Haiti Quotes

“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“It never ceases to amaze me that in times of amazing human suffering somebody says something that can be so utterly stupid.”
― Robert Gibbs

“The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat

“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

“Haiti où la négritude se mit debout pour la première fois et dit qu'elle croyait à son humanité.”
― Aim�� Césaire

“Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.”
― Assotto Saint

“Etranger qui marches dans ma ville/ souviens-toi que la terre que tu foules/ est terre du poète/ et la plus noble et la plus belle”
― Anthony Phelps, Mon pays que voici

“Nous ne savons pas encore que nous sommes une force, une seule force: tous les habitants, tous les nègres des plaines et des mornes réunis. Un jour, quand nous aurons compris cette vérité, nous nous lèverons d'un point à l'autre du pays et nous ferons l'assemblée générale des gouverneurs de la rosée, le grand coumbite des travailleurs de la terre pour défricher la misère et planter la vie nouvelle.”
― Jacques Roumain

“O mon pays/ je t'aime comme un être de chair/ et je sais ta souffrance et je vois ta misère/ et me demande la rage au coeur/ quelle main a tracé sur le registre des nations/ une petite étoile à coté de ton nom”
― Anthony Phelps

“In spite of its poverty, its political upheavals, its lack of resources, Haiti is not a peripheral place. Its history has made it a center.”
― Yanick Lahens

“O mon pays si triste est la saison/ qu'il est venu le temps de se parler par signes”
― Anthony Phelps

“Qui ose encore aimer ce pays/ et le dire?”
― Evelyne Trouillot

“On pouvait être a court de nourriture dans le pays, il y avait toujours de la couleur.”
― Graham Greene, The Comedians

“I have been in many awful places, but have never seen such fear as in the eyes of those who are trying to survive in Haiti's indescribable slums during the Clinton backed terror, or such misery as among poor peasants in southern Colombia, driven from their devastated lands by US chemical warfare -fumigation- and much more like it around the world. Even after violence achieves its goals and it's relaxed, it leaves a residual culture of terror as the surviving Salvadorean Jesuits observed. Yet somehow, communities endure and survive.”
― Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

“Dominicans are, in fact, Haitians by default
Since the natives named the whole Island Ayiti
Ignoring this fact makes you a dolt
We are all Creole, just different mentality”
― Ricardo Derose

“Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti. Ever since the slave revolt against the French, Haiti has been in chaos. Massive human suffering, lasting destruction. Why celebrate that? But no: Let’s hold another conference on that fantastic Haitian Revolution.”
― Bruce Gilley

“What he had not foreseen about Miami, though, was the plethora of stories like his. He had also not realized that there would be homeless families sleeping under a bridge a few feet from the luxury hotel that he was helping to erect. The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

“What he had not foreseen about Miami, though, was the plethora of stories like his. He had also not realized that there would be homeless families sleeping under a bridge a few feet from the luxury hotel that he was helping to erect. The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

“The will to make life beautiful was strong.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

“Mais le Père Angelo se refusa tout net à serrer la main au prêtre du vaudou”
― Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy

“Haiti as an independent republic accepted the invitation extended to her along with other nations, and erected a building on the World's Fair grounds. She placed Frederick Douglass in charge of this building to represent the Haitian government. Mr. Douglass had been sent as minister to Haiti from this country a few years before this, and had so won the confidence of this little black republic that it in turn gave him the honor of being in charge of their exhibit. Had it not been for this, Negroes of the United States would have had no part nor lot in any official way in the World's Fair. For the United States government had refused her Negro citizens participation therein.”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

“Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed the Negro or, for that matter, the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual and not the race that is affected by religion, education and example. Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure or by the slaver’s lash. When the impulse of an inferior race to imitate or mimic the dress, manners or morals of the dominant race is destroyed by the acquisition of political or social independence, the servient race tends to revert to its original status as in Haiti.”
― Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History

“Mijn argument in mijn boek is dat behalve de slavenopstand in Haïti de slavenopstanden niet tot slavenbevrijding hebben bijgedragen, maar dat de beslissing om er een einde aan te maken in de hoofdsteden in Europa is genomen. Nogmaals, ik denk dat het fundamenteel nadenken over slavernij echt iets westers is. En de slavenopstanden hebben daar niet toe bijgedragen.”
― Piet Emmer, De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop

“Since today Haiti beholds what unworthiness defines, one may ask intentionally, does the island of Haiti breed valiant creatures witty enough to respond insightfully to the danger that Illuminates their future? And has God's noble grace of heaven blessed Haiti's freedom in the world before she was; quite ready to make her entrance?”
― Paul Bertrand

“Since today Haiti beholds what unworthiness defines, one may ask intentionally, does the island of Haiti breed valiant creatures witty enough to respond insightfully to the danger that Illuminates their future? And has God's noble grace of heaven blessed Haiti's freedom in the world before she was; quite ready to make her entrance?”
― Paul C. Bertrand

“Some mornings we wake, our stomachs empty, our stomachs angry, but never do we look to the ground beneath our feet with longing in our mouths. We chew on our pride. The dirt we do not eat.”
― Roxane Gay, Ayiti

“Haiti was the stuff of American nightmare: a nation of black slaves who had killed off their white masters.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?