Edwidge Danticat
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.Collection: Amazing
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.Collection: Independence
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.Collection: Travel
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.
People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
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 aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
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 think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
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.
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.
And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
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.
Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.Collection: Rain
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. . .Collection: Monday
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.Collection: People
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.Collection: Writing
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 toCollection: Daughter
Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: People
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.Collection: Needs
When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Black
No one will love you more than you love your pain.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Tiny
Salt is a powerful symbol in Haiti, as elsewhere. Salt of the earth, for example is an American phrase. In Haiti, myth and legend has it that if you are turned into a zombie, if someone gives you a taste of salt, then you can come back to life. And in the life of the fishermen, there are so many little things about salt that I wanted to incorporate. The salt in the air. The crackling of salt in the fire. There's all this damage, this peeling of the fishing boats from the sea salt. But there is also healing from it, sea baths that are supposed to heal all kinds of aches and wounds.Collection: Powerful
...women, brave as stars at dawnCollection: Stars
It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.Collection: Starting Over
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. 25Collection: Strong
To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.Collection: Mind
We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Thinking
Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”Collection: Struggle
Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.Collection: Character
When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!Collection: Believe
The girl she said, I didn’t tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don’t want to lose them.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Sea
People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Haiti
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.Collection: Real