Perhaps, just as Alice Walker writes of her own forebears in her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," my blood ancestors-unlike my literary anc… - Edwidge Danticat

All artists, writers among them, have several stories-one might call them creation myths-that haunt and obsess them.

"Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them." ("A Wall of Fire Rising")

We have a Haitian saying: Fanm se poto mitán. Women are middle pillars of society. I think that's true of all societies. I agree to the often quoted maxim that we hold up half the sky. Sojourner Truth, in her famous speech, said that if Eve were able to change the course all alone we should be able to do more together today. Those are the foundations of my feminism, my activism as a feminist/womanist...For a lot of poor families, the men are abroad or the society has crushed them and they're absent for one reason or another. The women may not be labeling themselves feminists or womanists, but they're doing the work. They're keeping the children alive. They're keeping the family going. That's a developed-world, as well as a developing-world reality.