Haiti is a very poor country. It gets a lot of negative publicity in the media because of the natural disasters, the political instability, and the violence. What I discovered here was an enormously gifted people, very creative artists, musicians, writers, and poets.

What will 2004 look like to them? I see for them a country with 85% literacy, rather than 85% illiteracy. Cooperatives flourish in villages and in the informal sectors of the cities. Water is flowing through the fields of the countryside-where food enough for all of Haiti's people is growing. Creole pigs are seen more and more in the countryside, the descendents of those few that the peasants hid away and saved from extermination. Seedlings are beginning to take root on the mountainsides. The seedlings have a chance at survival because the people are no longer in misery, but are already on the road to poverty with dignity. There are primary schools and health clinics in every municipality of Haiti. The schoolbooks are not just half-price-they are free, in accordance with Article 32.1 of our constitution which promises a free education to every Haitian child. The children and young people are actively engaged in the changes sweeping their country. Radyo Timoun can be heard throughout the country, and people begin to feel it is normal for children to have a voice in national issues. The bayakou and the bouretye still labor, but the weight of social exclusion has been lifted. The restaveks are eating at the table with everyone else. This is our challenge for the new century; this is the challenge of 2004. We assume it. We are living it right now.

On this anniversary, while remembering the dead and celebrating those still living, I also want to recognize more than ever the marginalized members of Haitian society—people like my grandparents and their grandparents, poor, urban and rural, self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti. Without their full inclusion and participation in the reconstruction of their country, Haiti will never fully succeed.

I am from a place, Haiti, that constantly evokes nostalgia in the people who have seen it, lived in it, and loved it “before”...The blessings of our islands are also our curse. Our geography gives us year-round sun and beautiful beaches, but more and more in the age of climate change, we are on the front line of destruction. “We are a people” seems to be what we have been saying for generations to all our colonizers and invaders who seemed intent on destroying us. And now more than ever, Mother Nature, too. We are a people, the Arawaks and Taínos might have said, even as they died trying to prove it.

The Haitian people are a people who have dignity, they want to get up. People need a helping hand. Enough talk about this ordeal. Enough with the controversies. This should be a time for reflection.

Well, I think that when I’m writing about Haiti, I’m just writing one long, ongoing story. But I really did feel, like a lot of people did, that after the earthquake, there were suddenly two Haitis: the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So I feel that I’ve been writing about the first one much longer. And writing about the earthquake... it’s been such a short period of time and it’s still such a raw experience that the few things that I’ve written about it, I feel like I’ve written them to process it myself.

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.

We were born in Haiti during an emergency that has never left us. The Haitian revolution [1791-1804], the third revolution in modern times after the United States and France, pushed the Enlightenment project further with its radicalism. It is anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-slavery. We are the mould and the matrix of the North-South relations established by this modernity. If our elites tried to reproduce the model of the old metropolis, an anti-plantation culture developed in parallel – with a religion, voodoo; a language, Creole; but also a way of occupying space, matrimonial relations, etc. The first writers who came from the elite, wrote in French to say that we exist as Blacks and as human beings. For over a century, an oral literature has been developed in Creole, and is now appearing in the written word. We are leaning on these two pillars of support. Today, we are still in this state of emergency because, as far as I am aware, North-South relations have not fundamentally changed. Also, the complicity of the elites in maintaining these relations is still just as obvious for countries in the South. Writers, and artists in general, have created against a backdrop of distress and anger, but with the will to write “in a state of poetry”. As the Haitian poet René Depestre says: “The state of poetry is flourishing, light years away from the states of siege and alarm”.

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.

The current gap between the haves and the have-nots is the bane of the entire world, and this disparity is increasing daily. A mountain on one side and an abyss on the other—such is the current situation. On one hand, there are those who live, squandering millions upon millions on luxuries. On the other hand, there are those who struggle in hunger and pain to make enough for just one meal—to make enough for just one day’s medicine. If we postpone reducing this gap any longer, it will culminate in violence, even widespread riots. A bridge of love and compassion joining these two groups is desperately needed.

The way the media cycle works here, the way the news works, and the way people’s attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis. That’s why I think it is important to reach people through other means, like the arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that’s not an instant crisis. It’s not disaster porn, it’s a mutual gaze: I’m giving you something and you’re giving me something. That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.

In the end, people have to learn to live together. That is what I didn't like about America — it is so homogeneous. I like places where there are people who are different culturally, physically, in every way. And I like to see how they succeed in living together.

in terms of being immigrants, especially from a place like Haiti, when we see — you know, we see the cholera, we see the earthquake. I think people forget that there’s also this wonderful and powerful history of revolt, of resilience, of resistance, and this wonderful art that’s followed in its wake that has this great beauty to offer to the world.

Environmental problems frequently affect us here in Haiti and are a wake-up call. Our country is very vulnerable to natural disasters. However, I refuse to hear it called a cursed country. The Lord gave the earth to the children of Adam to till and cultivate it. Our happiness comes from something beyond, originating in the loving heart of the Creator. Geography alone cannot determine our happiness or unhappiness. On the contrary, we see ourselves as children blessed and loved by God.