Edwidge Danticat Quotes
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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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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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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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The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.
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That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that's when they exist. If you don't see them they don't exist.
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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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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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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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People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
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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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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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I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
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I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.