If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

We all have a tendency to over generalize our individual experiences. After I've published something, I'll meet someone who says, "I'm Haitian, and I don't know this, so it must not be true." Even if we're talking about a work of fiction. I've gotten very angry myself reading many things about Haiti. We're not a monolithic group; no group is. Also, it's important to keep in mind the genre in which we are writing. Fiction is full of invented stories about exceptional people in exceptional situations. Those situations are not always cheery or celebratory.

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

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.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."