Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.
It’s interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn’t overcome, you wouldn’t be writing it.
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to.
After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.
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.
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.”