Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticatis a Haitian–American novelist and short story writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 January 1969
liars writing thinking
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.
fun writing class
After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.
powerful influence storyteller
Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
haiti boat claims
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.
lying haiti doe
Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
grandmother aunt people
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.
people trying stories
I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
culture minutes shore
We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
beautiful art people
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.
media people attention
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.
years independence example
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
art luxury art-is
Art is a luxury but also a necessity.
taken play feelings
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.
country political news
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.