INTRODUCTION

xceptionally few things could be more realistic than the assassination of this man. On April 3, in the year 2000, Anno Domini, journalist Jean Dominique really died an unfortunate and despicable death. This work of pure fiction, solely with cinematic entertainment value, is but a writer’s attempt to recreate the tragic events along with the environment in which this iconic journalism figure existed. Today, that environment is still a petri dish for violent crimes against other journalists.

By inclination and formation, I am interested in the film industry. I was always fascinated by storytelling. As a child, I would think of stories to entertain my friends and folks who often wondered where I got them from or if I made them up myself. So, in a theatrically hilarious way, I would be pointing to my buttocks as I answered that my stories come from my head. I previously authored this story in the form of a screenplay as I drafted other stories to push them through Hollywood via, of course, a literary agent. As a result, this, like my other stories, is rich in dialogue. Also, the standards call for short, consequential exchanges with subtexts, all geared to advance and profit the plot and storyline. As these efforts were getting in the way with school, I have stopped after a few submissions. JEANDO, the working title of the story, has done well in some contests that could bring together up to 50,000 or more screenplays. I was still involved in film school, and I wanted to complete it at all costs, in time and money. I also held a healthcare job to make ends meet when something remained after incurring my expenses toward my education. Since I had previously tried to send other writings, I grew aware of the time and effort it takes to funnel a movie script to Hollywood producers. I only had time to be busy at my place of employment and school. School involved of being on a set shooting something or at the soundstage or in an editing bay molding the craft.

For we always had a shoot somewhere, we, students, were given the task to team up to cook up the stories or concepts we would decisively choose from to work on as class projects. Need I tell you that I always had my fix? Through the other obligations at work and from the other professors, I kept my chin down and wrote a few stories. Some stories were long, some short. Some I completed and others, to this day, still unfinished. Nonetheless, I kept writing. I did not preoccupy my mind with what would come of what I was writing, considering the shelf life of a movie script in Hollywood.

The only worry that haunted me was that case the assassination of that man would finally be solved, putting an end to this injustice and impunity. At the same time, the closure would be making all of my writings and thinking about the case irrelevant and obsolete. If you are reading this today in 2020 A.D., it is for sure the death of journalist Jean L. Dominique remains shamelessly unsolved. No one has been held accountable for the savage killings of that fateful morning. Murders? Jeando was not assassinated alone. His employee, Jean-Claude, was also sifted through with the criminals’ bullets. As this book was in the process, the fear was that some of the actors of the real shit that inspired it would suddenly die, with impunity wrapped as a parting gift, under the weight of “Almighty age.”

I did not even finish college when Dominique’s assassination occurred. The case dragged from one prosecutor to another. It is as if their wings melted for venturing, like Icarus, too close to some “powers that be?”

My generation grew up listening to Jeando on the radio, his station; and we developed a great love for him. Of today’s, most ignore who he was. However, thanks to YouTube and other media, public opinion is widely stacked detrimental to some of those real actors who took part in the events. At some points in this fictitious story, one can equate my achievement to only the way I works with or dispose of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters. I talked to many people. Even those who would admit they never knew the journalist, blatantly accuse. Citing the “internet,” this generation has an exact belief about who pulled triggers, who ordered Jeando killed, and who paid for the bullets. Criminals’ planning. The man certainly has had his imperfections, and people who have worked alongside him can attest to the many mistakes he made in his life. Jeando, by a long shot, was neither saint nor angel; however, this book does not try to count the things for which he may be held accountable. This is not such a book. When and if proper, the author does not hesitate to point out, though subtly, the one most prominent accusation Jeando has carried into his grave. Never did I think I would find in that man’s assassination the materials to satisfy my love of storytelling. As some would and may believe freely, storytelling to make a dollar, that is for sure. However, the real satisfaction is not at all financial. It is the fact that the story is told and is out there, be it in that genre.

Like I previously stated, this is a work of fiction that stems from a very true and real story. The meat of this tale is as accurate as it can be. I would not have enough brain noodles and materials to imagine the assassination of Jean Leopold Dominique and conceive of the behavior of the authorities toward it. The authorities at the time, as well as those that subsequently followed to this day. Among the realities that one cannot neglect within this labyrinth, there is, at times, especially at the approach of each anniversary of the murder, the single voice of Guyler Delva. Also, a young journalist, before joining subsequent administrations, he continued to demand justice, thus risking the same fate as Icarus for venturing too close to the “sun?”

However, on the twentieth anniversary of his assassination, Jeando “appears” to die again of some shit apparently not natural. If not in the authors’ mind and certainly in the hearts of his loved ones, there was not a thought about the journalist.

One should not categorize this book as a cheap accusatory tool. Indeed, some parts may appear “truer than the fiction” of which it is professed to be the work. Pure coincidence or suspicious truth. Participants in the real events constituting the meat of this work, therein may recognize shrapnel of the truth and particles of which the author himself is not readily mindful. Remember, the author first wrote the story with Hollywood in mind. Also, in Tinseltown, conflict, sex, and blood make the world go round. When we star as the audience in the movie business, we are ready and self-predisposed to believe it is all real though we know it isn’t so. However, there are two instances where I could not conjure up fictitious blood. The plasma Jeando and Jean-Claude spilled were all too real and are kept such in the story. On the other occasion, there was enough blood, in that school used as a polling location, to fill a river. As a journalist and radio station owner, Jeando covered that election day in 1987. One should hear his rant on the air the day after.

In this book, the author forgoes any of the due diligence, which requires to contact critical figures therein mentioned. The information and the belief surrounding the assassination of Jeando have reached public domain status. Some real characters, along with their real names, are mentioned, for there is no fictitious way around that fact. Self-effacingly, some names are withheld. Some actors in the actual events that inspired the story have become such political giants that an insignificant pseudo or false designation could not bypass. The author considers it fair game if they have already passed or have held positions thrusting them into the public domain. Jeando’s assassination comes in, perhaps, like an equalizer.

The jury may still want to stay out of this one. However, that small enclave does belong in the land’s near 11,000 square mile area. The inhabitants of Cazale sure exhibit the traits of some foreign ancestry. The white genotype has not faded away entirely amid this Afro-Caribbean population.

Genetics tells us that race-mixing did indeed take place in that region of the country. Those foreigners were not settlers, and they did not arrive on a cruise ship as tourists either. They came to execute someone else’s dirty bid as soldiers. Just like centuries before them, many outlaws and outcasts, who did not have anything to lose, elected to accompany Christopher Columbus on his audacious, blood spilling, women raping and diseases and pestilence spreading voyages rather than finishing their miserable lives in that little brat Isabella’s dungeons. Bartolome de las Casas put aside. There had never been any humanity within the subsequent European expeditions to this part of the world. And, these few words could expand out across all the African continent and still prove right. The who’s who of Spanish society did not show up on the shores of the New World but the scums who would have no other way to treat the peaceful humans they encountered there. Columbus, for one, was nothing short of a dick (Neil De Grasse Tyson). That s.o.b would use his knowledge of astrology to terrify the natives on the beautiful island of Hispaniola and extort from them the things he needed for his voyages.

With reason, many regard Toussaint Louverture as one of the greatest black men who ever lived. Such consideration, sometimes, is mostly in contrast with how his twin freedom fighter Dessalines is himself seen. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was receiving stripes on his back as a young field slave, Louverture was reading and dreaming about becoming Spartacus. He was a house slave but a slave,...