Slaves Laugh

By John Elson

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.