Summary
Anne is in Rwanda when she finds out about the earthquake. Anne is a recent architecture graduate who specializes in eco-building. She and Lucien, a fellow Haitian graduate with a masters in engineering, hope to open a practice in Port-au-Prince. However, with little demand in Haiti, Anne takes a job with a French NGO to help Rwanda, which is still rebuilding 10 years after the genocide. Anne works on affordable and mixed use housing, particularly interested in creating spaces for women’s micro-financing collectives. Anne went home briefly in the days leading up to the earthquake for her mother’s funeral. She had planned to stay in Haiti longer but was furious after Richard never showed up to the funeral; so she headed back to Rwanda early. It is in Rwanda, a week after the earthquake, that she finds out what she narrowly avoided in Haiti. Like Didier, Anne tries to get in touch with loved ones but all communication is down. Eventually, Lucien sends her an email that her grandmother, Ma Lou, is alive. It was Lucien who drove Richard to the beach the day of the earthquake and he informs Anne that her father was swallowed by a wave and his body was never found. Now an orphan, Anne’s only living relative in Haiti is Ma Lou.
Anne uses social media to help people search for their family and friends. She keeps a list of the dead and the living and watches with dread as the list of the dead grows longer and longer. As an architect, Anne understands that many of the deaths occurred because of the complete lack of enforcement of building codes in Port-au-Prince. As the city grew rapidly, mostly with rural and urban poor seeking opportunity, people built their houses haphazardly one on top of the other. With the earthquake, huge numbers of these unstable buildings fell, with thousands people buried underneath them. Those wealthy enough to build their house up to code were more likely to survive. Lucien tells Anne she should come back, that Haiti needs people who can build, but for the first six months Anne stays in Rwanda. From her vantage point, she observes the parallels between the Rwandan genocide and the earthquake in Haiti. Both countries know widespread death and loss; in both, around 250,000 people died. Rwanda is full of ghosts and people’s grief is transparent. Having just lost her mother, Anne feels at home in a place where there is space to openly grieve. After she finds out about the earthquake, Anne visits memorials of the massacres in Rwanda and imagines what the rebuilding process will look like in Haiti. Eventually, she decides to stop fleeing and face her ghosts. Unlike her father, Anne does not want to run away from her country and its hardships. She decides to go back, to be a part of rebuilding a future.
Anne returns to Haiti. Rather than the dangerous job of classifying structurally unsound buildings, Anne takes a job surveying the living to match them with viable housing. Her work takes her into the IDP camps. At first, many people view her as just another foreigner until they realize she’s Haitian and can speak Kreyòl. Even though Anne grew up in Haiti, her education and white collar job clearly set her apart. Anne makes lists, not just of housing, but of all people’s needs: food, finding loved ones, medical care. The needs are endless and the aid scene is chaotic. Innumerable NGOs have descended on Haiti but most of them have very little knowledge of the country and its people. Anne tries to help, but there is often very little she can do. Some people have been given permission to return to their homes but are so wary that the buildings could collapse that they prefer to sleep under the stars or stay in the camps. As predicted, Anne observes many trained builders and architects focusing their energy on the latest design in emergency shelters. She finds them small and inefficient, not what the Haitian people truly need.
Ma Lou’s house survived the earthquake. During her time in Haiti, Anne stays with Ma Lou and it is their first time living together. After Richard left for France, Ma Lou found Anne’s mother, who was pregnant with Anne at the time. Ma Lou promised to be there for them and, true to her word, she helped raise Anne. They both became Anne’s mothers, if not quite friends themselves. Ma Lou shared the money Richard sent her every few months. Anne wonders what her father felt in his last moments, and she meets up with Lucien who shares his account. In the camps, Anne meets Loko. Loko was a traditional healer who had to flee his home after a local evangelist damned everyone associated with vodou. Separated from his family, Loko now looks out for Sara in the IDP camp, saying she reminds him of his daughter. It is Loko who attends to Jonas in his last days and uses his knowledge of healing to ease some of Jonas’s pain as he dies. Anne also meets Sara and is there the day her tent catches fire. This moment haunts Anne: Sara lost in her grief, moving as if through a fog, as her tent burns down around her. Afterward, Anne has trouble sleeping. She constantly checks her endless lists of the dead, the living, and the survivors who seem half-dead themselves. Ma Lou hears Anne crying at night and one morning she gently holds Anne and tells her to go back to Rwanda.
Anne returns to Rwanda and her story picks up nearly two years later in May 2012. Anne’s thoughts constantly return to her mother’s death and she remembers long nights by her mother’s side in the ICU in Iowa. Those nights, half asleep, Anne felt that she was floating alongside her mothers body, a feeling oddly similar to being in the womb. It was as if Anne was the one containing her mother, maintaining her connection to the land of the living. When her mother died it was quiet and quick. Anne only noticed when her mother’s hand grew cold. After her death, they flew the body back to Port-au-Prince for the funeral. Against her better judgment, Anne invited her father. Anne recalls the day Richard showed up outside her school. Even as a young girl, Anne understood that this stranger was the reason she was at a fancy private school. Anne never understood why Richard did not get out of the car. Since Anne was from a lower class, the girls at her new school never played with her. Although being at the shiny, new school felt important, Anne was lonely there. Dieudonné and Ma Lou tried to share a little about Richard but Anne never really understood or cared about him. Now Anne wonders why she feels such a wrenching sense of loss when Richard was never truly a part of her life.
In Rwanda, Anne stays up to date about news from Haiti. She reads about a famous set of 14 murals that were destroyed. These murals were painted by Haitian artists to reinterpret bible scenes through Haitian eyes. They depict saints with dark skin and baptisms at a sacred Haitian waterfall where many go to connect with, and be healed by, vodou spirits. Of the 14 murals, only three survive and many pieces from the destroyed murals are stolen in the weeks following the earthquake. The world moves on and other disasters occupy global attention. Anne’s coworker shares with her an international competition for designs to rebuild Haiti’s Notre-Dame Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Anne decides to submit a design. The original cathedral was designed by a French architect, the very same who brought the idea of building with concrete to Haiti. So many of these concrete structures, adopted as “better” foreign ideas, are the very same that did not survive the earthquake. Working on the designs, Anne sees it as an opportunity to contribute to the rebuilding of Haiti and to commemorate the Haitians who died. Her design preserves some of the broken walls of the cathedral, letting them be a memory of the tragedy Haiti has been through and the possibility of renewal.
Jonas gives an account of his daily life through numbers. He tells of the number of eggs Ma Lou displayed at the market, how long he could hold his breath underwater, and how many blue mints he took from the hotel lobby to give to his crush at school. When the earthquake begins, Jonas is at Tatie’s house watching TV, even though he is supposed to be at home. It takes twelve seconds from when the wall in Tatie’s house begins to crack to the moment it falls, trapping Jonas under it. Jonas cries out for Sara but realizes his voice is drowned out by all the other children crying for their mothers too. Pinned and frightened, Jonas listens for hours to the cries of his sisters only to eventually hear their cries stop. Continuing to relay his experience through numbers, he recounts being freed and then coming to the sinking realization that he will never become a soccer star like he dreamed of. Not only that, he will never run and will always have to be carried everywhere.
Now, from Jonas’s perspective, Chancy relays the horrifying memory of seeing masked men in scrubs looming over him and holding him down as they sawed off his leg. Jonas feels searing pain and in confusion he screams out for Olivier who is holding his head in his hands nearby. Jonas remembers when his father left them supposedly to find work in another camp. Even as a child of eleven, Jonas did not believe Olivier. Twenty two days after his leg is amputated, Jonas feels himself yanked up and away from his body. Floating in the tent he can see Sara down below and suddenly Jonas is laughing, carefree. After Jonas dies, his spirit remains in the tent to keep Sara company. His sisters are already there playing. The only person who can see Jonas and his sisters’ spirits is Loko. One day, Jonas sees Olivier’s spirit but it is far away and does not seem to want to see Jonas. Jonas understands that he will remain eleven years old for eternity. He watches Sara murmuring prayers for him and his sisters. Each night before Sara goes to bed he gives her twelve kisses to let her know he will always be with her.
Ma Lou narrates the final chapter of What Storm, What Thunder in June 2012: two years after the earthquake and two years before her chapter at the beginning of the book. Ma Lou says that every mother knows when she loses her child. In spirit, Richard had been gone for many years, not even returning for his father’s funeral. Yet after the earthquake, Ma Lou feels the gaping hole of his absence and realizes his body too is now gone. After all the chaos and loss, Ma Lou believes that returning to their ancestral gods will help her, and others, on the path toward healing. A few months after the earthquake, the government decides to move an old cemetery where Lou and his family are buried. Ma Lou is determined to save the bones of her loved ones before they are dumped elsewhere. Ma Lou is arrested for trying to dig them up and she faces the judge with eloquence and ferocity. She argues that bones are not meaningless objects; their marrow contains energy that the spirits watch over. Ma Lou wins the trial and gets her bones. She keeps them in a sack under her bed, unsure where to bury them. Ma Lou remembers a time when the dead were revered in Haiti and laments that it is no longer so. However, for her part, Ma Lou wants to honor the dead.
Ma Lou is exhausted from caring for others over the past two years. She decides to visit the land her mother left her by the ocean and bury her family members’ bones there. She wants Anne to accompany her but does not feel she can ask outright. However, after hearing Ma Lou’s plan, Anne offers to join her. They invite Taffia, her son now almost two, and Sara. Ma Lou believes they too need to cleanse themselves after what they have been through. Sonia and Taffia’s mother excitedly agree to join them, eager for a break from the city. The seven of them head out of Port-au-Prince, the happiest they have been since the earthquake. On the way, they stop at Saut d’Eau, the sacred waterfall. Ma Lou enters the water holding her bag of bones. With Anne and Sara’s help, Ma Lou lets the water wash over the bones and her own body all the while asking the gods to take away their pain. Sara and Anne each do the same, if only symbolically, for the loved ones they have lost. Ma Lou watches as Taffia enters the water with her son and Sonia blesses him in the name of Wede, one of the gods of the falls. Afterward, Anne makes a stop at a private beach resort, the same resort where Richard died. Anne, Ma Lou, and Sonia go in; they have a bite to eat as they pay their respects to Richard. Finally, they arrive at Ma Lou’s village. There they bury Ma Lou’s bag of bones. When it’s done, Ma Lou sits down and cries as she never has before. She cries for her loved ones and all the countless souls from the earthquake whose bodies were unclaimed but never unloved. Anne places a hand on her grandmother’s cheek and sits with her as Ma Lou cries.
Analysis
Anne loses her mother, the person she was closest to in the world. In those last days together, Anne experiences death as a light and ethereal presence. In a role reversal, Anne feels she is carrying her mother’s body and spirit, just as her mother did for Anne when she was in the womb. Chancy personifies death, describing how it walked steadily on icy tiptoes to silently take Anne’s mother away. In the morning, all that is left is the husk of her body, the respirator eerily pushing air into a body that is now only a shell. With the earthquake, Anne’s personal loss is compounded with that of her home and country. As she tracks down survivors, Anne discovers that the majority of women who had been leading national women’s organizations were killed. With this realization, Chancy sheds light on another facet of loss. Not only are people lost, but with them all of their gifts, projects, and visions they had to contribute to the world. Those women represent an entire generation of activists and decades of work that were wiped out. The ripple effect of loss is much bigger than the number of dead.
When Anne returns, she finds Port-au-Prince raw, an open wound. Death is in the air and so many are simply fighting to survive. Meeting people like Sara, Anne thinks it is hard to tell who is alive and who is dead. Anne detects a certain level of resentment for the aid workers who visit the camps. Aid workers, like Anne, can come and go as they like; if they choose they can leave Haiti and the suffering around them. However those in the camps have no choice. For those who have lost everything, it is at times easier to accept help from others who have experienced similar losses and understand what they are going through. For Anne, the sheer weight of so much need becomes unbearable. She feels helpless to aid the immense suffering she sees around her. Ma Lou recognizes this and releases Anne. Ma Lou’s acknowledgement gives Anne the permission she needs to return to Rwanda without feeling like she is abandoning her family and country. In Rwanda, Anne can use her skill set for a tangible benefit for the people.
In a world with so much war, refugees, and natural disasters a whole industry has built up around aid work. Anne points out that not all of these groups and individuals are altruistic. Some are “disaster vultures,” people who make money off of people's pain but get hailed as heroes in the process. Chancy emphasizes that the problems Haiti and its people face did not grow in isolation. Foreign influences have helped shape everything from its economy to the building materials people use. Inequality and poverty, not incompetence, dictated which buildings survived and which fell. The government did nothing to enforce the need for safe housing structures for the poor. Anne had the privilege to continue her studies and wants to use these skills to aid in many of the infrastructure problems she witnesses. Anne represents a desire of Haitians to be a part of building their own future, to be the ones leading the solutions rather than depending on foreign influences that fail to appreciate Haitians' own gifts and talents.
The mural Anne reads about is so special to the country because it is in direct contrast to the outward gaze. It is an example of Haitians portraying themselves: highlighting their beauty, strength, and resilience. Although much of the mural was destroyed, Anne imagines pieces of it living on. She imagines people grabbing pieces, not to sell, but for their homes. Perhaps those shards of murals can serve as a guiding light for people toward a brighter future. Anne herself follows this hope. Being in Rwanda helps Anne zoom out to see what healing could look like for Haiti down the line. Anne sees the scars but is also part of Rwanda’s long process of rebuilding and healing. Her design for the rebuilding of Haiti's Notre-Dame Cathedral is highly symbolic. In her design, Anne intentionally highlights the broken walls. She preserves them so they will serve as a testament and memorial to all those who lost their lives in the earthquake. From these broken walls, a new cathedral will rise up, a symbol of resilience and a better future.
Chancy plays with the number douze, or twelve, in order to tell Jonas’s story. His telling is list-like as he paints a picture of his life before and after the earthquake. Jonas’s is the only chapter without a time marker. As spirits, Jonas and his sisters are still linked to a place, Port-au-Prince, but are outside of time. After the traumatic events they have been through, death brings a sense of lightness and an end to their suffering. From this perspective, Jonas can recount his horrific last weeks with a tone of detachment because those days are behind him. This contrasts to the living who are still haunted by what they have been through. In Haiti, “there’s a very strong belief in there being no division between the living and the dead,'' shares Chancy in an interview. Chancy weaves this belief into the novel. Even in death, Jonas and his sisters accompany their mother; their love for her no less diminished for having passed on. While many in the camps believe Sara is insane for saying she sees her dead children, Jonas’s account validates her experience. For Sara, the knowledge that there can still be some link between the living and dead brings her a level of comfort.
Ma Lou’s narrative bookends the novel, setting the stage and wrapping up everyone’s stories. She describes in detail the trip she referenced in chapter one. Ma Lou has reached a level of weariness that she can no longer sustain. Yet, so accustomed to taking care of others, Ma Lou struggles to ask for what she needs. Anne understands this and offers to accompany Ma Lou on her trip. When she sees Anne, Ma Lou describes herself as a “container that has not known it needed to be filled.” This metaphor speaks to how accustomed Ma Lou had become to operating with so little. There are many instances in the novel where women are celebrated for their steadiness and strength but Chancy reminds the reader that everyone, especially caregivers, need a break.
Everyone who survived the earthquake in Haiti is carrying around some sort of grief. This grief, Ma Lou explains, weighs them down: the pain of it makes people grow old. To truly move forward, they need to cleanse themselves. Ma Lou invites other women on the trip, knowing that each of them have their own stories of trauma, grief, and loss. Together they form an intergenerational community and support one another in the process of healing. At the waterfalls, Anne and Sara physically support Ma Lou, an elder, as she makes her way into the falls. Sonia helps baptize Taffia’s son who, like her, was brought into the world through an act of violence. The women come together finding strength and resilience in one another and the ceremonial act of cleansing. The water washes away their pain, leaving them feeling lighter. Sara is able to symbolically bury her daughters at the waterfall. The women are able to honor the dead and lay them to rest in a spiritually significant place in the Vodou religion. Through their acts, the women affirm that the old ways matter; they have power and are part of what gives the Haitian people their strength.
Ma Lou carried around the grief that Richard rejected her long before he actually died. After the earthquake, Ma Lou lets go of this as well. Richard was always a mystery to Anne, more an idea than a real person. But when he died, Anne lost the hope that they could form a deeper relationship. Their trip offers Anne the chance to say goodbye. On her mother’s land, Ma Lou is finally able to lay to rest the bones she has been carrying around for years. These bones are symbolic not only of her loved ones, but all the people who were loved and lost in the earthquake. Ma Lou, always the caretaker, cries for all of them. With her tears, she honors the thousands who died without a proper burial, something so important in Haitian culture. Through her own act of healing, Ma Lou offers a guiding light and hope for other characters as they, and their country, move forward after the earthquake.
