You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city. - Edwidge Danticat

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence. - Edwidge Danticat

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness. - Edwidge Danticat

That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that is when they exist. If you do not see them they do not exist. - Edwidge Danticat

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Someone has said that nations have interests, they do not have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy. - Edwidge Danticat

People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it. - Edwidge Danticat

People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I do not think that is limited to Haiti. - Edwidge Danticat

People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places. - Edwidge Danticat

Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed. - Edwidge Danticat

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On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away. - Edwidge Danticat

On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way. - Edwidge Danticat

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money. - Edwidge Danticat

More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago. - Edwidge Danticat

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of. - Edwidge Danticat

In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States. - Edwidge Danticat