Évelyne Trouillot Quotes

I wasn't intending to write a historical novel. May I be forgiven, then, for the few discrepancies and creative liberties I've taken. I only seek to acknowledge my characters' humanity. Yet I must refuse any responsibility for the torture and punishment described in the text. They are all unfortunately true, born of the cruel and perfidious imagination of those who proclaimed themselves to be civilized.

Today, old and bedbound, she finds herself alone. She knows we are always alone at the end of life, even when relatives are holding our hand, even when those who love us are shedding genuine tears. We must confront death all alone. There's no longer any way to hide behind plans, intentions, or dreams. It's necessary to look at the life behind us and say good-bye to it. We can pretend otherwise, but what good would it do? Along the way, illusions and self-deception help us to continue, but at the end of the road, they become useless masks that we must discard, for whether we like it or not, the flesh is laid bare and revealed for what it is. (chapter 1 p31)

I cannot resist going back to poetry as the main inspiration, and will cite some poets’ names: René Philoctète, Mahmoud Darwish, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda. When I want to remember what poetry means, I always go back to them always as an anchor and as an impetus to write, to create.

While writing Rosalie l’infâme, I rediscovered the history of the revolution, I learned about the struggles of the enslaved women, men and children in their daily lives; their struggles to maintain their dignity. And I truly believe that if the slaves had not fought for their dignity, if they had not managed to maintain some dignity amid the most inhuman system, the Haitian revolution would not have been possible. While doing my research for writing Rosalie, I could empathize with them because finally I saw them as human beings and not as an anonymous mass of victims of slavery.

I head home with the smell of the old woman's withered flesh on my fingers. The vision of her form sprawled limply on the bed like a nameless doll accompanies me through the streets of Paris. Why had they added that room to my list?
"Whatever you do, mademoiselle, don't reveal her name. No one should know who she is. Besides, we have no official confirmation. I thought you were only a child when you left your country. The dictator-I'm talking about the father, of course-was already dead when you were born, so you mustn't get carried away. Management has not authorized us to say that this woman is really his widow. In any case, this is no concern of yours."
Who does he take me for, that idiot of a director with his conspiratorial air? Even if I weren't the daughter of Marie-Carmelle, who suffered all her life from the horrors of the Doréval era, I would have recognized that woman's face. How could I forget it?

Haiti is a world of extreme gaps and contrasts. For the past forty years, the gaps have become bigger and bigger. One has the feeling that there are multiple spaces and countries within the same country. Each group for numerous reasons stays in its own environment, making the encounters between the different groups rare and unlikely. As a citizen I think that we have to find ways to force different types of Haitians to live together. Evidently, this requires social justice and the end of abject poverty for the majority while a minority is living in luxury. As a writer I like to envision such situations where, for one reason or another, individuals with different backgrounds meet, and then I explore what the results could be. To go beyond what is apparent and delve into emotions and let the readers also envision what is possible.

Between us silence covers the wounds with a veil of peace and a soft breeze. (p19)

This is a year not just to celebrate the past; it is a year to build, to change, to question, to recover our history and demystify it.

Sadly, it’s easy for publishers to fall into the trap of publishing texts that spread hastily formed impressions of a country and its people and unquestioningly recirculate damaging stereotypes. In that regard, books that abound in superficial references to vodou and pile up images of violence and deprivation seem to attract some editors, conveniently reinforcing their narrow perception of the Haitian reality. It takes a conscious commitment to diversify the array of translated books and to include non-Anglophone Black authors without trying to confine them to pigeonholes.

We Haitian citizens know the damages already caused by foreign forces in the country. Many questions need to be asked: Where did the guns and bullets that have reached Haiti come from? The country does not manufacture guns or bullets. Why do international bodies, and other foreign countries continue to support the de facto government while it refuses to prevent the violence from bandits?

Violence can prevent us from looking at the bigger picture and make us prisoners of the mundane – on guard so we don’t catch stray bullets. We should not be prisoners of this manufactured violence, which keeps us in a state of despair and constant fear. We have to keep our capacity to reflect on the situation and continue to look for and find solutions that take into account the dire realities of violence, while addressing the deeper structural problems of our society. The solution does not involve sending foreign soldiers to land in a country they do not know. The solution must go further than killing thugs. Rather, the solution requires that foreign governments stop butting into the country’s affairs. The solution is within. It demands that we, as Haitians, are not afraid to look properly at the problems, find a way to establish justice, break with the impunity, distribute our resources fairly, and gather our strength and dignity to establish a society that can work for us. It will not be an easy task, but it is possible. I still believe that.

I am more and more convinced that the future of Haitian literature rests in a broadened set of topics. It cannot deal only with exile, dictatorship and misery. I want to limit neither the topics nor the manner of approaching them. I think this is the feeling of many Haitian writers. For me, to be a writer today means to appropriate a space for creation even if, and especially when, conditions threaten both existence and the development of art. The writer has the ability to throw new light on reality. In that resides the artist’s power and originality. When a writer turns away from the path that is attributed to him and takes another path to offer an unexpected view, it is literary creation that wins. If one is obligated to write against political repression, one remains under the dictatorship. It is up to each artist to redefine the universe, to resist the preconceived ideas of their homeland, to not hesitate to pry open the vice of this or that set of topics that has been assigned, to find a way to defy the constraints imposed by sociopolitical context, revolutionary consciousness and the vision of others. One must escape every embargo on the imagination to question the world.

I think that we often tend not to face the pages of our history that upset us. I would have thought that there would be many more texts, many more stories around the Duvalier dictatorship. Generations of men and women were marked by this period. But it’s the same story as for slavery: there is shame in speaking of it, like a wound that one is scared to touch.

I detest death. It's been around us all my life, invading our slightest movements. Unknown dead people dominated my childhood and adolescence. All those anonymous fatalities I mourned. Family members with frozen expressions in yellowed family photos. I abhor the atmosphere in which you raised me-oozing with fear and regret, anger and powerlessness, with unfinished farewells forever dangling. An atmosphere devouring every intention I had of living happily. Swallowing up all my possibilities of pleasure and joy.
I detest this dour gravity I inherited from you.

I started writing naturally, not really knowing why. After more than twenty years since the publication of my first book of short stories, I believe that writing has become a necessity for me. As a human being, a black woman, writing helps me to make sense of the world. The more I write, the more I read, the more I see the world and its challenges—the deep inequalities, the constant struggles of the majority of the world’s population to live decently—the more I see writing as an urgency.