Edwidge Danticat Quotes
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I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories 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 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 aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.
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We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
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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 daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
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Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
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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.
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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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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'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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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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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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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.
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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 all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
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We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
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You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
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Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .
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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?