Time & Perspective Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat’s line is less complaint than indictment: a country shouldn’t need a spectacle of collapse to be considered real. The phrasing pivots on that bitter conditional - “at moments when there’s not a coup” - as if stability is the exception and catastrophe the default expectation. She’s naming the perverse media logic that makes certain places legible only when they’re burning. If Haiti (the context most readers will hear behind the sentence) is not producing dramatic footage, it “disappears,” not because life stops, but because attention does.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s frustration with the world’s short memory. Underneath, it’s a critique of how crisis becomes a brand: coups, bodies in the streets, the photo-ready misery that grants entry into global consciousness. Danticat, a writer shaped by diaspora and the long shadow of political upheaval, is pushing back against the idea that ordinary days in “troubled” nations are narratively unimportant. The line refuses the reduction of a whole country to its most consumable emergencies.

What makes it work is the quietness of the accusation. She doesn’t attack journalists or readers directly; she describes an absence, a vanishing act, and lets the listener feel complicit. The subtext is moral: attention is a form of power, and neglect is not neutral. When the only time a nation registers is during disaster, the world isn’t just observing history - it’s helping decide which lives count as news.