Exorcising Haiti

It began the day my wife and I flew back to Haiti for our usual four months in Jacmel. A lovely hill town overlooking the Caribbean, Jacmel is renowned for its iron-balconied homes, its uninhibited Mardi Gras in the streets, its inventive artists; and for the gentleness and affectionate nature of its people. But few living in Jacmel were unaware of the banked fires of resentment that had been heating up there and all over Haiti.

True, the coals had taken a long time to burst into flame; the elder Duvalier had established his tyranny in 1957. But on this day, November 26, 29 years later, the smoldering embers could no longer be contained. The place was Gonaives, the largest city in the arid northwest corner of Haiti, where undernourished Haitians actually starve to death, the embarkation point for the boat people who, since 1980, had been trying so desperately to make it to Miami in their pathetic, fragile craft—the place, too, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti’s independence in 1804, ripping the white stripe out of the Tricolor of the hated French slave masters whom Napoleon himself had just failed to bring back to power.

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Selden Rodman

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It began the day my wife and I flew back to Haiti for our usual four months in Jacmel. A lovely hill town overlooking the Caribbean, Jacmel is renowned for its iron-balconied homes, its uninhibited Mardi Gras in the streets, its inventive artists; and for the gentleness and affectionate nature of its people. But few living in Jacmel were unaware of the banked fires of resentment that had been heating up there and all over Haiti.

True, the coals had taken a long time to burst into flame; the elder Duvalier had established his tyranny in 1957. But on this day, November 26, 29 years later, the smoldering embers could no longer be contained. The place was Gonaives, the largest city in the arid northwest corner of Haiti, where undernourished Haitians actually starve to death, the embarkation point for the boat people who, since 1980, had been trying so desperately to make it to Miami in their pathetic, fragile craft—the place, too, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti’s independence in 1804, ripping the white stripe out of the Tricolor of the hated French slave masters whom Napoleon himself had just failed to bring back to power.