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 … - Évelyne Trouillot

The solution for a country is never outside the country; it should emerge, and grow and develop, from within. We can’t all be Baydenns [emigrants]. A whole nation cannot leave. The more people leave, the more the country declines. It’s a vicious circle, we’re going round and round.

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.

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)