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

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

“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

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

“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

“The words—tout moun se moun—seemed like the answer to the question he’d asked himself earlier that day. Was being an American a sufficient identity unto itself? “She said that again and again,” he remembered. “We’re all human beings.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains : The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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?

“This obsessing heart which does not correspond
To my language, nor to my customs,
And on which encroach, like a clinging-root,
Borrowed feelings and the customs
Of Europe, feel this suffering
And this despair—equal to no other—
Of ever taming with words from France
This heart which came to me from Sénegal.
- Haitian poet”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus

“À quoi sert la Littérature sinon qu'à un deal, enfin un détour, pour mieux soudoyer Dieu?
~
La voix qui parle en toi, laisse-la parler. Laisse-la parler plus que de raison, jusqu'a ce qu'elle se casse et fasse écho dehors.
~
Seul le saignement dentaire fera justice de la transparence du verbe.”
― James Noël, Estilhaços – Antologia de Poesia Haitiana Contemporânea

“Face à l'épouvante des mains nues
la Poésie
souveraine exigence”
― Evelyne Trouillot, Estilhaços – Antologia de Poesia Haitiana Contemporânea

“It's very important to be careful when you are in Haiti because the last time I went there, I was also infected with microbes.”
― Werley Nortreus

“Haiti is a nice country, but I hope one day that some of its residents act right.”
― Werley Nortreus

“Charlie, did you know that Haiti's slave revolution is the only one that has ever won back its freedom? They beat the French back so many times and so badly those Frenchmen ended up just selling Louisiana to America along with all the gateways to the west. All so the French didn't have to go back and fight that little island again. Without Haiti, America wouldn't be America, y'know, Manifest Destiny and all that. Haiti changed the trajectory of the world.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants