The Danger of the Extended Hand: A Critique of Humanitarian Aid in Makenzy Orcel’s 'L’Ombre Animale'

Abstract

Since the 2010 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince, there have been a number of inquiries detailing the material failures of the multi-national humanitarian aid response. Studies have focused on the misuse of funds by large international organizations, and they have attempted to trace the donations made by individuals and governments alike. Still others indicate the neocolonial manner in which Haitians were themselves cut out of negotiations regarding 'how' their nation should be rebuilt. Such criticisms are of particular interest, given the 40,000 Haitians still living under tarps more than eight years after the quake. Despite the documented disappointments of the post-earthquake aid initiative, North Atlantic aid workers and organizations enjoy a privileged position in the collective unconscious of the global North. As is becoming increasingly clear, “Aid” often does more harm than good, whether due to oversight, greed, or the momentum of the global wealth and power disparity. Makenzy Orcel’s 2016 novel 'L’Ombre animale' represents foreign development workers—not as the long-awaited rescuers of Haiti—but as wolves come to feed off the precarity and vulnerability of a rural Haitian village. In this article, I maintain that, through the historically and mythologically salient figure of the wolf, Orcel systematically questions the moral capital attributed to the white savior.

Keywords

• foreign aid
• foreign development
• Haiti
• Haitian exceptionalism
• Haitian resilience
• white savior narrative
• marvelous realism