I just finished reading my first tell-all Haiti book, a canonical work called The Rainy Season by Amy Wilentz. It was great. I recently met a long-timer anthropologist in Haiti who said after years and years of living here you can see some flaws in the book, but I didn’t see them, and I found it to be intelligent, exhaustively researched, and culturally respectful.
The book, written partially in first person, starts when Wilentz arrives in Haiti as Baby Doc Duvalier is about to catch a plane to exile in France in 1986. The Hotel Oloffson is full of journalists waiting for the story. The country is restless and ready for the end of a bloodthirsty dictatorship and its paramilitary band of thugs, the Tontons Macoute. Democracy seems to be looming on the horizon.
But over the course of the book, which runs until 1989, only some tragic moves toward democracy are made by a military regime that would rather not give up power to the people and risk prosecution for its crimes. The people, knowing justice will never be carried out by the government, begin cleansing the country of Duvaliarists and Tontons Macoute through popular killings and destroying property. This period is known as the dechoukaj, or uprooting. The U.S. Embassy, which supported the Duvaliers, supports the succeeding military regime, absurdly saying that it’s Haiti’s best chance for democracy. But Haiti’s first attempt at elections under the regime, who only puts up a farce of them to please the Americans, ends in a massacre of voters. Later, the already immensely popular Aristide is the target when men paid by the regime surround his church during mass and enter with guns and machetes, killing about a dozen and stabbing a pregnant woman in the stomach (Woman and baby were injured but survived).
At the end of the book, Wilentz finds herself back in her Manhattan apartment sleeping uneasily as she expects a call informing her of Aristide’s death. The call never comes, but her reporting about him turns out to be especially revealing as he rises to the presidency and is the target of a coup and an ouster. Aristide is a difficult topic around here. Haitians tend to love him or hate him. He’s back now, after years of exile in South Africa, but hasn’t has said anything since getting off the plane in Port-au-Prince. It’s strange to read Wilentz’s conversations with him long before his fate plays out. He is a mysterious character. In one interview, he talks about his well-known theological beliefs, in which he suggests he doesn’t believe that Jesus was literally the son of God, nor that he literally rose to Heaven, but rather the whole story developed to meet the political needs of Jesus’ followers. An unusual priest, no doubt.
Next up on my reading list: The Comedians by Graham Greene.
