We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
No one will love you more than you love your pain.
People aren’t really aware of what’s happening in other places.
People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don’t think that’s limited to Haiti.
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation – I have been reading a little bit more about this period – and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren’t aware of.
I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.
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.