Life Was Neither Something You Defended By

I Think Haiti Is A Place That Suffers So Much From Neglect That People Only Want To Hear About It When It’s At Its Extreme. And That’s What They End Up Knowing About It.

It Seemed From The Media That We Were Being Told That All Haitians Had Aids. At The Time, I Had Just Come From Haiti. I Was Twelve Years Old, And The Building I Was Living In Had Primarily Haitians. A Lot Of People Got Fired From Their Jobs. At School, Sometimes In Gym Class, We'd Be Separated Because Teachers Were Worried About What Would Happen If We Bled. So There Was Really This Intense Discrimination.

We Try To Keep The Beautiful Memories, But Other Things From The Past Creep Up On Us.

Pretend That This Is A Time Of Miracles And We Believe In Them.

When I Meet People For The First Time, I Always Put On My Glasses Because I Feel Like That's A Little Something Extra Between Me And Them. It's Like The Laurence Dunbar Poem "we Wear The Mask."