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

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.

Poetry, of course, is special, unique. It is a metamorphosis of language that transforms both reader and poet, an exquisite and melancholy exercise. Sometimes, in difficult moments, I take down a text by the Haitian writer René Philoctète or the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and my darkness fills with light. For me that’s what poetry is. And fiction has the power to shed new light on life, on people, on relations between human beings, on our relations with ourselves.

As a Black, non-Anglophone Haitian woman writer, I write about my personal world in my own languages (Creole and French) in order to move toward other people. With no concern for what a prospective Anglophone editor might think of my texts. Furthermore, the published book no longer belongs to me, and translated, my hold on it loosens even further. And my writings, stemming from my lived experience and my aesthetic and social vision for a more beautiful and just world, are presented to readers who are not always acquainted with my reality. It’s the same for other writers who, like me, are translated into English or other languages. Our words become conduits, bridges, walkways that transport meaning. It is to be hoped that these writings reach new readers in their full integrity and without distortion in a form conducive to candid and fruitful encounters. Respecting the diverse roots of creativity.