The Betrayal

About the Book

There is a thought that has been attributed to the Haitian Molière, or Alcibiade: “All countries are developing while Haiti is enveloping.” When one reads the following 1903 letter written by the nationalist physician Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, it could be easy to swear it was just written a minute ago. It is hard to believe since its independence was officially declared on January 1, 1804, that not much has changed in Haiti. Indeed, not much has changed. The following letter is a vibrant testimony to our societal stagnation and to our national degradation, both of which are symptomatic of the sum of our individual failures as citizens. Nations do not fail. Their citizens fail them. Personal successes are irrelevant to concerned citizens. Haiti has sadly become a country without elites. Most, alas, have become pitiful racketeers.

About the Author

University of New Hampshire at Manchester. Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He entered L’Ecole Nationale des Casernes Dessalines, the well-reputed primary school for children of Haiti’s armed forces, and then continued his studies at Lycée Toussaint Louverture. It was during his terminal years, while a student at Centre d’Etudes d’Haïti (Rhétorique), now College Paul Robert, he began his teaching career in the subjects of Greek and Latin. He maintained this post while at Centre Culturel (Philosophie) and in university at the Faculty of Ethnology. Coming to the United States in 1975, Georges became a respiratory therapist. In this capacity, he worked in several hospitals in New England before enlisting in the United States Navy. Georges left the navy in 1985. He entered Rhode Island College in the fall of the same year, where he earned a BA, a master in French pedagogy, and a certificate in African and African-American studies. He then went to the University of Connecticut to crown his accomplishments, in 1999, with a PhD in French studies. His doctoral dissertation evolved around the general topic of the representation of otherness in literature, more specifically of Americans in Haitian letters. Dr. Georges taught at Wooonsocket High School in Rhode Island, at Tufts University in Medford, and at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He joined the faculty of the University of New Hampshire in 2001, where he continues to teach courses in French and francophone cultures at the Manchester campus. He is also a respiratory therapist at Catholic Medical Center in the same city. Dr. Georges is a vigorous and articulate defender of black cultures. In addition to Haiti, he has traveled extensively throughout Africa and Latin America and has participated in numerous conferences on francophone literatures and Haitian politics. He has previously published Cacoïsme littéraire . . ., Poésie noire en vers blancs, and will soon publish Tim Tim? Bwa Sech! Kès Ki-a à Kiskéya?, a modest collection of short stories, and 13 Poèmes pour le Maroc.