1998-09-00: (Hurricane Georges Strikes Haiti, Another in the Endless Succession of Natural Disasters That Compounded the Nation’s Political and Economic Cris…

1998-09-00: (Hurricane Georges Strikes Haiti, Another in the Endless Succession of Natural Disasters That Compounded the Nation’s Political and Economic Crises): In September 1998, Hurricane Georges struck Haiti, causing widespread destruction in a nation whose infrastructure remained fragile despite years of international aid. The same year, Edwidge Danticat published The Farming of Bones, a novel about the 1937 Dominican Vespers that brought the massacre to the attention of the English-speaking literary world. Danticat, born on January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, had moved to New York City in 1981 and become one of the most important voices in Haitian-American literature, writing in English about the Haitian experience with a clarity and emotional depth that earned her international recognition. Through Danticat’s work, the history that Haiti could not afford to publish was being written in the language of the nation that had occupied it.