Someone Has Said That Nations Have Interests,

In Terms Of The Idea Of Long-term Occupation - I Have Been Reading A Little Bit More About This Period - And You Can See In That Occupation Are Many Lessons For The Current Occupation Of Iraq. So We Have These Connections That Go Way Back That People Aren't Aware Of.

I Think It's Hard For An Outsider To Capture The Flavor Of A Community And All Its Nuances, So Ultimately Haitian-americans Need To Start Sharing Intimate Accounts Of Their Stories.

That Experience Of Touching Down In A Totally Foreign Place Is Like Having A Blank Canvas: You Begin With Nothing, But Stroke By Stroke You Build A Life. This Process Requires Everything Great Art Requires-risk-tasking, Hope, A Great Deal Of Imagination, All The Qualities That Are The Building Blocks Of Art. You Must Be Able To Dream Something Nearly Impossible And Toil To Bring It Into Existence.

My Models Were Oral, Were Storytellers. Like My Grandmothers And My Aunts. It's True, A Lot Of People In My Life Were Not Literate In A Formal Sense, But They Were Storytellers. So I Had This Experience Of Just Watching Somebody Spin A Tale Off The Top Of Her Head. I Loved That.

These Were Our Bedtime Stories. Tales That Haunted Our Parents And Made Them Laugh At The Same Time. We Never Understood Them Until We Were Fully Grown And They Became Our Sole Inheritance.