Quote

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

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Thinking
Extremes
People
Hear
Knowing
Suffering
Place
Haiti
Ends
Suffers
Much
Neglect
Think
Extreme

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No one will love you more than you love your pain.
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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.
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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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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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I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
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I can't wait for both my daughters to be old enough to read all my books. I loved it every time I saw my parents acting like more than just my parents. And I'm looking forward to that with my daughters too. I am looking forward to having them discover me as someone completely other than their mother.
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We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
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It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
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There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, Cut their heads off, burn their houses.
Edwidge Danticat
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Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.
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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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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.
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It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
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In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat