Edwidge Danticat Quotations

In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way.

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.

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.

On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way.

On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.

In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.

People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.

People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.

People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

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.

Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.

Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.

More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago.

Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

I see the sharp inequality between how Haitian and Cuban refugees are treated in Florida. Both groups come here because their lives are equally desperate. But on arrival, the Haitians are incarcerated, and some are immediately repatriated, whereas Cubans get to stay and are eligible for citizenship.

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.

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.

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?

I am very timid about speaking for the collective. I can say what I see, I can say what I've heard, I can say what I feel, but I can't speak for - no one can speak for - 10 million people, and it takes away something from them if you make yourself their voice.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.

The whole history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is complicated. We share the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years after 1804 for fear that the French and Spanish would come back and reinstitute slavery. So we have this unique situation of being two independent nations on the same island, but with each community having its own grievance.

We still have our people working in the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. People are still repatriated all the time from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of being taken off buses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic still can't go to school and are forced to work in the sugarcane fields.

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.

We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.

One of the things that sparked my interest in this is the case of Emmanuel Constant, who started a militia called FRAPH that was backed by the CIA. FRAPH killed thousands of Haitians in the early 1990s. Now while Constant is living comfortably in Queens, other Haitians are being deported. I wanted to see how those who have been bruised by people like that deal with coming face to face with their torturers.

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.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, "Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934."

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."

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.

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?

I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.

Sometimes we mask ourselves to further reveal ourselves, and it's always been connected to me with being a writer: We tell lies to tell a greater truth. The story is a mask; the characters you create are masks. That appeals to me. Aside from that, too, in the carnival the masks were beautiful, and offered a vision of Haitian creativity.

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.

I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

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.

When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.

The Attorney General made another astonishing claim, that there were Pakistani terrorists possibly coming on these boats from Haiti. No one has ever seen a Pakistani coming on a boat from Haiti yet.

Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.

My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

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.

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

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.

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.

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

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.

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.

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time.

I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

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.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.

No one will love you more than you love your pain.

It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.

No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

Anger is a wasted emotion.

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.

The whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance - the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, "To think these niggers speak French!" Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people's heads: If we don't behave, we'll have occupation again.

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.

The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That's a reality that we can't ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

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.

Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.

Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head. -pg. 25

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.