Edwidge Danticat Quotes - Page 2

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• These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Laughing, Parent, Inheritance

  FaceBook post by Edwidge Danticat from Apr 16, 2011

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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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Struggle, Writing, Tools

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Art, Thinking, People

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Media, People, Attention

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• When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, Light, Hair

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Children, Thinking, Shields

  Interview with David Barsamia, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Thinking, Knowing, People

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Children, Taken, School

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Reading, Writing, Mean

  Edwidge Danticat (2011). “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”, p.11, Vintage

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Independent, Unique, Islands

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• It's not a matter of whether the reviews of your books are good or bad, it's about being taken seriously, both as a woman writer and as a writer of color. Also, it worries me when people point to a couple of women writers or writers of color who get some attention - and I am sometimes pulled into that category - to prove that others are getting a fair shot. It's like those people who keep saying that racism no longer exists in this country because Barack Obama was a President of the United States.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Country, Couple, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, People, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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."

  Edwidge Danticat

  Heart, Thinking, People

  The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. March 10, 2014.

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• AIDS was something that was put upon us [as haitians], and we were immediately identified with it. That is unfair. That is unjust. I always say, "We are all people living with AIDS." It's not like you can avoid it. It's part of our world.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Our World, People, Unjust

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Liars, Writing, Thinking

  Interview David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Military, School, Army

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Art, Luxury, Art Is

  The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. November 1, 2010.

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• It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Thinking, People, Stories

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• The people did not elect me. I speak with one voice that may echo other people, but I am part of a group of people. That's not distancing yourself from a community, that's also allowing the space for others to speak for themselves.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Echoes, Voice, Space

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. June 2010.

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Country, Children, Destiny

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Thinking, Community, Nuance

  "Edwidge Danticat: The “Create Dangerously” Interview". Interview with Kam Williams, www.kamwilliams.com. November 23, 2010.

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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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  People, Trying, Stories

  The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. October 14, 2013.

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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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Lying, Doe, Haiti

  Interview with David Barsamian, progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Florida, Groups, Citizenship

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.progressive.org. October 1, 2003.

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