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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

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Part
Trying
Haiti
People
Chorus
Complexes
Complex
Happy
Tell
Stories

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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.
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The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
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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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If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
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People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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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.
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There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, Cut their heads off, burn their houses.
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We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
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And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
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Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.
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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?
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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.
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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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In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
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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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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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