“Haiti Without Walls” by Kettly Mars | Published 1/1/11 | A Reflective Essay Analysis

           In “Haiti Without Walls”, Mars uses a pensive, hopeful, and inspirational tone in order to tell us of her experience in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. She creates her tone with her diction, detail, syntax, and imagery. For example, Mars is pensive when she writes, "How eerie the huge cloud of dust rising...over Port-au-Prince", and she is inspirational when she writes, "we were a people lost in a tremor but united by a common fate."

           I like Mars's tone in “Haiti Without Walls” because it makes me believe once again in the human spirit, in the ability of bad times to bring out the best in people. The tone is perfect for such an essay about a person's experiences in a disaster. The essay is beautifully written and really makes one think.

           I think the tone in "Haiti Without Walls" would work perfectly for an AP essay because it is formal, written in standard English, and the author manages to reach out to the reader and really resonate with the reader, which is pretty essential in any essay, especially an AP essay.

          Through Mars’s use of rhetorical devices in “Haiti Without Walls”, she not only allows the reader to understand her essay better, but also helps it flow better. For example, Mars uses parallelism and tricolon, such as when she says, “...we have known the wrath of storms, the terrors of the cholera epidemic, the frustration of being locked in an incredible political stalemate..." to facilitate the flow of the passage and to add power to her recollection of the effects of the Haitian earthquake.

            Florey made a good diction choice with the phrase "concrete and iron" when she wrote, "...survivors pulled the wounded from concrete and iron." Although what the Mars means to say here is that the wounded were pulled out of fallen buildings, her use of "concrete and iron" (synecdoche) carry the connotation of something that is machine-made and of the industrial age, something that she wants to contrast with the completely human experience that she is describing in her essay. This clever utilization of words' connotations and synecdoche add power to the sentence. Moreover Mars uses alliteration, such as when she writes, "without walls", "telluric wave twisted", "dying day", and "dream from destruction." She also uses repetition, such as when she writes, "our country was on her knees; we were on our knees." Such use of rhetorical devices throughout her essay adds a certain spice, imagery, and flow to her essay that would not have existed otherwise.

         All in all, "Haiti Without Walls" is a enchanting and emotionally appealing essay that is neatly executed. There were no weaknesses whatsoever that I could discern in the essay.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/opinion/20110102_Op_Postcards.html?ref=opinion