1934: (Abderrahman’s Cri du Coeur: The Young Man from the Lower Depths, the Pangs of Misery, and the Fires Beneath the Volcano): It was not only Bawon whom t…

1934: (Abderrahman’s Cri du Coeur: The Young Man from the Lower Depths, the Pangs of Misery, and the Fires Beneath the Volcano): It was not only Bawon whom the new president personified — behind Toussaint, behind even Lorimer Denis, there lay a young man, poor, black, desperately ambitious, determined to claw his way out of the abyss, who in 1934, writing as Abderrahman, had scrawled both défi and cri du coeur: when like me you spring from that class of youth despised as misbegotten, rejected in mistrust and contempt simply because you emerge from the lower depths of the real Haiti — repressed back into the nameless hordes of the homeless and the hungry, crushed every day by the pangs of misery, spattered each day by the impudent arrogance of the elite, the insulting well-being of those néo-arrivistes. Here were fires that underlay the burning lava of the volcano that would soon erupt — the Abderrahman passage, written twenty-three years before Duvalier attained the presidency, was the Rosetta Stone of Duvalierism: a text in which personal humiliation and class rage fused into a political theology whose central doctrine was that the mulâtre elite had forfeited its right to govern not through any particular act of misgovernance but through the original sin of its existence, its mere being an affront to the noir masses from whose labor it drew sustenance and upon whose exclusion it depended for survival.