Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
Haiti on the Verge
By Mark Danner
Tout Homme Est Un Homme: Tout Moun Se Moun
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, with Christophe Wargny
Editions du Seuil, 222 pp., FF 89 (paper)
Aristide: An Autobiography
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, with Christophe Wargny, translated by Linda M. Maloney
Orbis Books, 205 pp., $14.95
In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, translated and edited by Amy Wilentz
Orbis Books, 112 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Théologie et politique
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, preface by Leonardo Boff
Les Editions du CIDIHCA, 143 pp., $19.95 CAN (paper)
On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of 1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants, and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through a side door. When the French minister stepped forward to meet the gentlemen—whom he recognized as the crème de la crème of Haitian society most of them light-skinned, and educated, like their fathers before them, in the finest schools of Paris—they ignored him, shouldered their way roughly past, and began searching through the sumptuous parlors and then through the back rooms, until at last they uncovered, cowering in a tiny bathroom, one General Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, president of the Republic of Haiti. After managing, with some difficulty, to break the president's terrified hold on the rack of chamber pots, the gentlemen dragged his prone body out of the building, through the cobblestoned courtyard, and heaved it over the spiked-iron fence to the screaming mob beyond.
Review, 6839 words
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