Chancy gathers essays, a poem, a photo essay and newspaper columns written between 2010 and 2022 around one claim: what looks like natural catastrophe in Haiti is engineered. Writing as a Haitian who watched the 2010 earthquake from abroad and returned repeatedly afterwards, she sets the 2021 southern earthquake beside it and finds the same sequence, with aid arriving late, flooding markets with foreign goods, setting up camp without consulting local government, and leaving. The conditions for that failure are traced to the indemnity France extracted for recognition, to gunboat diplomacy, to development plans built on assembly factories instead of schools, clinics and trade, and to a hostility toward a Black republic that she reads back through Jefferson. Haitian state corruption is conceded and then measured against the record of foreign actors. Later sections turn to Haitian women's practices of survival, to Vodou and the myth of a cursed nation, and to relations with the Dominican Republic.