Novelist spotlights Haitian evil

Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American who immigrated to the United States when she was 12 years old. Since then, she has written seven books that run the gamut from fiction to nonfiction to children's literature.

Danticat's latest, "The Dew Breaker," is not really a novel, but it is a work of fiction. The publisher calls it "a book of interconnected lives" centering on "the dew breaker," which is the Haitian phrase for someone who tortures and/or kills those who do not fully support the country's dictatorship. In this case it is "Papa Doc" Duvalier in the 1960s.

Even as a child in Haiti, Danticat was drawn to writing. "I was always scribbling," she said during a telephone interview from her Brooklyn home. "I wrote in a journal and I listened to a lot of stories. I found that if you have a story of your own to tell, you find some way to tell it."

Although she has been gone from Haiti for many years, she still closely follows events there. "I keep in touch in a very human way with members of my family who are still there."

Danticat, who speaks fluent English without an accent, said her accent does return during "moments of high emotion."

In her writing, she focuses on the details. "I remember things, and I try to re-create situations in that way. A lot of life is in the nuances, the small things that are really monumental. I think visually, and I try to write in a visual way."

When pressed, Danticat admits that she considers "The Dew Breaker" to be one of her best works. "I don't think of it as a novel. The publisher didn't call it anything. Because of the structure and the many voices, I could write it in bites. It would have been more harrowing if I'd been following one story all the way through."

Danticat finds it most difficult to start a book, then it becomes easier when she's more deeply into it. "I start with the characters first, then see where they take the story. One of the wonderful things about writing is the process of discovery — seeing things unravel in ways sometimes unexpected. I didn't begin with a large design, but I became very interested in the father ("the dew breaker") in the first story and made him the back story as well."

When writing her stories, Danticat was very interested in the fact that when Haitians came by boat to the United States during the 1980s, there were both people being freed from the dictatorship and people who worked for the dictatorship. "The question became, 'What happens to somebody whose job used to be to hurt other people? How do they reconstruct their lives?' " That was her interest in the man who had tortured as a way of life.