Wilentz - Rainy Season: Haiti-Then and Now

Rory Flynn

AMY WILENTZ is an award-winning former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation magazine. She has written for The New Yorker and The Nation, as well as for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Conde Nast Traveler . She is the author of a novel and a book about life in California. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine.

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COVER DESIGN BY MARC COHEN FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH SHAWN THEW/EPA/CORBIS;
BACK COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAGGIE STEBER

Also by Amy Wilentz

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Copyright 1989 by Amy Wilentz

Introduction copyright 2010 by Amy Wilentz

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition April 2010

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Designed by Nina DAmario/Lavavi & Levavi

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Wilentz, Amy.

The rainy season : Haiti since Duvalier/Amy Wilentz.

p. cm.

Bibliography : p.

Includes index.

HaitiPolitics and government1986 2. HaitiSocial conditions19713. HaitiReligious life and customs 4. Wilentz, Amy. I. Title

F1928.2.W55 1989

972.9407dc19

893100
CIP

ISBN 978-1-4391-9839-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-47370-681-8 (eBook)

My city is gone, the one I built this book on, the one I built this book in. The ravine where I stood watching at an open window one afternoon, as a sudden storm during the rainy season rattled the palm fronds and washed everything that it could down to an unexplorable abyssshit, slop, and banana leaves; chicken pickings, glass shards, and orange peel; mango pit and shredded sugarcane and cat carcass and garbage of every kindis now churning with the cascading rubble of my old neighborhood and the rubble of my imagination. The National Palace, where I saw four governments installedone a junta, two elected, one reinstatedhas collapsed. Its three preposterous domes are sunken and deflated. Indeed, it looks almost ridiculous in ruin, as if someone had suddenly sucked the air out of a fat and pompous politician in the midst of a sonorous peroration. My moto-driving friend Sonsonn says the palace looks as though its had too much kleren, the raw, supercharged, home-brewed rum Haitians drink. Every time I look at it I have to look away quickly. My old companion is gone, and with it the rest of recognizable Port-au-Prince. In its stead, wreckage, ruin, destruction, debris, detritus. Death, too, so much of it. Im dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented, and I wonder, over and over, was it all leading to this?

Was it all leading to this seismic end, this sekous, as the Haitians call the 2010 earthquake? When the slave leader Toussaint LOuverture was pondering over the merits of revolution in 1790, was it all leading to this? As Jean-Bertrand Aristide debated running for president two hundred years later, was it all leading to this? An earthquake of this size seems fraught with fate. All the splendor of Haitian history and its raw indecency, too; all the lacy beauty of Haitian architecture and its deadly brutalist creations, too; all the market ladies selling charcoal and mangoes, and the late voodoo priest Bienaim working through the night at Souvenance, and my beloved Senatorial Candidate on his rickety bicycle, and all those mosquito-infested interviews with Aristide in his little office; and Denise in the Nazon shantytown peeling potatoes for my dinner, and Mimettes corn-rows, and Lounes fan and her Malta drinks, and the little boy who used to kiss me on both cheeks (he was so well brought up); and that gentleman I danced with in Jean-Rabel, and all the conch I ate, the fried pork, all the rum we all drank, and the roosters in the trees in Bombardopolis, and the school of sculptors down in the slums near the market, and the faulty plumbing at the Disco Doctors apartments, and my brilliant, cynical American anthropologist up in the hills, and all the total and unassailable wonders I experienced here in this generous and labyrinthine citythe miracles, and especially all the lessons and stern rebukes to my romanticism, and all the cruelty, too? And me writing this book, too, with all that material stuffed inside it?

Was it all leading here, to this wasteland?

Of course it was.

History happened in between; between the revolution in 1791 and the earthquake last month. History happened, and so did everyday life, love and babies, politics and elections, gossip, sewing, cobbling, prayer, paintings, floods. Even news reporting. Even book writing. But history, politics, and even love and art seem quaint and tiny in the face of geological power. Great ideals like liberty and democracy are dwarfed, wizened. When you stand in the rubble of Port-au-Prince, of Carrefour, of Leogane, of Grand Goave and Ti Goave, of Jacmel, you begin to wonder where a countrys soul resides. What is its actual address? Is Haiti still here? How much do place, architecture, and monument figure into a countrys psyche? How much does culture? How many people can die in one event without destroying national identity? (As many as 200,000 died in the Haitian earthquake.) Is a country a map, as we reflexively believe? What happens, then, when that map is erased?

This is the book from before all that.

I thought I had a map of Haiti when I wrote this book; I thought I had a compass. In the beginning, my true north was Aristide, the liberation theologian around whom this narrative began to take shape. I was lucky to find him: when I was first writing about Haiti and imagining this book, in late 1985, at the end of the Duvalier dynastys rule, I had plenty of sources: an army general, friends in the elite, a bunch of families down in the shantytowns, people involved in politics. But what I didnt have was the Churchthe archbishop didnt speak to the press and my understanding of whom else to talk to in the Catholic Church was, I confess, limited. But my trusty friend and fixer at the time, Milford Bruno, looked at me hard one day when I was complaining about this problem, and told me he could get me someone. He drove me down boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines to St. Jean Bosco Church, and led me to Aristide. I waited and waited that first time, as I waited and waited after, and I was not disappointed.