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 “A
few years ago, as I worked on a documentary film about torture
survivors in exile from my native Haiti, I met a young woman
who, under questioning by a military officer, was slapped until
she became deaf in one ear, was forced to chew and swallow a
campaign poster and was kicked so hard in the stomach by booted
feet that she kept slipping in and out of consciousness in a
pool of her own urine and blood. Another woman had an arm
chopped off and her tongue sliced in two before she was dumped
in a mass grave, miles from her home.”
Edwidge
Danticat, who wrote the above sentiment in a September 2006
New York Times article about torture, knows how to get
readers’ attention. And she’s using that skill to draw awareness
to issues deeply affecting South Florida’s Haitian exile
community.
The author,
born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, moved to the United States when
she was 12 and, even though she knew little English, published
her first writings two years later.
Since then,
her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, a collection of stories
about Haitian women who must overcome poverty and powerlessness,
was featured by Oprah’s Book Club.
Danticat, who
now calls Miami home, won the American Book Award for The
Farming of Bones and the 1995 National Book Award for her
short story collection Krik? Krak! (The avant-garde title
stems from a Haitian tradition in which storytellers call out “Krik?”
and those willing to listen gather round and respond, “Krak.”)
She received
the 1995 Pushcart Short Story Prize and won fiction awards from
The Caribbean Writer, Seventeen and Essence
magazines.
Danticat
recently described her goals to National Public Radio: “I wanted
to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing
up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had
extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.”
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