Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti

In this bracing memoir, Wilentz (The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier) revisits Haiti, as she describes a complex nation, following the cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. The world’s first black republic is neither French nor completely Caribbean nor a protectorate of the United States, but rather, Wilentz writes, something akin to French West Africa. Readers get a stimulating immersion course in Haiti’s culture, history, and political machinations. She introduces a fantastical cast of characters who inhabit the many layers of Haitian society and those individuals who flocked to the island following the earthquake, burdened with motives ranging from the base self-promotion or redemption of sundry celebrities such as Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen to those who came to help such as Doctor Coffee, whom Wilentz calls “an all-purpose medical phenomenon.” Though many pontificate on the country’s unrelenting despair, poverty, and corruption, Wilentz’s remarkable narrative strives to alter these perceptions. She writes, “But in fact, this depression and hopelessness come from experts who don’t understand Haiti, don’t acknowledge its strengths (and don’t know them), don’t get its culture or are philosophically opposed to what they assume its culture is, and don’t know its history in any meaningful way.” An unsentimental yet heartfelt journey to a country possessing the power to baffle some, yet beguile others. (Jan.)