Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticatis a Haitian–American novelist and short story writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 January 1969
children taken school
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.
children thinking shields
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.
children glasses shy
Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.
children florida states
Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.
daughter memories children
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to
country children destiny
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.
building country interests permanent serve states structure united
Most of them, they serve the interests of the United States but are not building any kind of permanent structure for the country they are affecting.
castro glue held revolution states time together united
You have also at the same time Castro and the revolution being the glue that held the United States together with a lot of these dictators.
aware columbia haiti happens influence people places policies united
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.
daily future thrown
I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
affects bad brings connected happened joining larger people questions realizing recently scary spain
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.
amazing dreams growing knew people poor raise voice
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.
country fact limited rich shocking struggle unless
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.
florida groups citizenship
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.