OTR Comment & Culture - August, 2004

The great majority of the footage in Jonathan Demme's new documentary "The Agronomist" consists of interviews with a single subject: Jean Dominique, the late Haitian broadcaster and activist. Demme also conducted interviews with Michele Montas, Dominique's wife and fellow journalist. The interviews took place over the years between 1980 when Dominique and Michele were in exile in New York, and 2000, when he was gunned down outside the offices of Radio Haiti Inter, the radio station he' d owned and operated since 1968, near Port au Prince. It is a testament to the intensity of Dominique's presence and his story that the film is nonetheless entirely riveting.

Dominique sits on a couch in his apartment, or behind a desk in his study and enunciates, often with his entire body, the story of his 20 years working at Radio Haiti Inter, which continues to be only independent radio station in Haiti. He screws up his face to push out the final points of his arguments. His eyes blaze as he relates the extremes of corruption and repression that he has borne witness to and experienced first hand. But after he has described them, he smiles broadly, and intentionally or not communicates the sympathy and humor that seems to persist in him despite everything. This is a man who will not give up believing in the possibility of peace and change, and after an hour in his presence, you come to feel that it would be negligent and downright foolish for you to do so either.

Dominique did begin his career as an agronomist, working with the peasants of the Artibonite Valley to improve their farming practices, and the pragmatism of his first calling followed him into his almost accidental life as a journalist. He seems to have had a consistent sense of how to use media as a practical tool, an instinctive understanding of its possibilities and limitations, and he used his position as the owner of Radio Haiti to apply specific pressures to the political culture in which he worked. During the years of the first Duvalier regime, Dominique relates how his decision to move into radio stemmed from a desire to reach a population who were (and remain) overwhelming illiterate. Controversially, he also decided to broadcast in Creole, the language of the majority, not French. His coverage of the yearly Santeria festival at Saut d'Eau connects the passionate trance states of the pilgrims with the simmering discontent among the poor of Haiti's slums. This, he tells us, was not the sanitized, Westernized, Catholic face of Haiti that the francophone elite wished to project. To speak about such things at all was to break a silence about how most Haitian's lived their lives - and he paid for his daring when he was forced into exile by the second Duvalier regime at the end of 'The Haitian Spring' in 1980.

Dominique was driven into exile twice, once in 1980 and then again in 1991 when the government of Jean Bertrande Aristide was over thrown by a military coup. Dominique supported Aristide in his first campaign for election, against the prevailing opinion of the liberal elite. Significantly, though, it is Aristide, more than the right wing leaders who preceded him, who the film presents as a foil for Dominique. Aristide appears as the leader who did not know how to use his power once he had it, except to try to ensure that he could hold on to it. And while the film ends with Dominique's death and makes no direct accusations about who his killers were, it seems increasingly evident that the regime Dominique had supported when it looked like it might bring democracy to Haiti, had a hand in the attack that ended his life. After Aristide was restored to power, Dominique continued to speak out about corruption within the regime. He conducted a hugely embarrassing interview with President Aristide about his involvement in corruption and embezzlement scandals. After that, his wife Michele Montas relates, the relationship between the two men soured. The investigation of Dominique's murder has pointed towards the involvement of several high-ranking members of Aristide's Lavalas party, and two investigating judges have found government agencies almost prohibitively recalcitrant in aiding their work. In 2003, after a series of death threats against its employees and an attack on Michele Montas who now runs the station, Radio Haiti Inter closed its doors. This is not a story that ends with Dominique's death, but it has lost its most galvanic and gifted interpreter.

Emily Mitchell is an OTR Contributing Editor and MFA candidate at Brooklyn College.