People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.
Even when I think of writing fiction, it’s being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there’s that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
That’s whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through – whenever they are in the news, that’s when they exist. If you don’t see them they don’t exist.
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
There is a frustration too, that at moments when there’s not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people’s consciousness.
Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.
And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
Anger is a wasted emotion.
Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.
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.