Mystery in the Tropics

Most Canadians who have any perspective at all on the Dominican Republic these days have gained it either from budget travel to seaside Dominican resorts (Hotel Punta Goleta, Cabarete: $499—two weeks) or as fans of major league baseball, which in recent decades has employed a whopping 410 Dominican players (during the 1980s, the Toronto Blue Jays’ legendary Dominican scout, Epy Guerrero, sent players such as George Bell, Tony Fernandez, Alfredo Griffin and Manny Lee to Toronto).

The island Republic plays baseball with the best and tourism with the thriftiest. Unfortunately, it has not always played politics, either domestic or international, with the same alacrity or success. The 19th and 20th centuries in the Dominican were, for the most part, an evolving catastrophe of foreign occupation, violent revolt and brutal dictatorship. And shifting international affiliation.

It was during the American occupation of 1965—a period of political and social instability that followed the assassination of dictator Generalissimo “Hot Balls” Trujillo—that an obscure Canadian priest, Father Arthur “Arturo” MacKinnon, was murdered in his vehicle on a dark rural road outside the town of Monte Plata.

The 32-year-old padre was a Roman Catholic missionary from Cape Breton Island, who had grown up in the tough coal-mining culture of rural Nova Scotia and, perhaps as a consequence, was a champion of the little guy, with a passion for fairness and a contempt for the assumptions of power. In the Dominican political climate of the era—a right-wing military government, slavish in its toadying to America and beset by civilian rebels—Father Arturo’s social activism was enough to get him labelled a communist by those in power.

When the provisional military government began rounding up rebels in June 1965—imprisoning, torturing and murdering them as U.S. troops stood by—an outraged Father Arturo went to the rebels’ defence, pleading for clemency and, more broadly, for social justice on behalf of the poor and disinherited. And that was the end of him. Within days he was murdered, apparently on orders from senior military personnel.

For 40 years, the truth about who had carried out those orders, or whether there had even been orders, remained a mystery. The two policemen who were with the priest when he was shot, who were assumed to have done the shooting and might eventually have borne witness, were murdered in turn by a soldier from the town of Monte Plata.

The mystery might well have been consigned to eternity had not a young Canadian writer named J.B. MacKinnon, a nephew of Father Arturo, decided to travel to the Republic a couple of years ago in an attempt not only to solve the mystery but to “meet” his uncle and get a sense of his spirit and work.

Dead Man in Paradise, which recently won the Charles Taylor Award for Canadian non-fiction, is the writer’s thoughtful and dramatic account of those travels and that attempt to solve his uncle’s murder.

MacKinnon’s travels take him to graveyards, libraries, churches, mission posts, slums, villages, police stations—to beaches and jungles and markets. He visits wary and sinister old generals, trusting and innocent peasants. And he puts the murderous puzzle together.

As he does so, he constructs a romantic, even heroic, picture of Father Arturo, who lived sparely, in solidarity with the poor, who took an active interest in the young people of the neighbouring slums and was famous in Monte Plata for putting a cooking pot in front of the local bishop and telling him to serve himself.

At a time when many of the western world’s Christians are little more than pitchmen for right-wing conformity and self-interest, and the image of Catholicism is warped by countless reports of exploitation and historic bad faith, it is reassuring to read about a young Catholic priest whose gospel, like Christ’s, was both biblical and social, and
whose life, romanticized or not, was spent in the unquestionable betterment of the needy.

On several occasions, MacKinnon is asked why he is conducting his exploration. And the answer, he writes, is his need to understand his uncle’s fate, his compulsion to pull back the curtains on an old crime. But it is apparent to me, a fellow writer, that MacKinnon is also fascinated, as all writers have to be, by a good story.

Much to our benefi t as readers, MacKinnon tells that story with fl air and passion, with artful phrasing and detailed attention to context. “The chatter of voices beneath the trees’ canopy,” he says at one point, was “like the inside of a madman’s head.” He describes the local barrio as “the kind of neighbourhood where pariah dogs play outfield for a game of stickball … where every rainstorm washes away another few feet of the sidewalk.”

In contrast to the dire politics and disgraceful poverty that are the lot of the country, MacKinnon offers welcome glimpses into the physical beauty of the island, in long, rhythmic sentences of a sort that would have made Lawrence Durrell take notice.

One of the best scenes in the book—a scene that reads like something out of the novels of Marquez—describes MacKinnon’s visit with the once-fearless General Antonio Imbert, who personally assassinated the dictator Trujillo and in so doing risked an encounter with “the dwarf,” Trujillo’s torture specialist, who is reputed to have enjoyed biting off the testicles of those who defied old Hot Balls.

The book’s promo and the author himself allude to the difficult choice between a desire to see justice done—to see his uncle’s killers brought to account—and the broader moral imperative to forgive those who have committed great wrong. But where the Christian injunction for forgiveness is concerned, I don’t buy in. And I don’t think Father Arturo would have either. Not here. What is the statute of limitations on torture and brutality against the innocent? And what power, 40 years after the fact, gives a writer the authority even to consider forgiveness in such matters? MacKinnon, like anybody else touched by his uncle’s murder, is free to move away from the ghosts that may haunt him. But he is nobody’s agent in the matter of forgiveness. Unfortunately the victims of political terror are seldom around to give us a perspective on such issues.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is MacKinnon’s nuanced and vivid depiction of contemporary Dominican life. “On this island there are two kinds of places,” he is told by a Swiss expatriate, a resident of neighbouring Haiti. “There are places where you need luck, and there are places where you need more luck.”

This might also be said of a writer’s attempts to reconstruct the past—or any plausible version of reality.

At the end of the book, MacKinnon provides a speculative account of what happened on the night of Arturo’s murder—who fired what gun, who saw what and whom. The account is interesting in a tantalizing cinematic way. However, in a book that offers insightful deliberation on memory and injustice and the imprecise meaning of the past—a book that provides an unstated rationale for the ultimate acceptance of uncertainty—the invention of the “facts” around Arturo’s death feels somewhat ironic and a little unnecessary as a conclusion.

On the other hand, for a writer who grapples chapter by chapter to understand what it is he is doing, even contrived facts are perhaps a more satisfactory ending than is the unresolved chaos of history.