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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I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.
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There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.
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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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People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.
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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 who want alternative information have to try so hard to find 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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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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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'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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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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Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
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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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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 [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."
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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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...women, brave as stars at dawn.
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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.
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I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
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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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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.