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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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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Leaders
Whose
Jacques
Cutting
Jean
Leader
Haiti
House
Motto
Also
Houses
Like
Burn
Heads

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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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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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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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America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934.
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
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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.
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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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We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
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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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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.
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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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Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
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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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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.
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