Life’s hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.
People often think of Haiti as a place where you’re not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.
I think it’s hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.
There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There’s a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.
I think it’s hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
I’m just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.
The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
Once you’re involved in the work, it’s really just you and the characters and the words.
The Attorney General made another astonishing claim, that there were Pakistani terrorists possibly coming on these boats from Haiti. No one has ever seen a Pakistani coming on a boat from Haiti yet.
I’m not saying Cubans don’t deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn’t that a national security issue?
We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
I am very timid about speaking for the collective. I can say what I see, I can say what I’ve heard, I can say what I feel, but I can’t speak for – no one can speak for – 10 million people, and it takes away something from them if you make yourself their voice.
I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.
America’s relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, “Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934.”
I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I’m sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
I don’t know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?