April 6, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Impressive novelist Edwidge Danticat, who vividly chronicles the violence and political unrest of her native Haiti, reads at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Edwidge Danticat
- An Evening with the Author
- Danticat has just published the critically acclaimed The Dew Breaker
- Her novel The Farming of Bones won an American Book Award
- Danticat is a Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Black Studies
- Wednesday, June 2 / 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Edwidge Danticat, the acclaimed Haitian-born writer who has just published The Dew Breaker, one of 2004’s most praised novels, will read from her work on Wednesday, June 2 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. This is a free event. Danticat is a Regents’ Lecturer in the UCSB Department of Black Studies.
Edwidge Danticat’s father escaped the brutal Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti when Edwidge was two-years-old. Settling in Brooklyn, he became a taxi driver and managed to bring his wife to America two years later. It wasn’t until 1981 that Danticat, at age 12, left her aunt in Haiti to be reunited in New York with her parents and her two brothers, whom she had met only once. Such a story is sadly a common one for Haitian immigrants and the basis of much of Danticat’s writing. The New York Times asserts that “Danticat’s calm clarity of vision takes on the resonance of folk art.”
Her latest book The Dew Breaker takes its name from the phrase used for members of the Tontons Macoute, the secret police force of dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who would come before dawn to commit their evil deeds. The book’s central character, a former Dew Breaker, tries to start anew in New York City and escape the horrors he helped create in Haiti. USA Today writes, “Seamlessly blending the personal and political, The Dew Breaker deals with what happens to a country and its people when mothers and fathers disappear for their political transgressions.... The stories in The Dew Breaker were previously published in different versions in magazines. Together, there’s a cumulative impact that adds to the haunting power of Danticat’s understated prose.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Danticat explained her goal for the book, claiming, “We tend so much to caricature people like the dew breaker and I think we simplify them at our own peril, because we completely remove ourselves from the equation. If we continue to think that these people are ‘evil,’ we won’t be able to recognize that in everyone is the potential (for violence) and we’ll always have these reoccurrences.”
The book’s genesis came in early 2000, while Danticat was following a groundbreaking Haitian trial seeking to bring justice to victims of torture. Many of the defendants were tried in absentia, having fled to the United States or the Dominican Republic, where they lived in exile among the people they had hurt. Danticat asserts, “It seemed a very dramatic idea. Imagine escaping something only to face the very people you’ve escaped where you end up.”
Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures.
As a Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Black Studies, Danticat will engage with students and faculty from various academic departments. Instituted in 1962 to encourage rare and invaluable interaction between gifted non-academics and the university community, the Regents’ Lectureship program of the University of California has continued to provide campus residencies in sponsoring departments for people with distinguished achievement in the arts, sciences, humanities, business, politics and international affairs.
An Evening with Edwidge Danticat is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Deaprtment of Black Studies at UCSB.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.