Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat’s line lands like a quiet indictment dressed as a plain fact. By naming “the Duvaliers” without embellishment, she refuses the comforting myth that Haiti’s catastrophes were purely homegrown, the inevitable result of “instability” or “corruption” in the abstract. The real target is the backstage architecture of power: how dictatorship survives not only through local terror but through international patronage that prefers predictability to justice.

The specificity matters. “29 years” is not a flourish; it’s a measure of stolen time, an accounting ledger that turns regime violence into duration. It implies generations shaped under Francois “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, where repression became a political climate, not an event. Then comes the sharpest pivot: “very well supported by the United States.” The adverb “very” is doing moral work. It narrows any escape hatch of ambiguity; this wasn’t incidental contact or reluctant diplomacy, but sustained backing.

Context gives the sentence its bite. During the Cold War, anti-communism often functioned as a permission slip for U.S. alliances with authoritarian leaders across the hemisphere. Danticat, writing from the vantage point of the Haitian diaspora and a novelist’s attention to lived consequences, compresses that history into a single, readable accusation. The subtext is about responsibility: if foreign powers helped prop up the Duvalier machine, they also helped create the conditions that pushed Haitians into exile, poverty, and political fracture. The sentence doesn’t ask for pity; it asks for memory with an address.