A Postcolonial Wasteland in the Caribbean Post-Holocene: Katia D. Ulysse’s <i>Mouths Don’t Speak</i> as a Portrait of Haitian/American Implication in Haiti’s Tropical Apocalypse

Abstract This article examines Katia D. Ulysse’s Mouths Don’t Speak (2018) as a realist narrative which presents Ulysse’s motherland, Haiti, as a postcolonial wasteland of repeated natural disasters, political turmoil and extreme poverty in many cases engendered by the neocolonial interventionism of the US and other countries as well as the contribution of the Haitian elite and the Americanised Haitian diasporas like Ulysse’s protagonists. Hence, drawing on ecocritical theories around waste (Simal-González 2019, 2022; Armiero 2021), the post-Holocene era (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011; Moore 2015, 2016b) and the concept of the “implicated subject” (Rothberg 2019), I analyse the novel’s portrayal of the aforementioned actors’ implication in contemporary Haiti’s eco-social apocalypse as a way to offer a pluralistic blaming for the gradual ‘wastification’ of this Caribbean country since colonial times. 1