"I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles"
About this Quote
The line’s emotional engine is the pairing of “extraordinary dreams” with “very amazing obstacles.” Danticat refuses the neat binary that American storytelling loves: either the poor are noble saints or cautionary tales. Dreams aren’t presented as fantasies that rescue people from hardship; they’re proof of complexity, ambition, humor, and stubborn forward motion inside conditions designed to narrow possibility. The obstacles aren’t romanticized either. “Amazing” is a loaded word here: it carries awe, but also disbelief at how much can be stacked against a person and still be treated as normal.
Her intent is literary and political without sounding like a manifesto. To “raise the voice” implies volume and elevation, not invention. The subtext is a critique of which lives get narrated at full scale and which are reduced to statistics, stereotypes, or charity-case silhouettes. Contextually, it fits Danticat’s larger project as a Haitian diasporic author: insisting that migration, poverty, and trauma are not the only plots available, and that the people living through them deserve the dignity of layered storytelling rather than inspirational packaging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Overcoming Obstacles |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Danticat, Edwidge. (2026, January 17). I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wanted-to-raise-the-voice-of-a-lot-of-the-66996/
Chicago Style
Danticat, Edwidge. "I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wanted-to-raise-the-voice-of-a-lot-of-the-66996/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-wanted-to-raise-the-voice-of-a-lot-of-the-66996/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
