Politics & Power Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Centralization is sold as efficiency, but Danticat frames it as a quiet tax on the poor: distance. The line sounds almost logistical, even mundane, which is exactly why it lands. A birth certificate is the kind of document you only notice when you don’t have it, when it blocks school enrollment, formal work, a bank account, a passport. By choosing that example, she turns “official paper” into a gatekeeping device, a way the state makes itself real through paperwork while remaining unreachable to the people who most need its recognition.

The subtext is a critique of how cities become the default address of power. When services concentrate in an urban center, the countryside isn’t simply underserved; it’s effectively deemed peripheral, its residents asked to prove they exist on the city’s terms. The journey becomes part of the transaction: transport costs, lost wages, bureaucratic runarounds, the risk that a single missing stamp means coming back again. Centralization doesn’t just administer citizens; it sorts them by mobility.

Danticat, as a writer shaped by Haiti and its diasporas, is especially attuned to what documents do in fragile or unequal states: they can be protection or punishment. The sentence carries the moral charge of lived experience, not policy theory. It exposes a modern paradox: the closer government gets to “the people” in rhetoric, the more it can retreat behind a single office in a single city, turning citizenship into a trip you may not be able to afford.