Edwidge Danticat Quotes

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."

There's a Haitian saying, "Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò." When you bathe other people's children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people's children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back.

How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?

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

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.

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.

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

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.

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.

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.

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

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.

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

I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts…

The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.

It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

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.

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

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.

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.

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.

Anger is a wasted emotion.

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 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.

One of the advantage of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain and regularly merge there.

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

Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

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

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.

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

If they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. They make the son sleeps with his mother. If it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.

That night, I slept hugging my secret.

She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. 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.

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.

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.

Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us (Danticat 19).

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

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.

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.

Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.

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.

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears - though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence - still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military "aid" helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.

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 want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have. I want to tell them they can overcome everything, if the are courageous, resilient and brave. Paradoxically, I also want to tell them their crowns have already been bought and paid for and that all they have to do is put them on their heads. But the world keeps tripping me up. My certainty keeps flailing.

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.

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.

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.

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.

Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

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.

We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old

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.

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.

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.

But there's something about music, when you feel it deeply, when you understand it so well, the way Isabelle understands it, there is something about it that makes scary things seem to disappear. If only for a little while" -Giselle

Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.

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

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?

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My head fills up with images of past gatherings there: pep rallies, award ceremonies, talent shows, speaker days, career days, holiday pageants, all things that Isabelle and I attended together, even while sitting in different parts of the auditorium with our own sets of friends.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

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

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.

They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.

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.

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.

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

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.

Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.

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.

Old age is not meant to be survived alone," Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. "Death should come gently, slowly, like a man's hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.

There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.

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.

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

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.
- Judges 12:4-6