"Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed"
About this Quote
The line lands like a stumble you can hear: "Umm, well" isn’t verbal clutter so much as a moral recoil. Edwidge Danticat is staging the moment when language fails under the weight of what it has to name. By invoking Florida "where they are prepared to execute children", she compresses an entire apparatus of state power into a single, brutal readiness: not the act itself, but the institutional posture that makes the act imaginable, schedulable, defensible.
The pivot that follows - "you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed" - is the quote’s quiet knife. "Claimed" can mean legal redress, political accountability, even a scrap of humanity left un-erased by the machinery. But it also echoes the vocabulary of property and possession, a reminder that systems of punishment often treat bodies as objects the state can take, process, dispose. Danticat’s phrasing suggests the desperation of searching for a remainder: if a society can rationalize killing minors, what principle is left to appeal to? What shared story can still be invoked in courtrooms, legislatures, newsrooms?
Contextually, this feels like Danticat doing what her work often does: connecting personal vulnerability to national policy, making the abstract "justice system" tactile. She doesn’t argue like a pundit; she exposes a fracture in the American self-image. The hesitations aren’t weakness. They’re a record of conscience trying to speak in a country where the state’s confidence has outpaced its mercy.
The pivot that follows - "you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed" - is the quote’s quiet knife. "Claimed" can mean legal redress, political accountability, even a scrap of humanity left un-erased by the machinery. But it also echoes the vocabulary of property and possession, a reminder that systems of punishment often treat bodies as objects the state can take, process, dispose. Danticat’s phrasing suggests the desperation of searching for a remainder: if a society can rationalize killing minors, what principle is left to appeal to? What shared story can still be invoked in courtrooms, legislatures, newsrooms?
Contextually, this feels like Danticat doing what her work often does: connecting personal vulnerability to national policy, making the abstract "justice system" tactile. She doesn’t argue like a pundit; she exposes a fracture in the American self-image. The hesitations aren’t weakness. They’re a record of conscience trying to speak in a country where the state’s confidence has outpaced its mercy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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