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, d… - Évelyne Trouillot

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)

I like this back and forth between the past and the present, between memory and reality.

(Who were your models when you began writing?) I was always drawn to novelists. Maupassant remains a master for me and I reread his stories and novels with more and more pleasure. Nabokov too. I like writers who manage to affect us profoundly in relatively few pages. As for Haitian authors, other than René Philoctète, who, in poetry, remains unsurpassable, there are some writers whose work enriches literature: Jacques Stephen Alexis is well known; Anthony Lespes, in my opinion, deserves to be.