Edwidge Danticat Quotes
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I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
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And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
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Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, "We have to name it; it has to have a name."
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I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?
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I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?
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When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
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Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.
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People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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Most of them, they serve the interests of the United States but are not building any kind of permanent structure for the country they are affecting.
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There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.
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It seemed from the media that we were being told that all Haitians had AIDS. At the time, I had just come from Haiti. I was twelve years old, and the building I was living in had primarily Haitians. A lot of people got fired from their jobs. At school, sometimes in gym class, we'd be separated because teachers were worried about what would happen if we bled. So there was really this intense discrimination.
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It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
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There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?" My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips. Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.
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Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
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The past is like the hair on our head. I moved to New York when I was twelve, but you always have this feeling that wherever you come from, you physically leave it, but it doesn't leave you.
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I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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So at least the people who have another voice and people who are interested in other things can have a place to put their information and be heard.
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Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
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There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."
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...women, brave as stars at dawn.
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Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
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Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.
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That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.