I've gathered some quotes from Edwidge Danticat's collection of essays entitled Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. 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. p. 10
The immigrant artist, to borrow from Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture knows what it is "to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear" our company, hamlets that need our labor but want our children banned from their schools, villages that want our sick shut out from their hospitals, big cities that want our elderly, after a lifetime of impossible labor, to pack up and go off somewhere else to die. p. 17
Journalist Jean Dominique, assassinated April 2, 2000, The [Haitian] Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds. There's no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You all are not alone." p. 51
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, commentators often remarked that the scenes media conveyed were similar to those from 3rd World countries.
"It’s hard for those of us who are from places like Freetown or Port-au-Prince, and those of us who are immigrants who still have relatives living in places like Freetown or Port-au-Prince, not to wonder why the so-called developed world needs so desperately to distance itself from us, especially at times when an unimaginable disaster shows exactly how much alike we are. ... The poor in the richest country in the world, however, should not be poor at all. They should not even exist. Maybe that's why both their leaders and a large number of their fellow citizens don't even realize that they actually do exist." p. 110
