amy wilentz

The Miracle Tree, Coming to a Whole Foods Near You

For decades, people in the development and reconstruction world have told me about the moringa, a fast-growing tree from Africa (originally) that they hail as a cure-all for subsistence economies, and I mean all. This tree, they say, could — once properly established in target cultures —  cure diseases, end malnutrition, and reforest the denuded hills and mountainsides in the developing world.…

A Kreyol speaker in the Palace of Franse

    Dany Laferrière, the Haitian-Canadian novelist, inducted into the Académie on May 28, 2015. photo: AFP History sometimes gets turned on its head, as it did last week when Dany Laferrière was inducted into the Académie Française. Laferrière was elected to this odd but august institution in December, 2013, so the induction was not a surprise, but still: amazing. Consider the incredible,…

New narratives, and old ones

  Haitian gingerbread house   Sometimes, a misreading of your own work just deflates you. Just one little line, and you want to throw in the towel. Instead: let me rectify matters here. In her interesting, smart, and necessary book on Haiti, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, (2015 Wesleyan University Press) Gina Athena Ulysse writes about, among many other subjects, Mac McClelland, the Mother…

“Shut Up, Infidel”

    Here’s my no doubt flawed translation of a portion of the post-massacre Charlie Hebdo editorial by Gérard Biard:

Will There Still Be “Yes, Buts”?

…One question, though, continues to irk us. Can we finally purge the dirty words “fundamentalist secularist” from our political and intellectual vocabulary? Can we finally stop inventing wise semantic circumlocutions in order to make parallels…

Five years — or is it three centuries?

  painting by Edouard Duval-Carrie

  We’re all checking the news this morning, and noticing — in the margins of the reams of words on Charlie Hebdo and the 19th-arrondissement network   — that it is the fifth anniversary today of the Haitian earthquake that took hundreds of thousands of lives in 2010.

Everyone wants to know how Haiti is recovering from that catastrophe. It’s a good question that…

Papa’s Baby

  This photograph of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier has been altered by this blog to give the former strongman the thick spectacles of his father, François (Papa Doc) Duvalier. the point being: he was not so different from his bloody-minded dad.

The dictator’s scion — nickname: Tet panye, or Baskethead — died on October 4 in Port-au-Prince.

Here, he is surrounded by his questionable supporters…

  Left, Michel Martelly; right, François Duvalier

  Jean-Claude Duvalier died today. I never met him. I saw him just once, at the airport in Port-au-Prince, in the early morning hours of a day that then seemed fateful: February 7, 1986. He was driving up to a U.S. cargo plane, and then heading into exile in France. His whole family was in the car with him. It was a brief moment. He whizzed by and…

Saving Science in Haiti

Caprimulgus Ekmani, the Hispaniolan Nightjar

Haiti and the island of Hispaniola have been studied by botanists and naturalists for centuries, not all of them looking for zombie powder. One of the best known naturalists to visit Haiti was Erik Ekman, a Swede who was in the country in 1917, and then later spent four more  years there, from 1924 to 1928, and another four in the Dominican Republic…

Jalousie from afar. Photo: Jim Wilentz

  Just so everyone can see the hypocrisy of the Jalousie paint job I wrote about earlier, here’s a picture my brother, a cardiologist who has been working in Haiti, took from the rue Panamericaine  a little more than a month ago.

To the left, the nicely painted, festive, cheerful, postcard-ready slum of Jalousie.

To the right, the continuation of the…

The Long Whodunit

    return from exile, 1986

I counted Jean Dominique among my friends. I listened to his show on…

Four Years After

  A child in Canaan, the new Haitian earthquake camp Photo by Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald staff

Fo…

A few months after the Haitian earthquake of January, 2010, I drove around Port-au-Prince with Dr.…

Does History Matter in Haiti?

    In the June 6, 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books, there is a review of two of my…

Petit Pierre's Ascent

When Graham Greene went to Haiti, one of the many fascinating characters he met there was Aubelin…

http://wp.me/s3pto5-744

Little Sugar Train

Above and below: A few photos of a model-train diorama made by a doctor named Tom who often works…