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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.

-Edwidge Danticat

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Misery Won't Touch You

Edwidge Danticat

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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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There Is This Split Between The Haiti Of Before The Earthquake And The Haiti Of After The Earthquake. So When I'm Writing Anything Set In Haiti Now, Whether Fiction Or Nonfiction, Always In The Back Of My Mind Is How People, Including Some Of My Own Family Members, Have Been Affected Not Just By History And By The Present But Also By The Earthquake.

It Seemed From The Media That We Were Being Told That All Haitians Had Aids. At The Time, I Had Just Come From Haiti. I Was Twelve Years Old, And The Building I Was Living In Had Primarily Haitians. A Lot Of People Got Fired From Their Jobs. At School, Sometimes In Gym Class, We'd Be Separated Because Teachers Were Worried About What Would Happen If We Bled. So There Was Really This Intense Discrimination.

People Who Want Alternative Information Have To Try So Hard To Find It.

The Whole Military Structure In Haiti That Existed Until The Early 1990s Was Put In Place By The American Occupation. At The Top There Were Southern White Officers, Who Led An Army That Crushed The Indigenous Resistance - The Cacos. A High-ranking U.s. Officer Said When He Arrived, "to Think These Niggers Speak French!" Later, Haitian Officers Attended The Notorious School Of The Americas At Fort Benning. The Threat From The U.s. Is Something That Is Always Hanging Over People's Heads: If We Don't Behave, We'll Have Occupation Again.

One Of The Things That Sparked My Interest In This Is The Case Of Emmanuel Constant, Who Started A Militia Called Fraph That Was Backed By The Cia. Fraph Killed Thousands Of Haitians In The Early 1990s. Now While Constant Is Living Comfortably In Queens, Other Haitians Are Being Deported. I Wanted To See How Those Who Have Been Bruised By People Like That Deal With Coming Face To Face With Their Torturers.

We Try To Keep The Beautiful Memories, But Other Things From The Past Creep Up On Us.

Often When You're An Immigrant Writing In English, People Think It's Primarily A Commercial Choice. But For Many Of Us, It's A Choice That Rises Out Of The Circumstances Of Our Lives. These Are The Tools I Have At My Disposal, Based On My Experiences. It's A Constant Debate, Not Just In My Community But In Other Communities As Well. Where Do You Belong? You're Kind Of One Of Us, But You Now Write In A Different Language.

It Is The Calm And Silent Waters That Drown You.

They Say Behind Mountains Are More Mountains.

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.

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.

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.

I Was Neither Doing These People Nor Myself A Favor By Showing Up When My Heart Wasn't In It. There Were Not Getting The Real Me, The Whole Me, The True Me.

Being A Shy Child, I Always Longed For A Mask. Even In My Adult Life, I Have Glasses, They Are My Mask.

Toni Cade Bambara Said: “writing Is The Way I Participate In The Struggle.”

The Whole History Between Haiti And The Dominican Republic Is Complicated. We Share The Island Of Hispaniola, And Haiti Occupied The Dominican Republic For Twenty-two Years After 1804 For Fear That The French And Spanish Would Come Back And Reinstitute Slavery. So We Have This Unique Situation Of Being Two Independent Nations On The Same Island, But With Each Community Having Its Own Grievance.

It's Not A Matter Of Whether The Reviews Of Your Books Are Good Or Bad, It's About Being Taken Seriously, Both As A Woman Writer And As A Writer Of Color. Also, It Worries Me When People Point To A Couple Of Women Writers Or Writers Of Color Who Get Some Attention - And I Am Sometimes Pulled Into That Category - To Prove That Others Are Getting A Fair Shot. It's Like Those People Who Keep Saying That Racism No Longer Exists In This Country Because Barack Obama Was A President Of The United States.

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The Best Moment In Writing Any Book Is When You Just Can't Wait To Get Back To The Writing, When You Can't Wait To Re-enter That Fictional Place, When Your Fictional Town Feels Even More Real Than The Town Where You Actually Live.

In Terms Of The Idea Of Long-term Occupation - I Have Been Reading A Little Bit More About This Period - And You Can See In That Occupation Are Many Lessons For The Current Occupation Of Iraq. So We Have These Connections That Go Way Back That People Aren't Aware Of.

Wonderful Thing About Novels Is That Sometimes We Read A Novel And We Know The Person In The Novel More Than We Know People In Our Own Lives.

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.

I Also Know There Are Timeless Waters, Endless Seas, And Lots Of People In This World Whose Names Don't Matter To Anyone But Themselves. I Look Up At The Sky And I See You There.

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.

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.

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.

Here, Though, There Is Nothing. Nothing At All. The Sky Seems Empty Even When I Am Looking At The Moon And Stars.

I'm Happy To Be Part Of This Chorus Of People Who Are Trying To Tell More Complex Stories About Haiti.

I Don't Know What Will Happen To The Physical Book And What It Will Mean For Authors. I Worry Whether It Will Mean People Can Still Make Their Careers This Way. Will Whatever Comes Next Allow People To Be Able To Own Their Ideas And Be Able To Take Time To Develop Them?

Life's Hard In Haiti Right Now. And The Hardest Thing Is That The Future Does Not Lie With One Person.

Vodou Is One Of The Religions Practiced In Haiti, A Rich Religion For The People.

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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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People Often Think Of Haiti As A Place Where You're Not Supposed To Have Any Joy. I Wanted To Show That This Is A Place With Joy.

There Is Always A Place Where, If You Listen Closely In The Night, You Will Hear A Mother Telling A Story And At The End Of The Tale, She Will Ask You This Question: 'ou Libéré?' Are You Free, My Daughter?" My Grandmother Quickly Pressed Her Fingers Over My Lips. Now," She Said, "you Will Know How To Answer.

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Sometimes We Mask Ourselves To Further Reveal Ourselves, And It's Always Been Connected To Me With Being A Writer: We Tell Lies To Tell A Greater Truth. The Story Is A Mask; The Characters You Create Are Masks. That Appeals To Me. Aside From That, Too, In The Carnival The Masks Were Beautiful, And Offered A Vision Of Haitian Creativity.

Especially Moments When Things Are Very Difficult And Complicated For Me And I Am Still Trying To Grasp What Is Happening And I Am Still Trying To Understand And To Reach Family Back Home.

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I Would Hate For People To Generalize About Every Haitian From Something That One Haitian Did, Or A Group Of Haitians Did.

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Life Was Neither Something You Defended By Hiding Nor Surrendered Calmly On Other People's Terms, But Something You Lived Bravely, Out In The Open, And That If You Had To Lose It, You Should Lose It On Your Own Terms.

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The Past Is Like The Hair On Our Head. I Moved To New York When I Was Twelve, But You Always Have This Feeling That Wherever You Come From, You Physically Leave It, But It Doesn't Leave You.

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When You Write ,it's Like Braiding Your Hair. Taking A Handful Of Coarse Unruly Strands And Attempting To Bring Then Unity.

I'm Just Melancholy By Nature, And A Lot Of That Gets Into My Writing.

Once You're Involved In The Work, It's Really Just You And The Characters And The Words.

...women, Brave As Stars At Dawn

I Hope To Be A Good Role Model For My Daughters.

No, Women Like You Don't Write. They Carve Onion Sculptures And Potato Statues. They Sit In Dark Corners And Braid Their Hair In New Shapes And Twists In Order To Control The Stiffness, The Unruliness, The Rebelliousness.

There Is A Frustration Too, That At Moments When There's Not A Coup, When There Are Not People In The Streets, That The Country Disappears From People's Consciousness.

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When You Are Working On Something, You Have To Believe That People Will Still Be Reading When You're Done!

People Are Just Too Hopeful, And Sometimes Hope Is The Biggest Weapon Of All To Use Against Us. People Will Believe Anything.

I Think It Is Important To Reach People Through Arts And Literature, Because Then You Establish A Connection That's Not An Instant Crisis.

There [haiti] Were Also Leaders Like Jean-jacques Dessalines, Whose Motto Was, "cut Their Heads Off, Burn Their Houses."

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Whole Interaction Between The Storyteller And The Listeners Had A Very Powerful Influence On Me.

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

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Anger Is A Wasted Emotion.

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.

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."

I Remember Reading An Interview With A Writer Who Said That In Nonfiction If You Have One Lie It Sort Of Messes It Up. But In Fiction The Real Details Give You So Much More Credibility, Because People Do So Much Research Just To Write Fiction. In Fiction You're Trying To Recreate Something Lifelike.

We Need Literature Because We Wouldn’t Fully Know Ourselves Without It. We Need Good Literature To Be Fully Human.

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.

Napoleon Had Been Fighting This Army Of Slaves And Free People In Haiti And It Depleted His Forces. And After The Revolution, When The French Were Driven Out, They Stopped And Sold This Big Chunk Of North America To The Americans For Very Little Money.

After Writing Fiction For So Long, I Like The Discovery Element Of Nonfiction, In The Sense That When You Find The Right Information, It Feels Like Gold.

I Think It's Hard For An Outsider To Capture The Flavor Of A Community And All Its Nuances, So Ultimately Haitian-americans Need To Start Sharing Intimate Accounts Of Their Stories.

Someone Has Said That Nations Have Interests, They Don't Have Friends, And You See That Over And Over In U.s. Policy.

If A Woman Is Worth Remembering,' Said My Grandmother, 'there Is No Need To Have Her Name Carved In Letters.

Sometimes Family Members Will Ask To Be Kept Out Of Certain Things That I'm Writing, And I Try To Respect That. I'd Much Rather Have Relatives Than A Book.

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.

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.

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.

To Be Able To Create You Have To Have Peace Of Mind On Some Level.

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?

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.

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.

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.

For The Majority Of The People It Is A Difficult Place To Live. That's A Reality That We Can't Ignore. But There Is Also Great Beauty To It.

I Think It's Hard To Write A Book About Happiness Because Fiction Requires Tension And Complication.

This Was A "bad" Example For U.s. Slaves. Haiti Was Subjected To An Embargo From The United States, Which, Along With Many Other Countries, Refused To Recognize This New Republic.

Pretend That This Is A Time Of Miracles And We Believe In Them.

And The Fact That Haiti Was Occupied For 19 Years By The United States, From 1915 To 1934.

We Live Now In A Global Culture Where Anything That Happens In A Place That's 90 Minutes From Your Shores Really Affects You.

The More Practice You Have, The Less Stressful Writing Is.

People Think That There Is A Country There That These People Are Only Around When They Are On Cnn. I Don't Think That's Limited To Haiti.

The Greatest Gift Anyone Can Give To A Writer Is Time.

We All Have A Tendency To Over Generalize Our Individual Experiences. After I've Published Something, I'll Meet Someone Who Says, "i'm Haitian, And I Don't Know This, So It Must Not Be True." Even If We're Talking About A Work Of Fiction. I've Gotten Very Angry Myself Reading Many Things About Haiti. We're Not A Monolithic Group; No Group Is. Also, It's Important To Keep In Mind The Genre In Which We Are Writing. Fiction Is Full Of Invented Stories About Exceptional People In Exceptional Situations. Those Situations Are Not Always Cheery Or Celebratory.

Their Maker, She Said, Gives Them The Sky To Carry Because They Are Strong. These People Do Not Know Who They Are, But If You See A Lot Of Trouble In Your Life, It Is Because You Were Chosen To Carry Part Of The Sky On Your Head. -pg. 25

I Love The Process Of Cracking The Spine For The First Time And Slowly Sinking Into A Book. That Will Soon Seem Old-fashioned, I'm Sure, Like The Time Of Illuminated Manuscripts.

Aids Was Something That Was Put Upon Us [as Haitians], And We Were Immediately Identified With It. That Is Unfair. That Is Unjust. I Always Say, "we Are All People Living With Aids." It's Not Like You Can Avoid It. It's Part Of Our World.

These Were Our Bedtime Stories. Tales That Haunted Our Parents And Made Them Laugh At The Same Time. We Never Understood Them Until We Were Fully Grown And They Became Our Sole Inheritance.

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.

When You Write, It’s Like Braiding Your Hair. Taking A Handful Of Coarse Unruly Strands And Attempting To Bring Them Unity. Your Fingers Have Still Not Perfected The Task. Some Of The Braids Are Long, Others Are Short. Some Are Thick, Others Are Thin. Some Are Heavy. Others Are Light. Like The Diverse Women Of Your Family. Those Whose Fables And Metaphors, Whose Similes And Soliloquies, Whose Diction And Je Ne Sais Quoi Daily Slip Into Your Survival Soup, By Way Of Their Fingers.

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.

You Learned In School That You Have Pencils And Paper Only Because The Trees Gave Themselves In Unconditional Sacrifice.

In Haiti You Had The Duvaliers For 29 Years And They Were Very Well Supported By The United States.

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