Haiti’s History and the Life and Times of Edwidge Danticat 3

Laurent Dubois: The late 1960s was really just the moment right before a significant transition. This was about the end of the time when François Duvalier was in power and he then passed on power to his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who took up the reins of power in the early '70s and remained in power until 1986. So she's born really at a kind of key moment, this kind of transitional moment, in Haitian history and, in that sense, I think, you know, came out of a very particular kind of historical experience in Haiti, which was this very, very long three-decade Duvalier dictatorship.