Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat is calling out a very modern kind of erasure: the way whole nations flicker into existence only when a cable-news chyron needs fresh misery. The line’s power comes from its plainspoken structure. “People think” isn’t a polite hedge; it’s an indictment of a lazy consensus. And “there is a country there” sounds almost absurd in its understatement, as if Haiti’s basic reality has to be re-asserted against the media’s implicit claim that it’s a disaster zone, not a living place with continuity, culture, and daily life.

The jab at CNN functions as shorthand for a larger apparatus: the attention economy that rewards spectacle and compresses complex histories into a crisis montage. When Haitians are “only around” during breaking news, they’re reduced to roles - victims, refugees, background bodies - rather than agents with interiority. That reduction doesn’t just misinform; it trains audiences to treat suffering as episodic content instead of the visible edge of long-term political and economic forces.

Then Danticat widens the frame: “I don’t think that’s limited to Haiti.” It’s a refusal to let Haiti be quarantined as an exceptional case, the “poor country” people pity and then forget. She’s pointing to a recurring Western media habit: places in the Global South become legible only through catastrophe, and diaspora communities become visible only when framed by tragedy. The subtext is sharp: if your awareness depends on a news cycle, it isn’t awareness - it’s consumption.