Summary
Taffia is fifteen when the earthquake strikes. Her chapter picks up in April 2010, three months after the earthquake. Her narrative shifts between her life before and after the earthquake. Taffia is the youngest in her family. The oldest, Didier, is a musician in the United States; Sonia works and lives apart from the family in what Taffia views as a mysterious but glamorous lifestyle. Taffia lives at home with her parents and brother Paul, who is seventeen. Their father is an alcoholic and Taffia was named after a cheap type of rum that her father drinks regularly. Paul normally keeps to himself, not spending much time with family. Taffia is focused on thoughts of school, friends, and popularity.
After Taffia’s aunt, Tatie, gets a television, everyone in the neighborhood gathers at her house to watch Frijolito, a Spanish soap opera. With many of her family members absent physically or emotionally, Taffia turns to soap operas both as entertainment and to make sense of the world around her. Taffia sees herself and her neighbors in the soap opera plot lines. Taffia observes that on these shows girls with dark skin like hers were never the heroines, rather they always remain part of the background. The leads look more like her sister Sonia, who has lighter skin. Taffia trades opinions and predictions with girls at school, Kassy and Selena. She’s glad to be more popular now that she has access to a TV and can keep up with much of the shows.
Since Didier left for the states five years ago, Taffia feels a growing distance from her brother. Didier sends Taffia an iPod with music he has written and recorded and Taffia consoles herself by listening to his music. She is especially touched by a song about the strength of women who continue forward despite the suffering around them. Taffia wonders what Didier is trying to say to her, and how she can find the strength he talks about in his song.
From the IDP camp, Taffia remembers how she and Paul were on their way to Tatie’s house when the earth buckled under them. Reaching Tatie’s house, the only sign of their aunt were pieces of her clothing peeking out from under the rubble. After the initial shock, they helped clear debris from Tatie’s house to free Jonas, a boy from their neighborhood whose leg was trapped under the collapsed house. Paul and Taffia’s own house was so destroyed Taffia did not even recognize it. Their father swayed drunkenly in front of the pile of ruins, his eyes empty and red. All along their street people were screaming and frantically searching for family members amidst smashed cars, broken houses, and a world blanketed in a white dust. By the end of the day, Sonia, Dieudonné, and Taffia’s mother reunited with the rest of the family. The next few days were consumed with trying to save the injured and searching for food, water, and first aid. For days, no official help arrived so the neighbors organized amongst themselves. Taffia’s job was to shroud the dead with bed sheets or whatever was available. As the number of dead mounted, bodies were tossed in a pile at the side of the road to wait for trucks to take them away. Under the cathedral, the neighborhood organized a camp, where the market used to be, for those who lost their homes.
This camp grows and eventually turns into an official IDP camp. At first, Taffia believes it will be temporary, but pretty soon she realizes this tent city has become their home for the foreseeable future. With this realization, life in the camp takes on a rhythm. Taffia studies older women, like Ma Lou, following their lead for how to organize their family’s life. Each day is divided into tasks: Tuesday collect water, Wednesday barter, Thursday venture outside the camp in search of goods or loved ones. Taffia’s family is able to salvage very little of their earthly belongings, but Taffia does find a small music player that Didier sent her. Sonia stays with the family after Dieudonné leaves Port-au-Prince to check on his family in western Haiti and Taffia is comforted by her sister's presence. Between Ma Lou and Taffia’s family, they try to look out for Sara. An older man named Loko makes a living collecting and selling rainwater, of which there is never enough in the camps. Although rain provides free drinking water, it also collects in ditches and mixes with outhouses, spreading disease in the camps.
Before the earthquake, Paul was sullen, angry, and closed off. In Sonia’s chapter it was revealed that he was sexually abused by a priest when he was little. Something he revealed to their aunt Tatie and seemingly no one else. All Taffia knows is that Paul has a secret and because of it they should give him leeway and hope that eventually he might change. Always a skinny child, Paul began working out intensely as a teenager, eating as much as he could in an effort to build muscle. In the camps, Paul starts to join the loose bands of teens his age who wander about the camps at night. These bands break into abandoned buildings and take from the foreign aid supplies. Paul admires these boys for taking what no one was willing to give them freely. Taffia worries about Paul, but since Paul sometimes returns home with items the family needs, their mother stays silent on the issue.
Taffia used to dream of escaping her old life. But now, stuck in the squalor and harsh life of the camps, she misses her old life. Foreign aid groups dispense food and goods but it’s never enough. Taffia recalls the night she got dressed up and went to the club with her friend Kassy. Dancing with Kassy, Taffia felt carefree and alive. A fight broke out at the club that night. In the confusion that ensued, Taffia bumped into Junior: a boy from school whose aggressive and persistent interest always made her feel vaguely threatened. Junior pushed up against her, accusing Taffia of never taking an interest in him. Uncomfortable, Taffia was relieved when Sonia found her in the crowd and pulled her away. One day in the IDP camp, Taffia runs into Junior. He grabs her, saying now he's got Taffia where he wants her. Now, Junior threatens, Taffia has nowhere to run to. Taffia struggles to pull herself free evading questions about which tent she lives in. Taffia fends Junior off and runs back to her tent, wondering how much longer they’ll be stuck in the camp.
Taffia forgets about the incident with Junior and weeks pass. One night, Taffia makes her way back from the latrine. Normally she goes accompanied for security, but tonight she goes alone. On her way back to the tent, Taffia is grabbed by three boys. They violently hold her down and rape her. One of them whispers, “Thought you could get away? I can do whatever I want with you” and Taffia realizes it’s Junior. Afterwards, they leave Taffia on the ground. After lying there for hours hoping to disappear, Taffia picks herself up and makes her way home. She keeps silent about what happened. As the months go by, Taffia realizes she's pregnant. As sexual violence runs rampant through the camps, women from NGOs, including Anne, try and get survivors to share information about what is happening. Taffia however never tells, instead she hopes that if she stops eating she’ll starve the baby growing inside her.
For a time, Paul disappears from the camp and when he returns he is even quieter than before. Rumors circulate about what he and the band of boys he was with have done. When Taffia questions him, he responds that he wanted to be a legend, to sow fear and be remembered. However, later, he came to realize that what he and the other boys were doing was wrong. One day, Sara’s tent catches fire and Taffia and her siblings save her. After that, Sara comes to live in Taffia’s family’s tent. Living with Taffia’s family, Sara starts to be drawn out of her grief. She still hears and sees her dead children around the camp, but now interacts with others around her. Taffia gives birth to a baby boy. She’s too scared to look at his face, afraid she will see Junior’s features staring back at her. Taffia’s mother and Sara help Taffia take care of the child. Life continues on and Taffia tries to make sense of how her life has changed since the earthquake.
Analysis
Taffia is a typical adolescent before the earthquake: focused on school, who will be her best friend, and feeling the first thrills and fear of getting attention from boys. Her older siblings try to escape poverty, leaving the family in search of opportunity. Despite people looking down on Sonia, Taffia admires her beautiful and confident sister. She compares Sonia to the heroines in the telenovelas she watches. The legacy of Sonia’s lighter skin remains undiscussed in the family. Taffia craves connection with her older siblings. More than the money and gifts Didier sends home, Taffia misses their closeness. Even the gift of the iPod reveals the gap between them. With nowhere to recharge it, Taffia feels that Didier has forgotten the realities of life in Haiti. The telenovelas that Taffia watches allow her to dream of a different life. These telenovelas promote the narrative of striving to make it out of the circumstances one was born into, which is prominent with many of the characters in the novel.
With the earthquake, Taffia’s life flips within seconds. She loses her aunt Tatie, their family home, and any semblance of a normal life. Taffia is haunted by images of mangled and dead bodies that she wishes she could forget. Yet Taffia is resilient and finds a way to adapt to life in the camp. She takes the lead from older women in the camp with more experience as they try and piece together a life from the destruction. The narration flips back and forth between Taffia’s life in the camp and memories from before the earthquake. Taffia savors these memories from her old life as if they were sweets and they offer her an escape from her current reality.
Chancy examines family and gender dynamics in Haiti, describing the unequal burdens that men and women carry. In Didier’s song for Taffia, he describes how women in Haiti are the backbone of their communities. When Taffia listens to this song, she doubts she has this kind of strength. But, after the earthquake, Taffia is forced to follow the path of the women in Didier’s song in ways Didier never imagined when he wrote it.
Community plays a key role in survival for characters in the novel. In Taffia’s neighborhood, there is a collective understanding that they are on their own, so everyone pitches in. The lack of government presence and support is glaring. Government systems and foreign aid are too overwhelmed to handle everyone’s needs so people do what they can. Loko donates water to people and Taffia’s family takes care of Sara. In the process, they help Sara heal within the love of another family. These acts of solidarity demonstrate how, despite the hardships that everyone now faces, there is still a sense of banding together for survival. However, simultaneously, insecurity and violence increase and become widespread in the camp. Taffia watches the bands of men taking what they want and sowing fear in their wake. These conflicting forces show how fragile the sense of security is that they have constructed in the camp. As Taffia explains, “walls made of tarp and cloth would never keep jackals at bay.”
Just as Taffia is adapting to the first trauma of the earthquake, something happens that marks her even more profoundly. Taffia’s experience typifies the violence and insecurity that women face in a society where some men view women as possessions: prizes that a man earns and can do with what he will. Junior is humiliated by Taffia’s refusal of him and enacts his revenge. Both Taffia and Paul experience sexual assault. The shame, silence, and secrecy that surrounds sexual violence forces each of them to carry the burden and trauma of what happened to them alone. As her pregnancy becomes noticeable, Taffia notes that Paul is the only one in her family who looks at her belly: as if in silence it would be possible to deny what happened. Taffia is deeply traumatized and describes the fetus as a leech that never goes away: the more she tries to forget about it the more it hangs on. She fears seeing in her baby a reminder of her attacker. Yet, being forced into motherhood, Taffia must find a way to endure the violence she faced.
After surviving sexual assault, Paul turns inward; he becomes sullen and closed off. He focuses on transforming himself into a man who can protect himself and who others will fear, as if this will negate the trauma, when he was made to feel powerless and a victim. For this same reason Paul joins one of the bands of young men. Taffia notes this transformation and, after her own attack, wonders if Paul could be capable of committing the same acts of violence that she endured. Through Paul, Chancy portrays a general trend in many marginalized young men in Haiti and, through Taffia, the widespread terror and suffering they can cause.
