Chavannes Jean-Baptiste is the young peasant organizer at the center of Amy Wilentz's The Rainy Season (1989), the most sustained single portrait of Haiti's democratic transition in literary journalism.
He was a leader of the Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Small Haitian Peasants' Solidarity) movement and later of the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP), organizing in the Artibonite Valley and the Northwest Department during the 1986-1989 transition period. In Wilentz's account he embodies the aspirat...