Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

Sometimes we mask ourselves to further reveal ourselves, and it's always been connected to me with being a writer: We tell lies to tell a greater truth. The story is a mask; the characters you create are masks. That appeals to me. Aside from that, too, in the carnival the masks were beautiful, and offered a vision of Haitian creativity.

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.

In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.

Anger is a wasted emotion.