Danticat on Aristide

Possible writer for Aristide interview

[Danticat] returns to Haiti every three or four months, most recently in January [2004] -- just before the beginning of this year's violence, which ultimately led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"Things hadn't unraveled yet when I was there," Danticat says. "The demonstrations had started ... but you didn't know what kind of storm was coming. There were pro-Aristide demonstrations and anti-Aristide demonstrations. It was sort of going back and forth, and I couldn't tell how it was going to end."

Because her new novel and its attendant publicity tour coincided with Aristide's unseating, Danticat often finds herself, as a respected Haitian-American novelist whose subject is her native county, asked to explain and interpret what's going on. But, she says, the role of commentator ill suits her.

"I don't have any idea, and I'm not afraid to say that," she says. "I don't have the big picture -- first of all because I live here, and second because I'm a fiction writer. My best reaction is my fiction, and that takes some time and reflection and nuance."

Further, she says, she's incapable of the sound-bite assessment that is useful for journalists. "The situation is so complicated anyway, and I don't have the luxury of declaring somebody totally evil or somebody totally saintly. ... So I say I do not know."

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"She recalls the 1991 coup against Aristide as shocking, "but people rallied". After college, she lobbied for his return while working as an intern for Demme... Danticat met Aristide in New York ("he was very charismatic") and again at the presidential palace in 1994, when she first went back to Haiti to work with Demme on a documentary about the priest's return. "He seemed to embody the pains of the poorest people of Haiti; people loyal to him were so loyal," she says. She was later associate producer on Benoît's film Courage and Pain (1996), testimony from Aristide supporters who survived torture."

Aristide's exile has left her with "very complicated feelings. I wish there could have been a mediated solution, in which those who voted for him didn't think their vote meant nothing. Now there's a wave of violence because they feel they have nothing to lose." As for the desired outcome, "it's not up to me, and certainly not up to the US and France to decide".

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