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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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1990-09-22
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BOOKS, Page 64Slaves Laugh
THE RAINY SEASON: HAITI SINCE DUVALIER
by Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster; 427 pages; $19.95
When Amy Wilentz first visited Haiti in 1986, she expected to
find a land terrorized by President-for-Life Jean-Claude ("Baby
Doc") Duvalier and his dreaded Tontons Macoutes. As it happened,
she landed at Port-au-Prince Airport three days before Duvalier was
hustled off to exile in France. Instead of a country bowed under
tyranny, Wilentz found one struggling with the uncertainties of
revolution.
"Everything was at a boil," she felt, "and I couldn't stay
away." Eventually Wilentz quit her job as a TIME staff writer to
live in Haiti for nearly two years. The end result, The Rainy
Season, is a portrait of post-Duvalier Haiti that verges on the
Didionesque. Which is to say, it has sharply observed accounts of
such local color as voodoo and zombis, and a tone of cool
detachment mixed with scorn for the social wreckage spawned by even
well-intentioned American meddling. Yet at its narrative best The
Rainy Season is the kind of world-class reportage that deserves
honor as history's first draft.
Haiti, Wilentz writes, is a land where "misery walked around
the place like a live being." For the country's poor, Duvalier's
end meant not liberty but new masters: generals who promised
elections that were scarred by terror, intimidation and fraud.
Nothing had changed, except the birth of hope. Its harbinger
is a frail, shy Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A
charismatic preacher of liberation theology, Aristide was spokesman
for Ti Legliz -- the "Little Church" of the slums, in contrast to
the grand official church of Haiti's temporizing bishops and its
French-speaking "mulatto elite." Yet even Aristide ends as one more
victim of Haiti's misery. Army goons burn his church, murdering
many of his congregants, and Aristide eventually becomes a priest
sans pulpit when the Salesians dismiss him for being too political.
What sustains Wilentz's own cautious hope for Haiti is the
energy of its people, who have somehow learned the art of
surviving. Haiti, she writes, "made me think of the laughter of
slaves" -- but slaves, she all but adds, who will someday find
their way to freedom.