Project Summary
The Haiti Memory Oral History Project is an oral history project created by historian Claire Antone Payton to document the January 12, 2010, earthquake and post-earthquake life. The earthquake is a point-zero in the lives of individual Haitians and in Haitian history; it is a moment that divided time into "before" and "after." This project attempts to document that change.
The result is a collection of over one hundred audio-recorded interviews with Haitians in Port-au-Prince in the summer and fall of 2010. The interviews offer Haitians the opportunity to represent themselves and present their own narrative about what has happened to their country. While nearly all of these interviews include stories from the earthquake, most of them tend to focus on post-earthquake life, particularly life in the homeless camps.
The interviews invite the listener to engage with the intimate and unexpected details of life in Port-au-Prince and to explore Haiti in an entirely new way.
