Lesson 1: Critical Approaches

Inclusive Date: Week 1

In this unit, the standards are:

The learners will be able to understand and appreciate literary texts in various
genres across national literature and cultures.

The learners will be able to demonstrate understanding and appreciation of 21st

century literature of the world through: 1. A written close analysis and critical
interpretation of a literary text its terms of form and theme, with a description of its
context derived from research.

For Lesson 1, we will have the following learning targets. At the end of the lesson, check the
column that best describes your assessment of your own learning relative to the given learning targets.

I can write a close analysis and critical

interpretation of literary texts, applying a
reading approach, and doing an
adaptation of these, require from the
learner the ability to identify:
representative texts and authors from
Asia, North America, Europe, Latin
America, and Africa

Hello 21st century learners! Climb aboard and explore with me, together let’s explore different
worlds and dimensions as we enter this literary adventure! Join me as we explore the world of
literature. To start our lesson, let us pray one Our Father.

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 Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen

Together we will travel from lesson to lesson to discover treasures and experience an
extraordinary adventure as we journey through the 21st century literature from the Philippines and the
World.

Literature is constantly evolving, which means that there are more outputs in which you as a
student will enjoy in the near future. By reading and discussing literature, we expand our imagination,
our sense of what is possible, and our ability to empathize with others. This module will help us to write
and interpret literary texts. Ready? Let’s go!

Have you given reviews or comments

for a product that you tried? What about
a movie you watched or story you read?
Did you recommend it? Why or why
not?

Based on your answers you have already experienced evaluating or criticizing

someone’s work where it leads to our lesson which is about criticism.

What is Literary Criticism?

It is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and /or evaluation of works of literature.
Literary criticism is essentially an opinion supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or
historical or political content. It usually includes discussion of the work’s content and integrates your
ideas with other insights gained from research. By doing so, it may improve your ability to read
critically and interpret texts while gaining appreciation for different literary genres and theories of
interpretation.
Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better
sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of view, and
determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.

Let us know what are the different literary approaches that we could use when we are reading different
texts.

Literary Approach Meaning Questions…

Biographical It views literature as a reflection  What aspects of the author’s

of an author’s life and time or of
the characters’ life and times.
Focuses on connection of work 
to author’s personal
experiences.
 Does the writer challenge or
It is necessary to know about 
the author and the political,
economical, and sociological
context of his times in order to
personal life are relevant to
this story?
Which of the author’s stated
beliefs are reflected in the
work?
support the values of her
contemporaries?
Do any of the events in the
story correspond to events
experienced by the author?
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 truly understand his works.  Do any of the characters in
the story correspond to real
people?
Formalism Also called as “Pure or Literary”  How is the work’s structure
approach unified?
 How do various elements of
the work reinforce its
The selection is read and meaning?
viewed intrinsically, or for itself,  What recurring patterns
(repeated or related words,
independent of author’s age, or
images, etc.) can you find?
any other extrinsic factor.
 How does repetition
reinforce the theme(s)?
 Is there a relationship
The study of the selection is between the beginning and
based on the literary elements the end of the story?
which is boil down to the literal  How do the various
level (subject matter), the elements interact to create a
affective values (emotional, unified whole?
mood, atmosphere, tone,
attitude, empathy), the
ideational values (themes,
visions, universal truths,
character), technical values
(plot, structure, scene,
language, point of view,
imagery, figure, metrics, etc.,
and total effects (the
interrelation of the foregoing
elements).

Historical Sees literature as both a  How does it reflect the time

reflection and product of the
times and circumstances in
which it is written. Man as a
member of a particular society
or nation at a particular time, is
central to the approach and
whenever a teacher gives
historical or biographical
backgrounds in introducing a
selection, or arranges a
literature course in chronological
order, he is hewing close to this
approach.
in which it was written?
 What literary or historical
influences helped to shape
the form and content of the
work?
 What historical events or
movements might have
influenced this writer?
 How important is it the
historical context (the work’s
and the reader’s) to
interpreting the work?

Focuses on the connection of

work to the historical period in
which it was written; literary
historians attempt to connect the
historical background of the
work to specific aspects of the
work.

Psychological Focuses on the psychology of  What forces are motivating

characters and even the
psychology of creation.
Considers literature as
expression of personality.
It has resulted in an almost
the characters?
 Which behaviors of the
characters are conscious
ones?
the  Which are unconscious?
 What conscious or
unconscious conflicts exist
between the characters?

3|P age
 exhausting and exhaustive
“psychological analysis” of the
characters of symbols and
images, of recurrent themes,
etc.
Sociological Focuses on man’s relationship
to others in society, politics,
religion, and business.
Literature is viewed as the
 How do social forces shape
expression of man within a
given social situation which is
reduced to discussions on
economic, in which men are
somewhat simplistically divided
into haves and have not.  What does the work say
Stresses on social relevance,
social commitment,
 Does the story address
contemporaneity, and it deems
communication with the reader
important.  How do economic conditions
Philosophical Focuses on themes, view of the 
world, moral statements,
author’s philosophy, etc.
 What is the relationship
between the characters in
the society?
 Does the story address
societal issues, such as
race, gender, and class?
the power relationships
between groups or classes
of people in the story? Who
has the power and who
doesn’t? why?
about economic or social
power?
issues of exploitation? What
role does money play?
determine the direction of
the characters’ lives?
 Does the work challenge or
affirm the social order it
depicts?
 Can the protagonist’s
struggle be seen as
symbolic of a larger class
struggle?
What view of life does the
story present?
 According to this work’s view
of life, what is mankind’s
relationship to the universe?
 What moral statement, is
any, does this story make?
Is it explicit or implicit?
 What does the work say
about the human nature?

Now that you familiarized yourself with the points you have to consider in accomplishing your critique,
you are now ready to write one! Read the award winning short story entitled as, “Voices” by Alice
Munro. The copy of the story can be found on the appendix part of the module. After reading, criticize
the story by applying the formalistic approach and biographical approach. You may write your
output at the back of this page.

After doing the activity above, let us have a break to regain your energy. Have a rest and take care of
yourself always!

Teacher’s ____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
Note ____________________________________

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Read the essay written by Junot Diaz entitled “Apocalypse”. Analyze the essay by bringing out the
Common Themes, Literary Elements, Techniques and Devices and Literary Approaches. Decide on
what approach best fits the essay. The copy of the essay can be found on the appendix part of the
module.
Summary of the Literary Elements in Literary Techniques Literary Approaches
Essay the Essay and Devices Used used

Teacher’s ____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
Note ____________________________________

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RUBRICS

Poor Fair Good

(N/A) (N/A) (N/A)

Essay Structure Poor Fair Good

5 pts
Essay does not have Essay has and Essay has a clear
introduction, body introduction and a introduction,
Poor: 0-2 points paragraph and conclusion. Includes conclusion and at
Fair: 3-4 points conclusion. There is body paragraphs. least three body
Good: 5 points no thesis statement. Thesis statement is paragraphs.
Body paragraphs are stated, but not clear. Introduction has
not clear. thesis statement.
Paragraphs have
topic sentences.
Conclusion
summarizes the
point of the essay.

Argument/Thesis Poor Fair Good

15 pts
Writer's stance on the Writer states Writer clearly
argument is not clear. argument. Argument states his or her
Poor: 0-7 points Argument is simple is somewhat position. Writer's
Fair: 8-11 points and not explained. developed. argument is
Good: 12-15 thoughtful,
points complex and
thoroughly
explained.

Textual Poor Fair Good

Evidence
5 pts Evidence is not Includes at least Includes at least
specific. Writer does three textual three textual
not include at least references to back references to back
Poor: 0-2 points three pieces of up thesis, but they up thesis. This
Fair: 3-4 points textual evidence. are not thoroughly evidence is
Good: 5 points Evidence is simple explained or specific, complex
and not fully examined. Evidence and thoroughly
explored. Evidence is not specific and/or examined.
does not support the does not support the Evidence is quoted
writer's writer's or paraphrased
argument/thesis. argument/thesis and clearly
statement. supports the
writer's argument.

Grammar Poor Fair Good

5 pts
The essay clearly There are few Essay uses correct
has not been edited. spelling errors. grammar, including
Poor: 0-2 points There are numerous Student uses mostly spelling,
Fair: 3-4 points spelling, punctuation proper grammar, punctuation and
Good: 5 points errors, and sentence including correct sentence structure.
structure problems. punctuation and Sentences are
There are errors sentence structure in complete. Student
when using MLA most cases. There uses capitalization
format. may be errors when where needed.
using MLA format. Citation references
follow the MLA
format. Work has
clearly been
edited.

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 NOTE: Please go back to the learning targets in the first page of this module and
check the columns that indicate how well you understood the lesson. Thank you!

Congratulations, you had just finished your lesson 1 module! After studying our lesson, kindly
write the things you learned, found interesting and question as your learning summaries.

My Learning Summaries! Rate your understanding about our lesson about

I learn
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________

I realize
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________

I am confused
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________
Based on our lesson, what are your new learning and realizations as a child of God? Below,
write your lesson’s reflection through a prayer. A related Bible verse is also provided to help and guide
you more on the prayer you will formulate. Together, let us do things toward His Holiness because we
are precious in His eyes.

Romans 15:4
For whatever
was written in
former days was
written for our
instruction, that
through
endurance and
through the
encouragement
of the Scriptures
we might have
hope

We would like to hear from you and your parent/guardian comments and observations of
this lesson’s module. If you have suggestions, please feel free to write it at the box provided.
Remember, we are partners in this learning. Your feedbacks will be highly appreciated.

7|P age
 Comments:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________

Suggestions:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________

This part is for the parent or the attending adult:

Kindly write some of your observations on your child’s learning/study habits this week. Include also your
suggestions or if you have questions, feel free to write them here also.

Observation:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Question (if there’s any):
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Suggestion/s:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Cellphone No.

References

https://www.google.com/search?ei=22r2X_fsLJXv-
QbTpooI&q=21st+century+literature+from+the+philippines++canonical+authors+ppt&oq=21st+century+literatu
re+from+the+philippines++canonical+authors+ppt&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoECAAQRzoCCAA6CQgAEMkDEBYQ
HjoGCAAQFhAeOgUIIRCgAVC-
gwFY39IBYKLXAWgAcAN4AoAB5Q2IAflDkgEPMC4xLjIuNS0xLjEuNC4xmAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesgBCMABAQ&sc
lient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwi3xp3A3IjuAhWVd94KHVOTAgEQ4dUDCA0&uact=5

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=bx_5X5bSAYeEr7wPxbGt-
AU&q=armor+by+john+bengan&oq=armor+by&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQARgAMgUIABDJAzICCAAyAggAMgIIADICC
AAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADoLCC4QsQMQyQMQkwI6CAgAELEDEIMBOgUIABCxAzoICC4QsQMQgwE6CA
guEMcBEKMCOggIABCxAxDJAzoFCC4QsQM6AgguOgsIABCxAxCDARDJAzoLCC4QsQMQxwEQowJQq60BWOnFAW
Cz8AFoAHAAeACAAeEDiAGxEJIBCTAuMi4zLjIuMZgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-ab

ACSDI Learning Modules

Private Education Assistance Committee

8|P age
Appendix A: Apocalypse
Apocalypse
By Junot Diaz

ONE

On January 12, 2010 an earthquake struck Haiti. The epicenter of the quake, which registered a
moment magnitude of 7.0, was only fifteen miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. By the time the initial
shocks subsided, Port-au-Prince and surrounding urbanizations were in ruins. Schools, hospitals,
clinics, prisons collapsed. The electrical and communication grids imploded. The Presidential Palace,
the Cathedral, and the National Assembly building—historic symbols of the Haitian patrimony—were
severely damaged or destroyed. The headquarters of the UN aid mission was reduced to rubble, killing
peacekeepers, aid workers, and the mission chief, Hédi Annabi.

The figures vary, but an estimated 220,000 people were killed in the aftermath of the quake, with
hundreds of thousands injured and at least a million—one-tenth of Haiti’s population—rendered
homeless. According to the Red Cross, three million Haitians were affected. It was the single greatest
catastrophe in Haiti’s modern history. It was for all intents and purposes an apocalypse.

TWO

Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James
Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end
of the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the
catastrophes, personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the
Chernobyl meltdown or the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed
thousands and critically damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event
that provokes revelation. The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must
in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must
be revelatory.

“The apocalypse, then,” per Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.”
Apocalypses of the first, second, and third kinds. The Haiti earthquake was certainly an apocalypse of
the second kind, and to those who perished it may even have been an apocalypse of the first kind, but
what interests me here is how the Haiti earthquake was also an apocalypse of the third kind, a
revelation. This in brief is my intent: to peer into the ruins of Haiti in an attempt to describe what for me
the earthquake revealed—about Haiti, our world, and even our future.

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing
things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek
to run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s
words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the
underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged
inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe,
whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. (I do believe the tsunami-earthquake that ravaged Sendai
this past March will eventually reveal much about our irresponsible reliance on nuclear power and the
sinister collusion between local and international actors that led to the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.)

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us
light.

But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance,
practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our
world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion
brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—
becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

THREE

So the earthquake that devastated Haiti: what did it reveal?

Well I think it’s safe to say that first and foremost it revealed Haiti.

9|P age
This might strike some of you as jejune but considering the colossal denial energies (the veil) that keep
most third-world countries (and their problems) out of global sightlines, this is no mean feat. For most
people Haiti has never been more than a blip on a map, a faint disturbance in the force so far removed
that what happened there might as well have been happening on another planet. The earthquake for a
while changed that, tore the veil from before planet’s eyes and put before us what we all saw firsthand
or on the TV: a Haiti desperate beyond imagining.

If Katrina revealed America’s third world, then the earthquake revealed the third world’s third world.
Haiti is by nearly every metric one of the poorest nations on the planet—a mind-blowing 80 percent of
the population live in poverty, and 54 percent live in what is called “abject poverty.” Two-thirds of the
workforce have no regular employment, and, for those who do have jobs, wages hover around two
dollars a day. We’re talking about a country in which half the population lack access to clean water and
60 percent lack even the most basic health-care services, such as immunizations; where malnutrition is
among the leading causes of death in children, and, according to UNICEF, 24 percent of five-year-olds
suffer stunted growth. As the Haiti Children Project puts it:

Lack of food, hygienic living conditions, clean water and basic healthcare combine with epidemic
diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to give Haiti among the highest
infant, under-five and maternal mortality rates in the western hemisphere.

In Haiti life expectancy hovers at around 60 years as compared to, say, 80 years, in Canada.

Hunger, overpopulation, over-cultivation, and dependence on wood for fuel have strained Haiti’s natural
resources to the breaking point. Deforestation has rendered vast stretches of the Haitian landscape
almost lunar in their desolation. Haiti is eating itself. Fly over my island—Hispaniola, home to Haiti and
my native Dominican Republic—as I do two or three times a year, and what you will see will leave you
speechless. Where forests covered 60 percent of Haiti in 1923, only two percent is now covered. This
relentless deforestation has led to tremendous hardships; it is both caused by and causes poverty.
Without forests, 6,000 hectares of arable land erode every year, and Haiti has grown more vulnerable
to hurricane-induced mudslides that wipe out farms, roads, bridges, even entire communities. In 2008
four storms caused nearly a billion dollars in damage—15 percent of the gross domestic product—and
killed close to a thousand people. The mudslides were so extensive and the cleanup so underfunded
that much of that damage is still visible today.

In addition to resource pressures, Haiti struggles with poor infrastructure. Political and social institutions
are almost nonexistent, and a deadly confluence of political instability, pervasive corruption, massive
poverty, and predation from elites on down to armed drug gangs has unraveled civic society, leaving
the majority of Haitians isolated and at risk. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was reeling—it would not
have taken the slightest shove to send it into catastrophe.

All this the earthquake revealed.

FOUR

When confronted with a calamity of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, most of us resort to all
manners of evasion—averting our eyes, blaming the victim, claiming the whole thing was an act of
god—in order to avoid confronting what geographer Neil Smith calls the axiomatic truth of these events:
“There’s no such thing as a natural disaster.” In every phase and aspect of a disaster, Smith reminds
us, the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.

In other words disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible
societal choices that implicate more than just those being drowned or buried in rubble.

This is why we call them social disasters.

The Asian tsunami of 2004 was a social disaster. The waves were so lethal because the coral reefs
that might have protected the vulnerable coasts had been dynamited to facilitate shipping. And the
regions that suffered most were those like Nagapattinam, in India, where hotel construction and
industrial shrimp farming had already systematically devastated the natural mangrove forests, which
are the world’s best tsunami-protectors.

Hurricane Katrina was a social disaster. Not only in the ruthless economic marginalization of poor
African Americans and in the outright abandonment of same during the crisis, but in the Bush
administration’s decision to sell hundreds of square miles of wetlands to developers, destroying New
Orleans’s natural defenses. The same administration, according to Smith, gutted “the New Orleans
Corps of Engineers budget by 80 percent, thus preventing pumping and levee improvements.”
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As with the tsunami and Katrina, so too Haiti.

But Haiti is really exemplary in this regard. From the very beginning of its history, right up to the day of
the earthquake, Haiti had a lot of help on its long road to ruination. The web of complicity for its
engulfment in disaster extends in both time and space.

Whether it was Haiti’s early history as a French colony, which artificially inflated the country’s black
population beyond what the natural bounty of the land could support and prevented any kind of material
progress; whether it was Haiti’s status as the first and only nation in the world to overthrow Western
chattel slavery, for which it was blockaded (read, further impoverished) by Western powers (thank you
Thomas Jefferson) and only really allowed to rejoin the world community by paying an indemnity to all
whites who had lost their shirts due to the Haitian revolution, an indemnity Haiti had to borrow from
French banks in order to pay, which locked the country in a cycle of debt that it never broke free from;
whether it was that chronic indebtedness that left Haiti vulnerable to foreign capitalist interventions—
first the French, then the Germans, and finally the Americans, who occupied the nation from 1915 until
1934, installing a puppet president and imposing upon poor Haiti a new constitution more favorable to
foreign investment; whether it was the 40 percent of Haiti’s income that U.S. officials siphoned away to
repay French and U.S. debtors, or the string of diabolical despots who further drove Haiti into ruin and
who often ruled with foreign assistance—for example, FranÇois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who received
U.S. support for his anti-communist policies; whether it was the 1994 UN embargo that whittled down
Haiti’s robust assembly workforce from more than 100,000 workers to 17,000, or the lifting of the
embargo, which brought with it a poison-pill gift in the form of an IMF-engineered end to Haiti’s
protective tariffs, which conveniently enough made Haiti the least trade-restrictive nation in the
Caribbean and opened the doors to a flood of U.S.-subsidized rice that accelerated the collapse of the
farming sector and made a previously self-sufficient country overwhelmingly dependent on foreign rice
and therefore vulnerable to increases in global food prices; whether it was the tens of thousands who
lost their manufacturing jobs during the blockade and the hundreds of thousands who were thrown off
the land by the rice invasion, many of whom ended up in the cities, in the marginal buildings and
burgeoning slums that were hit hardest by the earthquake—the world has done its part in demolishing
Haiti.

This too is important to remember, and this too the earthquake revealed.

FIVE

The earthquake revealed our world in other ways. Look closely into the apocalypse of Haiti and you will
see that Haiti’s problem is not that it is poor and vulnerable—Haiti’s problem is that it is poor and
vulnerable at a time in our capitalist experiment when the gap between those who got grub and those
who don’t is not only vast but also rapidly increasing. Said another way, Haiti’s nightmarish vulnerability
has to be understood as part of a larger trend of global inequality.

We are in the age of neoliberal economic integration, of globalization, the magic process that was to
deliver the world’s poor out of misery and bring untold prosperity to the rest of us. Globalization, of
course, did nothing of the sort. Although the Big G was supposed to lift all boats, even a cursory glance
at the stats shows that the swell of globalization has had a bad habit of favoring the yachts over rafts by
a whole lot. The World Bank reports that in 1960 the per capita GDP of the twenty richest countries was
eighteen times greater than that of the twenty poorest. By 1995 that number had reached 37.

In this current era of neoliberal madness, sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “The least
developed countries lag more and more behind and within countries the number of the poor is growing;
on the other side of the split screen is the explosive growth of wealth of the hyper-rich.” It would be one
thing if the rich were getting richer because they are just that much more awesome than we are, but the
numbers suggest that the rich may be getting richer in part by squeezing the poor and, increasingly, the
middle class. This is a worldwide phenomenon. It is happening at the bottom of the market—in Haiti, for
example, where per capita GDP dropped from around $2,100 in 1980 to $1,045 in 2009 (2005 U.S.
dollars)—and at the top. In the United States, the poorest have gained much less than the wealthy:
between 1993 and 2008, the top-1 percent captured 52 percent of total income growth.

The world’s goodies are basically getting gobbled up by a tiny group of gluttons while the rest of us—by
which I mean billions of people—are being deprived of even the crumbs’ crumbs. And yet in spite of
these stark disparities, the economic powers-that-be continue to insist that what the world needs more
of is—wait for it—economic freedom and market-friendly policies, which is to say more inequality!

Pieterse describes our economic moment best:

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Overall discrepancies in income and wealth are now vast to the point of being grotesque. The
discrepancies in livelihoods across the world are so large that they are without historical precedent and
without conceivable justification—economic, moral, or otherwise.

This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal
stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are
being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed
beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural
disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island
that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist
project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are
being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure
whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around
the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits
around to die.

And this too the earthquake revealed.

SIX

I cannot contemplate the apocalypse of Haiti without asking the question: where is this all leading?
Where are the patterns and forces that we have set in motion in our world—the patterns and forces that
made Haiti’s devastation not only possible but inevitable—delivering us? To what end, to what future, to
what fate?

The answer seems to me both obvious and chilling. I suspect that once we have finished ransacking
our planet’s resources, once we have pushed a couple thousand more species into extinction and
exhausted the water table and poisoned everything in sight and exacerbated the atmospheric warming
that will finish off the icecaps and drown out our coastlines, once our market operations have parsed
the world into the extremes of ultra-rich and not-quite-dead, once the famished billions that our
economic systems left behind have in their insatiable hunger finished stripping the biosphere clean,
what we will be left with will be a stricken, forlorn desolation, a future out of a sci-fi fever dream where
the super-rich will live in walled-up plantations of impossible privilege and the rest of us will wallow in
unimaginable extremity, staggering around the waste and being picked off by the hundreds of
thousands by “natural disasters”—by “acts of god.”

Sounds familiar, don’t it?

Isn’t that after all the logical conclusion of what we are wreaking? The transformation of our planet into
a Haiti? Haiti, you see, is not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what
is to come.

And this too the earthquake revealed.

SEVEN

If I know anything it is this: we need the revelations that come from our apocalypses—and never so
much as we do now. Without this knowledge how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the social
practices that bring on our disasters? And how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the collective
response that will be needed to alleviate the misery?

How can we ever hope to change?

Because we must change, we also must refuse the temptation to look away when confronted with
disasters. We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters.
We must refuse the familiar scripts of victims and rescuers that focus our energies solely on charity
instead of systemic change. We must refuse the recovery measures that seek always to further polarize
the people and the places they claim to mend. And we must, in all circumstances and with all our
strength, resist the attempts of those who helped bring the disaster to use the chaos to their
advantage—to tighten their hold on our futures.

We must stare into the ruins—bravely, resolutely—and we must see.

And then we must act.

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Our very lives depend on it.

Will it happen? Will we, despite all our limitations and cruelties, really heed our ruins and pull ourselves
out of our descent into apocalypse?

Truth be told, I’m not very optimistic. I mean, just look at us. No, I’m not optimistic—but that doesn’t
mean I don’t have hope. Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I’m from New Jersey: as a
writer from out that way once said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Yes, I have hope. We humans are a fractious lot, flawed and often diabolical. But, for all our
deficiencies, we are still capable of great deeds. Consider the legendary, divinely inspired endurance of
the Haitian people. Consider how they have managed to survive everything the world has thrown at
them—from slavery to Sarah Palin, who visited last December. Consider the Haitian people’s
superhuman solidarity in the weeks after the quake. Consider the outpouring of support from Haitians
across the planet. Consider the impossible sacrifices the Haitian community has made and continues to
make to care for those who were shattered on January 12, 2010.

Consider also my people, the Dominicans. In the modern period, few Caribbean populations have been
more hostile to Haitians. We are of course neighbors, but what neighbors! In 1937 the dictator Rafael
Trujillo launched a genocidal campaign against Haitians and Haitian Dominicans. Tens of thousands
were massacred; tens of thousands more were wounded and driven into Haiti, and in the aftermath of
that genocide the relationship between the two countries has never thawed. Contemporary Dominican
society in many respects strikes me as profoundly anti-Haitian, and Haitian immigrants to my country
experience widespread discrimination, abysmal labor conditions, constant harassment, mob violence,
and summary deportation without due process.

No one, and I mean no one, expected anything from Dominicans after the quake; yet look at what
happened: Dominican rescue workers were the first to enter Haiti. They arrived within hours of the
quake, and in the crucial first days of the crisis, while the international community was getting its act
together, Dominicans shifted into Haiti vital resources that were the difference between life and death
for thousands of victims.

In a shocking reversal of decades of toxic enmity, it seemed as if the entire Dominican society
mobilized for the relief effort. Dominican hospitals were emptied to receive the wounded, and all
elective surgeries were canceled for months. (Imagine if the United States canceled all elective
surgeries for a single month in order to help Haiti, what a different that would have made.) Schools
across the political and economic spectrums organized relief drives, and individual citizens delivered
caravans of essential materials and personnel in their own vehicles, even as international organizations
were claiming that the roads to Port-au-Prince were impassable. The Dominican government
transported generators and mobile kitchens and established a field hospital. The Dominican Red Cross
was up and running long before anyone else. Dominican communities in New York City, Boston,
Providence, and Miami sent supplies and money. This historic shift must have Trujillo rolling in his
grave. Sonia Marmolejos, a humble Dominican woman, left her own infant babies at home in order to
breastfeed more than twenty Haitian babies whose mothers had either been seriously injured or killed
in the earthquake.

Consider Sonia Marmolejos and understand why, despite everything, I still have hope.

EIGHT

“These are dark times, there is no denying.” Thus spake Bill Nighy’s character in the penultimate Harry
Potter movie. Sometimes we have to look in our entertainment for truths. And sometimes we have to
look in the ruins for hope.

More than a year has passed since the earthquake toppled Haiti, and little on the material front has
changed. Port-au-Prince is still in ruins, rubble has not been cleared, and the port is still crippled. More
than a million people are still in tent cities, vulnerable to the elements and disease and predatory
gangs, and there is no sign that they will be moving out soon. The rebuilding has made many U.S.
companies buckets of cash, but so far has done very little for Haitian contractors or laborers. Cholera is
spreading through the relief camps, killing more than 4,500 so far, according to the United Nations. In
December 2010 Paul Farmer reported that nearly a year after the disaster Haiti had received only 38
percent, or $732.5 million, of promised donations, excluding debt relief. In the Dominican Republic,
threats of violence caused thousands of Haitian immigrants to abandon the Santiago area just weeks
before the earthquake’s first anniversary.

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More than a year later, we can say safely that the world has looked away. It has failed to learn the
lesson of the apocalypse of Haiti.

Never fear though—if anything is certain it is this: there will be more Haitis. Some new catastrophe will
strike our poor planet. And for a short while the Eye of Sauron that is the globe’s fickle attention span
will fall upon this novel misery. More hand wringing will ensue, more obfuscatory narratives will be
trotted out, more people will die. Those of us who are committed will help all we can, but most people
will turn away. There will be a few, however, who, steeling themselves, will peer into the ruins for the
news that we will all eventually need.

After all, apocalypses like the Haitian earthquake are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities:
chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change. One day somewhere
in the world something terrible will happen, and for once we won’t look away. We will reject what Jane
Anna and Lewis R. Gordon have described in Of Divine Warning as that strange moment following a
catastrophe where “in our aversion to addressing disasters as signs” we refuse “to interpret and take
responsibility for the kinds of collective responses that may be needed to alleviate human misery.” One
day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen and for once we will heed the ruins. We will
begin collectively to take responsibility for the world we’re creating. Call me foolishly utopian, but I
sincerely believe this will happen. I do. I just wonder how many millions of people will perish before it
does.

Appendix B: Voices
Voices
By Alice Munro

When my mother was growing up, she and her whole family would go to dances. These would
be held in the schoolhouse, or sometimes in a farmhouse with a big enough front room. Young and old
would be in attendance. Someone would play the piano — the household piano or the one in the school
— and someone would have brought a violin. The square dancing had complicated patterns or steps,
which a person known for a special facility would call out at the top of his voice (it was always a man)
and in a strange desperate sort of haste which was of no use at all unless you knew the dance already.
As everybody did, having learned them all by the time they were ten or twelve years old.
Married now, with three of us children, my mother was still of an age and temperament to enjoy such
dances if she had lived in the true countryside where they were still going on. She would have enjoyed
too the round dancing performed by couples, which was supplanting the old style to a certain extent.
But she was in an odd situation. We were. Our family was out of town but not really in the country.

“This is so surprising and wonderful,” said Munro in a statement supplied by her publisher. “I am dazed
by all the attention and affection that has been coming my way this morning. It is such an honour to
receive this wonderful recognition from the Nobel Committee and I send them my thanks.

“When I began writing there was a very small community of Canadian writers and little attention was
paid by the world. Now Canadian writers are read, admired and respected around the globe.”

My father, who was much better liked than my mother, was a man who believed in taking whatever you
were dealt. Not so my mother. She had risen from her farm girl’s life to become a schoolteacher, but
this was not enough, it had not given her the position she would have liked, or the friends she would
have liked to have in town. She was living in the wrong place and had not enough money, but she was
not equipped anyway. She could play euchre but not bridge. She was affronted by the sight of a woman
smoking. I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical. She said things like “readily” and
“indeed so.” She sounded as if she had grown up in some strange family who always talked that way.
And she hadn’t. They didn’t. Out on their farms, my aunts and uncles talked the way everybody else
did. And they didn’t like my mother very much, either.

I don’t mean that she spent all her time wishing that things weren’t as they were. Like any other woman
with washtubs to haul into the kitchen and no running water and a need to spend most of the summer
preparing food to be eaten in the winter, she was kept busy. She couldn’t even devote as much time as
she otherwise would have done in being disappointed with me, wondering why I was not bringing the
right kind of friends, or any friends at all, home from the town school. Or why I was shying away from

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Sunday School recitations, something I used to make a grab at. And why I came home with the ringlets
torn out of my hair — a desecration I had managed even before I got to school, because nobody else
wore their hair the way she fixed mine. Or indeed why I had learned to blank out even the prodigious
memory I once had for reciting poetry, refusing to use it ever again for showing off.

But I am not always full of sulks and disputes. Not yet. Here I am when about ten years old, all eager to
dress up and accompany my mother to a dance.

Were the people who lived in this house giving this dance simply in order to create some festivity? Or
were they charging money? Did they have doctor’s bills? I knew how dreadfully that could fall upon a
family.

The dance was being held in one of the altogether decent but not prosperous-looking houses on our
road. A large wooden house inhabited by people I knew nothing about, except that the husband worked
in the foundry, even though he was old enough to be my grandfather. You didn’t quit the foundry then,
you worked as long as you could and tried to save up money for when you couldn’t. It was a disgrace,
even in the middle of what I later learned to call the Great Depression, to find yourself having to go on
the Old Age Pension. It was a disgrace for your grown children to allow it, no matter what straits they
were in themselves.

Some questions come to mind now that didn’t then.

Were the people who lived in the house giving this dance simply in order to create some festivity? Or
were they charging money? They might have found themselves in difficulties, even if the man had a
job. Doctor’s bills. I knew how dreadfully that could fall upon a family. My little sister was delicate, as
people said, and her tonsils had already been removed. My brother and I suffered spectacular
bronchitis every winter, resulting in doctor’s visits. Doctors cost money.

The other thing I might have wondered about was why I should have been chosen to accompany my
mother, instead of my father doing that. But it really isn’t such a puzzle. My father maybe didn’t like to
dance, and my mother did. Also, there were two small children to be looked after at home, and I wasn’t
old enough yet to do that. I can’t remember my parents ever hiring a babysitter. I’m not sure the term
was even familiar in those days. When I was in my teens I found employment that way, but times had
changed by then.

We were dressed up. At the country dances my mother remembered, there was never any appearance
in those sassy square dance outfits you would see later on television. Everybody wore their best, and
not to do so — to appear in anything like those frills and neckerchieves that were the supposed attire of
country folk — would have been an insult to the hosts and everybody else. I wore a dress my mother
had made for me, of soft winter wool. The skirt was pink and the top yellow, with a heart of the pink
wool sewn where my left breast would be one day. My hair was combed and moistened and shaped
into those long fat sausage-like ringlets that I got rid of every day on the way to school. I had
complained about wearing them to the dance on the grounds that nobody else wore them. My mother’s
retort was that nobody else was so lucky. I dropped the complaint because I wanted to go so much, or
perhaps because I thought that nobody from school would be at the dance so it didn’t matter. It was the
ridicule of my school fellows that I feared always.

My mother’s dress was not homemade. It was her best, too elegant for church and too festive for a
funeral, and so hardly ever worn. It was made of black velvet, with sleeves to the elbows, and a high
neckline. The wonderful thing about it was a proliferation of tiny beads, gold and silver and various
colours, sewn all over the bodice and catching the light, changing whenever she moved or only
breathed. She had braided her hair, which was still mostly black, then pinned it in a tight coronet on top
of her head. If she had been anybody else but my mother I would have thought her thrillingly
handsome. I think I did find her so, but as soon as we got into the strange house I had to notice that her
best dress was nothing like any other woman’s dress, though they must have put on their best too.

The other women I’m speaking of were in the kitchen. That was where we stopped and looked at things
set out on a big table. All sorts of tarts and cookies and pies and cakes. And my mother too set down
some fancy thing she had made and started to fuss around to make it look better. She commented on
how mouthwatering everything looked.

Am I sure she said that — mouthwatering? Whatever she said, it did not sound quite right. I wished
then for my father to be there, always sounding perfectly right for the occasion, even when he spoke
grammatically. He would do that in our house but not so readily outside of it. He slipped into whatever
exchange was going on — he understood that the thing to do was never to say anything special. My
mother was just the opposite. With her everything was clear and ringing and served to call attention.

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Now that was happening and I heard her laugh, delightedly, as if to make up for nobody’s talking to her.
She was inquiring where we might put our coats.

It turned out that we could put them anywhere, but if we wanted, somebody said, we could lay them
down on the bed upstairs. You got upstairs by a staircase shut in by walls, and there was no light,
except at the top. My mother told me to go ahead, she would be up in a minute, and so I did.

A question here might be whether there could really have been a payment for attending that dance. My
mother could have stayed behind to arrange it. On the other hand, would people have been asked to
pay and still have brought all those refreshments? And were the refreshments really as lavish as I
remember? With everybody so poor? But maybe they were already feeling not so poor, with the war
jobs and money that soldiers sent home. If I was really ten, and I think I was, then those changes would
have been going on for two years.

The staircase came up from the kitchen and also from the front room, joining together into one set of
steps that led up to the bedrooms. After I had got rid of my coat and boots in the tidied-up front
bedroom, I could still hear my mother’s voice ringing out in the kitchen. But I could also hear music
coming from the front room, so I went down that way.

The room had been cleared of all furniture except the piano. Dark green cloth blinds, of the kind I
thought particularly dreary, were pulled down over the windows. But there was no dreary sort of
atmosphere in the room. Many people were dancing, decorously holding on to each other, shuffling or
swaying in tight circles. A couple of girls still in school were dancing in a way that was just becoming
popular, moving opposite each other and sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. They actually
smiled a greeting when they saw me, and I melted with pleasure, as I was apt to do when any confident
older girl paid any attention to me.

There was a woman in that room you couldn’t help noticing, one whose dress would certainly put my
mother’s in the shade. She must have been quite a bit older than my mother — her hair was white, and
worn in a smooth sophisticated arrangement of what were called marcelled waves, close to her scalp.
She was a large person with noble shoulders and broad hips, and she was wearing a dress of golden-
orange taffeta, cut with a rather low square neck and a skirt that just covered her knees. Her short
sleeves held her arms tightly and the flesh on them was heavy and smooth and white, like lard.

This was a startling sight. I would not have thought it possible that somebody could look both old and
polished, both heavy and graceful, bold as brass and yet mightily dignified. You could have called her
brazen, and perhaps my mother later did — that was her sort of word. Someone better disposed might
have said, stately. She didn’t really show off, except in the whole style and colour of the dress. She and
the man with her danced together in a respectful, rather absentminded style, like spouses.

If I had lived in the town, instead of just going there for school, I would surely have seen her sometime
before. I would have known that there was something disgusting and exciting about her

I didn’t know her name. I had never seen her before. I didn’t know that she was notorious in our town,
and maybe farther afield, for all I knew.

I think that if I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have
given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need.

Of course, if I had lived in the town, instead of just going in and out every day for school, I might have
known that she was a notable prostitute. I would surely have seen her sometime, though not in that
orange dress. And I would not have used the word prostitute. Bad woman, more likely. I would have
known that there was something disgusting and dangerous and exciting and bold about her, without
knowing exactly what it was. If somebody had tried to tell me, I don’t think I would have believed them.

There were several people in town who looked unusual and maybe she would have seemed to me just
another. There was the hunchbacked man who polished the doors of the town hall every day and as far
as I know did nothing else. And the quite proper-looking woman who never stopped talking in a loud
voice to herself, scolding people who were nowhere in sight.

I would have learned in time what her name was and eventually found out that she really did the things
I could not believe she did. And that the man I saw dancing with her and whose name perhaps I never
knew was the owner of the poolroom. One day when I was in high school a couple of girls dared me to
go into the poolroom when we were walking past, and I did, and there he was, the same man. Though
he was balder and heavier now, and wearing shabbier clothes. I don’t recall that he said anything to
me, but he did not have to. I bolted back to my friends, who were not quite friends after all, and told
them nothing.
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When I saw the owner of the poolroom, the whole scene of the dance came back to me, the thumping
piano and the fiddle music and the orange dress, which I would by then have called ridiculous, and my
mother’s sudden appearance with her coat on that she had probably never taken off.

There she was, calling my name through the music in the tone I particularly disliked, the tone that
seemed to specially remind me that it was thanks to her I was on this earth at all.

She said, “Where is your coat?” As if I had mislaid it somewhere.

“Upstairs.”

“Well go and get it.”

She would have seen it there if she herself had been upstairs at all. She must never have got past the
kitchen, she must have been fussing around the food with her own coat unbuttoned but not removed,
until she looked into the room where the dancing was taking place and knew who that orange dancer
was.

“Don’t delay,” she said.

I didn’t intend to. I opened the door to the stairway and ran up the first steps and found that where the
stairs took their turn some people were sitting, blocking my way. They didn’t see me coming — they
were taken up, it seemed, with something serious. Not an argument, exactly, but an urgent sort of
communication.

Two of these people were men. Young men in Air Force uniforms. One sitting on a step, one leaning
forward on a lower step with a hand on his knee. There was a girl sitting on the step above them, and
the man nearest to her was patting her leg in a comforting way. I thought she must have fallen on these
narrow stairs and hurt herself, for she was crying.

Peggy. Her name was Peggy. “Peggy, Peggy,” the young men were saying, in their urgent and even
tender voices.

She said something I couldn’t make out. She spoke in a childish voice. She was complaining, the way
you complain about something that isn’t fair. You say over and over that something isn’t fair, but in a
hopeless voice, as if you don’t expect the thing that isn’t fair to be righted. Mean is another word to be
made use of in these circumstances. It’s so mean. Somebody has been so mean.

By listening to my mother’s talk to my father when we got home I found out something of what had
happened, but I was not able to get it straight. Mrs. Hutchison had shown up at the dance, driven by the
poolroom man, who was not known to me then as the poolroom man. I don’t know what name my
mother called him by, but she was sadly dismayed by his behaviour. News had got out about the dance
and some boys from Port Albert — that is, from the Air Force base — had decided to put in an
appearance as well. Of course that would have been all right. The Air Force boys were all right. It was
Mrs. Hutchison who was the disgrace. And the girl.

She had brought one of her girls with her.

“Maybe just felt like an outing,” my father said. “Maybe just likes to dance.”

My mother seemed not even to have heard this. She said that it was a shame. You expected to have a
nice time, a nice decent dance within a neighbourhood, and then it was all ruined.

I was in the habit of assessing the looks of older girls. I had not thought Peggy was particularly pretty.
Maybe her makeup had rubbed off with her crying. Her rolled-up mousey-coloured hair had got loose
from some of its bobby pins. Her fingernails were polished but they still looked as if she chewed them.
She didn’t seem much more grown up than one of those whiny, sneaky, perpetually complaining older
girls I knew. Nevertheless the young men treated her as if she was someone who deserved never to
have encountered one rough moment, someone who rightfully should be petted and pleasured and
have heads bowed before her.

One of them offered her a ready-made cigarette. This in itself I saw as a treat, since my father rolled his
own and so did every other man I knew. But Peggy shook her head and complained in that hurt voice
that she did not smoke. Then the other man offered a stick of gum, and she accepted it.

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What was going on? I had no way of knowing. The boy who had offered the gum noticed me, while
rummaging in his pocket, and he said, “Peggy? Peggy, here’s a little girl I think wants to go upstairs.”

When I came downstairs with my coat on they were still there, but this time they had been expecting
me, so they all kept quiet while I passed. Except that Peggy gave one loud sniffle, and the young man
nearest to her kept stroking her upper leg. Her skirt was pulled up and I saw the fastener holding her
stocking.

For a long time I remembered the voices. I pondered over the voices. Not Peggy’s. The men’s. I know
now that some of the Air Force men stationed at Port Albert early in the war had come out from
England, and were training there to fight the Germans. So I wonder if it was the accent of some part of
Britain that I was finding so mild and entrancing. It was certainly true that I had never in my life heard a
man speak in that way, treating a woman as if she was so fine and valued a creature that whatever it
was, whatever unkindness had come near her, was somehow a breach of a law, a sin.

What did I think had happened to make Peggy cry? The question did not much interest me at the time. I
was not a brave person myself. I cried when chased and beaten with shingles on the way home from
my first school. I cried when the teacher in the town school singled me out, in front of the class, to
expose the shocking untidiness of my desk. And when she phoned my mother about the same problem
and my mother hanging up the phone herself wept, enduring misery because I was not a credit to her. It
seemed as though some people were naturally brave and others weren’t. Somebody must have said
something to Peggy, and there she was snuffling, because like me she was not thick-skinned.

It must have been that orange-dressed woman who had been mean, I thought, for no particular reason.
It had to have been a woman. Because if it had been a man, one of her Air Force comforters would
have punished him. Told him to watch his mouth, maybe dragged him outside and beaten him up.

So it wasn’t Peggy I was interested in, not her tears, her crumpled looks. She reminded me too much of
myself. It was her comforters I marvelled at. How they seemed to bow down and declare themselves in
front of her.

What had they been saying? Nothing in particular. All right, they said. It’s all right, Peggy, they said.
Now, Peggy. All right. All right.

Such kindness. That anybody could be so kind.

It is true that these young men, brought to our country to train for bombing missions on which so many
of them would be killed, might have been speaking in the normal accents of Cornwall or Kent or Hull or
Scotland. But to me they seemed to be unable to open their mouths without uttering some kind of
blessing, a blessing on the moment. It didn’t occur to me that their futures were all bound up with
disaster, or that their ordinary lives had flown out the window and been smashed on the ground. I just
thought of the blessing, how wonderful to get on the receiving end of it, how strangely lucky and
undeserving was that Peggy.

And, for I don’t know how long, I thought of them. In the cold dark of my bedroom they rocked me to
sleep. I could turn them on, summon up their faces and their voices — but oh, far more, their voices
were now directed to myself and not to any unnecessary third party. Their hands blessed my own
skinny thighs and their voices assured me that I, too, was worthy of love.

And while they still inhabited my not yet quite erotic fantasies they were gone. Some, many, gone for
good.

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