3. "Port-au-Prince: The Moment" by Mischa Berlinski

Mischa Berlinski is a relatively young American author who has already won several awards including the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award, and finished as a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. His 2010 essay titled “Port-au-Prince: The Moment” attempts to convey his experience of the days following the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of the same year to anyone who wasn’t there to experience it themselves. Berlinski successfully does this through the rhetorical use of imagery, irony, and metaphors. The essay itself opens just as the earthquake is beginning, and is described by Berlinski as, “a series of rolling waves, each sharper than the one before.” He uses this metaphor of comparing the 7.0 magnitude earthquake to waves because while very few people have experienced an earthquake of any magnitude, most people have been in either a pool, the ocean, or some other body of water in which waves may be present. This allows his audience to understand the feeling of the quake by relating them to the familiar feeling of waves. A little further into the essay, Berlinski recalls his family’s initial reaction to earthquake and states, “Cristina was in tears. The baby was collected and calm.” Here he uses irony as you would suspect his wife’s and baby’s reaction to be switched. Normally, his wife, a full grown and matured woman, would have be “collected and calm” and you’d expect the baby to be crying. However, the reality was in fact the opposite. Lastly, he uses imagery to describe scenes that the average person has never seen. Berlinski states, “A very large woman wearing a yellow bra cradled an unmoving bloodied child in her arms.” This paints a graphic picture in our imagination that without such use of imagery, may not have been possible. It is for these reasons and Berlinski’s use of imagery, irony, and metaphors that I believe he accomplished his purpose of communicating his experience of the Haitian earthquake and that of the days following to those who were not there to experience it firsthand.

Haiti Earthquake Building Damage by Flickr Upload Bot