Do we – the rest of the world – need Haiti to remind us how well off we are? Dante could not have invented an inferno more hopeless. Is there really no way out? A humane protectorate consisting of the U.S., France, Brazil and Canada? A concentrated effort masterminded by the U.N. to do the job for which it was created? Is Haiti going to remain forever a prisoner of its unspeakable past and a reminder to the rest of the world that it has been complicit in its agony?
Or could it be that the literary imagination will come to the rescue? If the Haitian nightmare was not so patently a real one, would we have no choice but to conclude that it was imagined? Mario Vargas Llosa comes from Peru, a country that has had its own reality of miseries. On December 7, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This is the conclusion of his Nobel speech:
“From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the ones we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us.
“The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story.
“That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.”
The last video in the Internment series has been posted at YouTube.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Such wisdom, thank you, Eric for finding this.
Nice piece. Did Llosa himself connect his comments to the Haitian disaster, or is that your own brilliance?
He did NOT make the connection. I take full credit.
Based on experience at various headquarters and in the field, I fervently hope that we may be protected from “concentrated efforts[s] masterminded by the UN”.