circumstances. The divergence, in this case, is the circumstance of his situation. From the very beginning, there is little doubt of Shorty's eventual fate. The earthquake upon which this fiction is based still has ramifications for Haiti long after it has been forgotten by most of the rest of the world.
