In the Parish of the Poor
Hogan, John P.
that, for him, they did not really exist. Hence Dickens's paradoxical nature and his greatness as an artist are a function of his success in depiction, in telling the story his way, as much as...
...The foreword by Amy Wilentz provides an excellent overview of the period and insightfully introduces Aristide...
...You know how hard it is to build Utopia on a garbage heap, indeed, it is hard to build even a decent poor man's home there...
...In each of these cases, Aristide is able to cull a resurrection hope out of the clutches of death...
...When the third volume appears next year in English, Mahfouz's chronicle will have reached World War II, the conflicts of liberated grandchildren, and the issue of communism in Egypt...
...efforts to scrap the Interdiction Agreement signed by President Ronald Reagan and JeanClaude Duvalier...
...There is something curious about this argument: Dickens's uniqueness lies in the collapse of the distinctions between reality and fiction and only his genius saves him from being a solipsist...
...The second installment situates the rogue-patriarch against the background of deteriorating traditions, filial insubordination, and the rising tide of nationalism and resentment of British domination...
...We will either read Dickens or we will not...
...In response to such formidable tasks, Aristide has surrounded himself with strong and capable cabinet members, all of whom are light years ahead of Haiti's recent political figures...
...Jean Bosco Church on September 11, 1988, the message went out in Haiti: "Yon jou, dife makout boule Pawol Renmen-an--Pou--Chak jou, dife Renmen-an boule raisin makout" ("One day, the ton-ton macoutes burned the Word that we love...
...a new agreement with the Dominican Republic covering Haitian sugar cane workers...
...John P. Hogan tier the brutal murders and burning at St...
...The killings at Fort Dimanche, the massacre at Jean Rabel, the ambush of Aristide and the other activist priests at Freycineau, the bloody election Sunday of November 29, 1987, and the brutal assault on parishioners at St...
...There is an irony to Bishop Laroche's glowing tribute and indeed to the very fact that an outspoken Catholic priest has been elected president of Haiti...
...The Washington Office on Haiti has indicated a few of the major planks in the new president's program...
...Jean Bosco are all recounted from Aristide's perspective...
...He must shift from being the fiery proclaimer of the word to being the policy formulator and implementer...
...With the publication of In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, North Americans get a glimpse of Haiti's president...
...Jean's there emerged the future president of Haiti...
...Wilentz acknowledges the pivotal role of the Haitian church in the downfall of Baby Doc and uncovers the leavening role of the slight, intense Salesian priest...
...However, Aristide and the Haitian people--who together live w i t h i n the c o n s t a n t shadow o f death--would describe the apparent suppression of their movements and the subsequent renewal of energy in terms of the Paschal Mystery...
...In fact, no one is leading in this complicated relationship...
...Ackroyd had in his earlier "interview" of himself asked if he really understood Dickens and answered by leaving the judgment up to the reader...
...And indeed out of the attempt to assassinate the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide at St...
...Albert O. Hirschman, the development economist, has recently used an analogy to describe the plight of local development efforts...
...410: Commonweal...
...So far, and in spite of the unfortunate but understandable carnage in the aftermath of the Roger Lafontant coup attempt prior to Aristide's inauguration, the new president has made the shift with grace and acumen...
...They include: 14 June 1991:409 a grassroots, self-help development strategy involving NGOs and PVOs...
...The books were first published in 1956-57, but are still news to most of us...
...His inauguration speech on February 7 called for a "marriage" between the Haitian people and the Army but did not waver in asking for the discharge of six of the eight commanding generals--vestiges of the old guard...
...The struggles of the Haitian Conference of Religious, the old Radio soleil, Mission Alpha, various Caritas projects, the Papaye Peasant Movement, Tet Ansamn groups, and the 1i Legliz all came alive within the network that put Aristide in the presidency...
...DEATH & RESURRECTION IN HAITI IN THE PARISH OF THE POOR Writings from Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide, translated and edited by Amy Wilentz Orbis Books, $10.95, 112 pp...
...now, each day, the Word that we love burns out the roots of the ton-ton macoutes...
...In the Parish of the Poor aptly illustrates Hirschman's analogy...
...The important test now for President Aristide is precisely whether he can lead and at the same time hold onto the "political symbiosis" he has with his people...
...The order form for the Oxford complete works lies filled out before me...
...Mahfouz, known for his admiration of Proust, offers interior monologues of Kamal's unrequited love and self loathing that read like heavy-handed imitations of Charles Swann's agonies...
...The bulk of the text is taken up with a long letter to colleagues in the Latin American church...
...His uniqueness makes him universally appealing and representative...
...Indeed, Haiti has survived on that hope...
...While the father's coarse pleasures take on a pathetic aspect as he chases a young singer and keeps her on a houseboat on the Nile, Kamal pursues cosmopolitan Alda, a Proustian heartbreaker who comes from the upper middle class and represents the unattainable...
...Just as Aristide LIFE ALONG THE HILE PAI.A~ OF DESIRE Naguib Mahfouz Doubleday, $22.95,422 pp...
...Indeed, the sales of his books then and now force another paradox...
...Hence Dickens's paradoxical nature and his greatness as an artist are a function of his success in depiction, in telling the story his way, as much as those characters, real or imagined--and quotation marks c o u l d surround e i t h e r term--would allow him...
...from the Arabic world given humane depth and artistic harmony by a tolerant, witty, urbane observer of small scenes and large patterns...
...Hirschman says that although a project or movement may die out, this "social energy" becomes active again but in a different form...
...His ardor and idealism are passed on to his brother Kamal, a philosophy student whose desires distill the modem humanist program of political liberation, scientific progress, sustaining love, and beauty in the arts...
...The younger children and their mother Amina, a woman sequestered from the world and yearning to please the master of the house, fill out the family picture...
...It is the symbiosis that has allowed Aristide's detractors, among them the church hierarchy, to assert that he is 'leading' his congregation in an unacceptable direction...
...he calls this phenomenon the principle of conservation and mutation of social energy...
...Three factors will affect any reforms the new government tries to implement: the constant threat posed by ton-ton macoutes and the Duvalierist remnant, especially to Aristide himself...
...Once again, death has been overcome by resurrection...
...But the criticism had to be leveled and must be understood in light of the crucible that Haiti has been through...
...Mahfouz makes him the most obvious victim of passion, a comic loser who moves from scandal to scandal...
...As the chronicle resumes in this volume---a self-contained, entirely clear story by itself--we are reminded of the aspirations of son Fahmy, a young law student killed in a nationalist protest in Palace Walk...
...efforts to arrest and prosecute human rights abusers and corrupt officials...
...David Castronovo his grand-scale novel of Cairo life in the 1920s-weighing in with the heft and detail of a nineteenthcentury chronicle--is the second part of Nobel laureate Mahfouz's family trilogy about the middle classes between the wars...
...Ackroyd sees Bleak House as the true image of midcentury Britain and not the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace...
...Indeed, the president has preached nonviolence and has promised only to try to lead Haiti from "misery to poverty...
...and finally, the need to coax (and use efficiently) support and assistance from the United States and other donor nations...
...He is the giant precursor, whose power and example must, by paradox, inspire and frighten...
...It seems to me that the reader's response lies in his reaction to Dickens's novels...
...The young man--an "ox" to his adroit father has damaged the family reputation by divorcing in a messy way and threatening family connections and dignity...
...That, in some sense, he had not died"--a dream reconciliation between the writer who concealed and the writer who reveals...
...But that is all we ask, a decent poor man's home, and no more corruption, no more inflicted misery, no more children bathing in sewage...
...On December 16, 1990, over 67 percent of Haitian voters elected Pd Titid, the fiery preacher of the Word and defender of street kids and liberation theology, who had subsequently been drummed out of the Salesians for his outspoken criticism both of Duvalierism and the Haitian bishops...
...In addition, Haiti's justice system, tax laws, minimum wage laws, and land tenure system all need critical examination and new legislation...
...On the other hand, his harsh criticisms of Haiti's bishops and of the "cold country to the north" might appear unfortunate, given his current position...
...The first volume of the trilogy, Palace Walk, focuses on Ahmad al-Sayyid, a prosperous retail merchant whose tyrannical domestic regime, decorous business life, and late-night pleasures with cronies and lute girls provide the narrative with its tensions...
...In these terms Ackroyd's biography is a complete success...
...Ackroyd, a novelist himself and a chronicler of London past and present in Hawksmoor and in The Great Fire of London, seems to come to terms with Dickens...
...the need to garner some support from the business and upper classes...
...The letter gives a stark overview of some of Haiti's history but especially of the years since Jean-Claude Duvalier fled...
...Indeed, Bishop Laroche, president of the Haitian episcopal conference, in his moving tribute at the Te Deum Mass, likened "cher Pkre Aristide" to Moses leading the Haitian people out of a desert of suffering...
...The title, Palace of Desire, refers to the alley where Yasin, Ahmad's grown son by his first marriage, has his household and conducts his updated, ironically presented version of the well-lived life, in his case a clumsy parody of the father's more discreet philandering...
...She indicates the "political symbiosis" between Aristide and Haiti's poor...
...It seems perfecfly applicable to current events in Haiti...
...In his last "inter-chapter" he recounts a dream of Dickens, in which, having completed the arduous task of writing the life, the biographer meets his subject and asserts, "I knew that it truly was Charles Dickens...
...The letter is vintage Aristide but provides a hint of his later modest, to-the-point campaign...
...While Palace Walk is principally set in the old neighborhood of narrow streets, coffee houses, stands of snack and drink vendors, and lattice-work balconies protecting women from the public sphere, Palace of Desire opens out and becomes a social study that encompasses the drawing rooms of merchant princes, the boulevards of the new part of town, and the challenges to Ahmad's small world of comfortable compromise...
...For once, Haiti has leaders Haitians can trust...
...They are copious reports emerged from the ashes of St...
...Aristide's election was the result of a "renewal of energy" of many suppressed or aborted efforts...
...A man with an infinite capacity for compartmentalizing and rationalizing, he bullies his way through life using custom, bits of the Koran, and his personal magnetism to keep things in order...
...Jean's, his campaign movement emerged from the apparent failure of numerous church movements...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 12
