After each of our encounters filled with love and pain, she would tell me: "Your story must dwell, vigilant, under your skin, at the tips of your hai… - Évelyne Trouillot

Contact with books pushed me toward writing. In books I found a special space of the imagination, and I wanted to create my own...When I write, I feel so rich. Rich with love affairs and friendships that I have had, rich with my experience as a mother of two children, rich with my life as one half of a couple, rich with my ups and downs, with everything that I have seen and read...Reading and writing function for me as two sides of the same adventure: the meeting of language, ideas, and images.

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.

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.