I cannot resist going back to poetry as the main inspiration, and will cite some poets’ names: René Philoctète, Mahmoud Darwish, Louis Aragon, Pablo … - Évelyne Trouillot

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.

They've become elements of my universe, so powerful a part of my mental space and of my memories that it seems to me I'll never be able to escape them and will always remain captive to their ghosts. (chapter 3 p67)

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.