Misery Won't Touch You Gentle. It Always

When You Write, It’s Like Braiding Your Hair. Taking A Handful Of Coarse Unruly Strands And Attempting To Bring Them Unity. Your Fingers Have Still Not Perfected The Task. Some Of The Braids Are Long, Others Are Short. Some Are Thick, Others Are Thin. Some Are Heavy. Others Are Light. Like The Diverse Women Of Your Family. Those Whose Fables And Metaphors, Whose Similes And Soliloquies, Whose Diction And Je Ne Sais Quoi Daily Slip Into Your Survival Soup, By Way Of Their Fingers.

I Was Neither Doing These People Nor Myself A Favor By Showing Up When My Heart Wasn't In It. There Were Not Getting The Real Me, The Whole Me, The True Me.

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.

There Is A Frustration Too, That At Moments When There's Not A Coup, When There Are Not People In The Streets, That The Country Disappears From People's Consciousness.

I Think All Artists Are Looking For A Subject Or Are Sometimes Unsure Of Their Subject, But Immigrant Artists Bring Another Culture To That And They Bring Also The Place Where The Original Culture Meets The New Culture.