The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier — Chapter Notes

The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier — Chapter Notes Overview Amy Wilentz's The Rainy Season (1989) is a work of literary journalism covering Haiti during the turbulent post-Duvalier transition, roughly 1986–1989. Wilentz, then a Time magazine correspondent, arrived in Haiti shortly after Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's February 7, 1986 exile and remained a close witness to everything that followed: the Dechoukaj (the uprooting), the rise and brutal suppression of popular organizing, the massacres of 1987, the stillborn elections of November 1987, and the serial coups that cycled through General Namphy and then General Avril. The book is simultaneously reported ethnography — Wilentz embeds herself in slum communities, follows a young peasant organizer named Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, attends Ti Legliz masses and vodou ceremonies — and sharp political analysis of the structural forces that made Haiti's democratic transition so violent and so repeatedly aborted.