"That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that's when they exist. If you don't see them they don't exist"
About this Quote
A country reduced to a headline is a country denied a life. Danticat’s line skewers the media’s brutal on/off switch: nations “exist” only when their suffering can be packaged as spectacle or their politics can be framed as drama. The repetition of “whatever” isn’t laziness; it’s the point. It mimics the shrugging cadence of distant audiences and news cycles that treat whole histories as interchangeable content slots.
The intent is less to blame individual ignorance than to indict a system that rewards episodic attention. “Whenever they are in the news” describes a kind of conditional humanity: visibility becomes a prerequisite for reality, and invisibility becomes a quiet form of erasure. The subtext is colonial in its logic. If the powerful don’t look, the marginalized are presumed not to matter; their ongoing lives - work, love, governance, art, ordinary conflict - don’t count as “news,” so they don’t count at all.
As a writer shaped by Haiti’s long relationship with Western attention (earthquake, crisis, corruption, disaster, repeat), Danticat is also pointing to the violence of narrative scarcity. A place is not only misrepresented by bad coverage; it is diminished by the gaps between crises, when it disappears from the public imagination. The final sentence, blunt as a verdict, mirrors the childishness of the belief it exposes: a grown-up version of peekaboo, except the cost is political amnesia, policy neglect, and the ongoing permission to ignore.
The intent is less to blame individual ignorance than to indict a system that rewards episodic attention. “Whenever they are in the news” describes a kind of conditional humanity: visibility becomes a prerequisite for reality, and invisibility becomes a quiet form of erasure. The subtext is colonial in its logic. If the powerful don’t look, the marginalized are presumed not to matter; their ongoing lives - work, love, governance, art, ordinary conflict - don’t count as “news,” so they don’t count at all.
As a writer shaped by Haiti’s long relationship with Western attention (earthquake, crisis, corruption, disaster, repeat), Danticat is also pointing to the violence of narrative scarcity. A place is not only misrepresented by bad coverage; it is diminished by the gaps between crises, when it disappears from the public imagination. The final sentence, blunt as a verdict, mirrors the childishness of the belief it exposes: a grown-up version of peekaboo, except the cost is political amnesia, policy neglect, and the ongoing permission to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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