Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwidge Danticat

There’s a quiet accusation baked into Danticat’s phrasing, and it lands precisely because she refuses to shout. “Also” makes it sound like an add-on, a small clarification, when it’s really a pivot to the structural story Americans prefer not to hear: the U.S. isn’t just a distant observer of “places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua,” but a recurring force in their instability. The most cutting word is “influence” - gentler than “interfere,” “destabilize,” or “exploit,” yet wide enough to cover everything from covert operations and backed coups to trade regimes, migration policy, and disaster-era conditional aid. She’s indicting a whole ecosystem, not a single villain.

The line “people are not often aware” isn’t a neutral observation; it’s a critique of cultivated ignorance. Not knowing becomes a kind of privilege, one protected by U.S.-centric news framing that treats Latin America and the Caribbean as perpetual crises with no backstory, only headlines. Danticat’s list form matters, too: Haiti is her moral anchor, then she widens the frame to a regional pattern, insisting these aren’t isolated tragedies but repeatable outcomes of power.

“Or in Columbia right now” (likely “Colombia”) yanks the argument into the present tense. Whatever era the listener wants to file U.S. intervention into - Cold War, Reagan years - she won’t allow the comfort of history. The intent is to connect diaspora memory to U.S. responsibility, making “foreign” suffering legible as policy fallout, not fate.