Going Among the People
RODMAN, SELDEN
Going Among the People The Rainy Season: Haiti Since the Duvaliers By Amy Wilentz Simon and Schuster. 427pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Haiti: The Black Republic, " "Where...
...Aristide had survived several attempts to silence him—both before and after Namphy's violent aborting of the November 29,1987 election that was to replace his caretaker regime in which 2 million registered Haitians were hoping to vote...
...The author's charges of American "complicity" in Haiti's economic debacle don't tell the whole story either...
...Should we now rather listen to Wade Davis, Elizabeth Abbott (Namphy), Herbert Gold, T.D...
...Airman and Marion Shaw, who would have us believe that Haiti is and always has been a nation of zombis, unscrupulous voudou priests and corrupt politicians who are bankrolled by ugly Americans...
...For all of its faults, however, The Rainy Season is the best of the current crop of reports on Haiti...
...The cleric's followers could be excused for thinking that his 1987 escape at Freycineau, on the outskirts of the capital, was a miracle, since fire barricades had been set up there, gunfire had smashed all the windows of the little cavalcade proceeding from Gonaïves, and the very vehicle where Aristide lay hidden under sacks of charcoal had been searched...
...It is true that U.S.-funded CARE flooded Haiti with contraband rice ostensibly imported to feed the starving through the cooperation of Namphy's Finance and Economy Minister, Felix Leslie Delatour, and thereby put out of business the healthy indigenous rice industry in the Artibonite Valley...
...According to Wilentz, the effort only angered peasants obliged to vacate their fertile acres, and further swelled the army of unemployedinthecapital...
...Were authors like W.B...
...She has mastered Creole, the Haitian vernacular...
...If President Avril develops the forbearance to tolerate the alternative voices of Aristide and Chavannes, of Beauchard and Hébreux, and if President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III are prodded into devising a sane policy for Haiti, this book may deserve some of the credit...
...She has several things going for her...
...Missing, too, are any conversations with peasant leader Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, or the sergeants who toppled Namphy, or President Prosper Avril...
...Seabrook, Jean PriceMars, Alfred Métraux, Maya Deren, James Leyburn, Harold Courlander, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Katherine Dunham, Robert and Nancy Heini, and André Malraux simply naïve...
...She has spent a great many of her waking hours in Port-auPrince's slums, talking to the dispossessed and enjoying their company...
...Nor has their form of government: Overpopulated, undereducated Haiti has been ruled by men with arms from 1803 to the present, sometimes benevolently but more often brutally...
...Jean Bosco, the church General Henri Namphy targeted for the arson / shootout of September 11,198 8. (Six days later a group of outraged noncommissioned officers (NCOs) led by Sergeant Joseph Hébreux ousted the General...
...But she neglects to mention that Avril arrested Beauchard and 13 other NCOs 27 days later...
...Speaking of Avril's elevation to the presidential palace by the NCOs last September 17, Wilentz states that Sergeant Patrick Beauchard was responsible for the 19 radical demands they first forced him to accept...
...This is a strong case for stupidity at the American Embassy, but not for malevolence or complicity...
...And she has found a credible hero in Père Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the frail curé of "TiLéglise," St...
...Amy Wilentz, a Time stringer who writes in the currently fashionable novelistic style, attempts to provide some balance...
...The Haitian people haven't changed: They are as unself-pitying, outgoing, industrious, talented, and humorous as ever, despite what they have endured...
...His veiled threats to liquidate the business élite made it easy for his foes to call him a Communist, and his suspicion of everything American prevented him from establishing the kind of international network that served the Mahatma so effectively on his trips to London...
...The claim that Max Beauvoir, stager of voudou entertainments in the Duvaliers' days, and Wally Turnbull, chief of the Baptist Mission who has prevailed on thousands of peasants to plant and care fortrees, areCIA'-spies" isnot supported by any evidence...
...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Haiti: The Black Republic, " "Where Art Is Joy: Haitian Art—The First Forty Years" Why are most of this decade's books and articles about Haiti unsympathetic or even savagely destructive...
...She does not interview business leaders, the heads of the four democratic parties, or former President Leslie F. Manigat (who was picked by Namphy to run for the office in an "election" held in January 1988, and six months later was the victim of a coup that brought the General back...
...When he finally recovered enough equilibrium to face an audience of cheering thousands, he could speak only in a whisper and had to be carried back into hiding...
...In contrast, from 1943 to 1980 most writing about Haiti focused on its religious and esthetic creativity...
...spent millions of dollars supplying and planting seedlings near springs all over Haiti in an attempt to arrest the country's catastrophic deforestation...
...Haiti, of course, has always had more than enough rain and sun...
...Understandably, after his church was torched and his congregation butchered the following year, Aristide spent weeks in hiding, taking Valium and actually signing a paper promising the conservative Church hierarchs he would give up his parish and go to the Dominican Republic...
...On the other hand, before money from the Agency for International Development was cut of f because of Namphy's heavy-handed squelching of the November '87 elections, theU.S...
...It is a weakness of Wilentz' engrossing book that she fails to round out her picture of post-Duvalier Haiti...
...But her one photograph—people walking through flooded streets in Portau-Prince—indicates that, strangely, this is not her intention...
...The same minister, by closing the purportedly uneconomical Haitian American Sugar Company, threw thousands of cane cutters and factory workers in the fertile Cul-de-Sac Plain out of work...
...Amy Wilentz' enigmatic title might be taken as a metaphor for a rain of bullets...
...It is particularly eloquent in conveying the indomitable spirit of the city people under fire...
...Guilt over the scores of his followers who had been killed and wounded in the destruction of Ti Léglise, not fear for his life, had unhinged him...
...The little priest has many Gandhian traits, but political savvy, a sense of humor about himself and the ability to compromise with his enemies on small issues are not among them...
Vol. 72 • June 1989 • No. 10
