Évelyne Trouillot Quotes

These words come back to remind me that I am a slave, and it is in this truth that my strength lies. Whether a field slave or a house slave, man, woman, or child, the slave is a creature who has lost his soul between the mill and the sugarcane, between the ship's hold and its steerage, between the crinoline and the slap in the face. Shame stains our every gesture. When we place our feet, undeserving of shoes, on the ground, when we let our exhausted bodies fall on cornhusk mattresses, and when we swing the bamboo fans, we crush our souls under the weight of our shame. Only our gestures of revolt truly belong to us. (p62)

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.

The writer is also a citizen: a citizen who writes. Someone who makes sense of things. For me, this production of meaning does not happen in a vacuum, in a space without place, without society. The social calls out to me.

I feed off of my observations, above all. Sometimes it just takes a remark for an idea for a story or a character to arise. Or unconsciously I store things away and the next time I sit down to write, they come back to me. Obviously writing is a digestion of our experiences. Certain characters of mine draw on the image I have of people in my life...But I think that what makes a text interesting is its capacity to go beyond one’s own experiences, to succeed in sharing a different world. This requires a lot of sensitivity, and also self-knowledge. Writing allows me to better understand the world in which I developed. If I really want to create meaning, I must be honest with myself, and not present a simplistic version of things. Most of the time this means setting aside my own experiences, transcending them.

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 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.

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 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?

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.

Literature is a key to understanding human nature, social relations, and feelings.

Writing can be both a task of memory, or homage, and simply a hand held out, the offer to share a sadness that’s too heavy to bear alone. To continue working and try to make a difference constitutes both an obligation and a renewal. This does not mean that writers cannot intervene in other ways, but for me writing helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings, and at the same time, I think I can have some impact on people’s minds.

This image of the condemned books remains for me one of the strongest images of the repression, this repression of knowledge and of creative freedom. Isn’t that one of the strongest armies used by dictators everywhere?

I weave through the maze of paths between the shacks, taking care to go the back way, avoiding the one window through which I can glimpse the dark, damp rooms inside the house. My blue serge skirt swirls around my legs, and I hold it up with one hand to keep it out of the puddles from yesterday's rain. I run, ignoring the occasional scolding looks and grumblings that follow me, responding to well-meaning advice with a flick of my hand. (first lines)

Always in the backs of their minds were their memories of an oppressive past, from which they could hope to break free only with great turmoil and agitation. (chapter 3 p100 )

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.