Edwidge Danticat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why do you think Haitian political history has shown so much instability in terms of turnover in the number of rulers? We started as a country with everything against us right there. Haitian Revolution was an impossibility to so many people. These enslaved people fought the French, the British, the Spanish, to start the first Black republic, the first place in the world, really, where enslaved people overcame their masters and started this nation in a world where slavery was the norm. So Haiti was shunned, and we had to pay to the French for this independence until into the next century. I think there was so much stacked up against us, and then, in the early 1900s, you had the very long US occupation, and then the dictatorship. I think we were set up, in a way, to fail because this was not meant to exist. Enslaved people starting their own country was not meant to exist. A lot of people have said it, and historians have said it, like, “How dare you?” I think to this day Haiti’s being told, “How dare you?” Many instances when we’ve elected our leaders, then suddenly there’s a coup or there’s . . . So I think the instability is not fully the fault of Haitians. We’ve had our part where people have decided to turn against their own, but it’s also something that has been set up to fail. What did the United States get most wrong in its 1915 to 1934 occupation of Haiti?…

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