More and more people are able to access information – thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago.
I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn’t in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.
Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.
Art is a luxury but also a necessity.
On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.
I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.
I’m happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.
The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people’s attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.
I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that’s not an instant crisis.
That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.
We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that’s 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you’re trying to recreate something lifelike.
Life’s hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that’s a little something extra between me and them. It’s like the Laurence Dunbar poem “We Wear the Mask.”
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.
I think it’s hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.