hello everyone welcome again to conversations with tyler today i am very pleased to be chatting with edward danteka the famed haitian-american author also winner of a macarthur genius fellow ship and uh edwidge thank you for coming on the show oh thank you so much for having me i have so many questions let's start with one about you now you moved to the
united states from haiti i believe when you were 12. how is it you have learned so much about haitian history and since you didn't do most of your schooling in haiti well i i often say that you know and my parents used to say it as well that i left haiti but he didn't leave me um and 12 is i think young enough to transition somewhat easily but also uh to have formed
so many memories and to have actually have had a you know i had actually had a big chunk of um like primary education in haiti and having learned both all history and and britain history so i brought a lot of that with me to the us and enough that i was curious when i got here to to find out more from this side of things so um i think it was part in part a love
for haiti that continued and also a curiosity about history in general but haitian history in particular now there's a shift i think in haitian cultural history if you think of the 1960s or 70s haitian cultural history is centered in haiti so you have mick jagger jacqueline kennedy or nas they go to port-au-prince they buy paintings they bring them back uh everything is
very haitian-centered and that seems to end in the 1980s why did that happen well yeah there was a time even in the you know in the 50s where you had cruise ships going to haiti which i've always found somewhat interesting because all that time that you had that you know the tourism uh the sort of that high level of tourism was still doing the dictatorship
and so people were going at that time anyway the folks you mentioned and others um and then in the 1980s during the aids epidemic you know that the pandemic of of aids then haiti was designated as by the by the cdc as uh haitians were labeled a high-risk group for aids and and we were the only ones designated by nationality it was uh haitians homophiliacs heroin addicts and
homosexuals and um and so that certainly uh that came out of uh some cases of uh uh people who had contracted aids and who came to a hospital here in miami and were reported to the cdc and so that killed really that designation killed the tourism industry in haiti it was later you know after much you know demonstrations after a lot of research it was corrected
but it really killed whatever tourism industry there was in haiti which was already kind of a strange kind of tourism anyway because you know if people felt like happy to go at a time of you know very strict dictatorship that there was always already something a little strange about that but but whatever tourism industry there was was destroyed by the aids epidemic
but if you think of haitian culture today is it correct to think that the haitian diaspora is now haitian culture so if you think of haitian painting well there's duval carrier but he's lived in puerto rico and france in florida uh you are the leading haitian writer if one were going to call you that wyclef sean from haiti but now mostly in north america leila mccalla
some would even call basquiat a haitian artist i mean is that now outside of haiti what haitian culture is no i think i think that would be um that would be incorrect to to say because there's still such a there's a great uh vibrant uh culture and inside haiti and there are wonderful writers inside haiti as well there's wonderful visual artists musicians um
and so i think if you think of it like any other diaspora you know and and um there's sort of uh we're going to be like if you're in north america or if you're out you know you're there's some mechanisms that make that you know our work more visible my work is in english so naturally uh people uh have more access to it like more easily but there's a a really
strong and vibrant culture inside haiti as well that people like us you know we feel fed by you know that we feel is still still important to us you know as as readers you know i'm a writer but i'm also a reader i'm gonna you know i appreciate art i'm you know i'm on the on the council of the sancha dar in haiti of an esteemed um institution that goes back you know several
decades now so there is there's still that culture and and it's it's really a a powerful statement i think to um to haitians and haitian culture because there's so many obstacles uh all the time in the way of artists in haiti but they you know they still are thriving and and are very really wonderful uh express what's happening very powerfully through their work do
you think the haitian diaspora is culturally stable or do you think it will in essence be absorbed and assimilated into more narrowly afro-american culture well i think because the the haitian diaspora has uh because there's often so much happening in haiti let's say that thai you know what we would call that long bleed you know the umbilical cord is really married to haiti
um and even over several generations like that you know the haitians who i know i don't want to speak for everybody remain very connected to haiti and want their children to know haiti and want that connection through language through food through music so the diaspora um you know no diaspora is fully stable there's of course there's integration there's a simulation
there's that happens with every immigrant community over the generations certainly for sure um but there's a certain tie to haiti that the diaspora has there's so many diaspora organizations that neighborhood organizations where people support you know schools in the neighborhoods where they come from where they support organizations there's and and part of it
i think that tie that connection is connected to the fact that there is that haiti is off often in crisis and um and people in the diaspora are often the first line responders right and after people in haiti inside haiti you know after haitians in haiti but the haitian diaspora even within our families if there's an illness if there's you know and that sometimes extends to
the larger community so i think there will be um over you know i i definitely there's there's integration you know i think um but i don't see i think we have a diaspora that goes back you know further than people know yet yet that connection to haiti throughout the generations has been made and and then with these artists that you mentioned you know
makala is you know is she's a wonderful artist born of haitian parents yet her music reflects um that uh artists like melissa lavo you know you mentioned basquiat i think those you know that that's also a kind of testament to the threat that runs to haiti in the diaspora do you think there is in fact a natural language for haitian literature so if you think of the earlier haitian
classics that you've had a hand in translating they were written in french your work of course is written in english it's been slow to have been translated into creole is it a fundamental fact about the future of asian literature that there there's not a natural language there well i mean i it's it's such a um a topic of discussion often among
critics of haitian literature um what language is haitian literature written in and i and i think now people you know like i have i mean most people i mean some people i can't speak for everyone but i think most people will who study haitian literature will say that it's now a multilingual literature um there's literature in creole certainly which i
it's probably closer to the language to to you know to the primary language like most haitians speak cruel and that was slow to come there was always like literature and creole but not as much as there is now um french was probably you know was literation literature is mostly written in french and like you said we've worked on translating um i've worked with others and translating
for example a masterpiece of haitian literature called lisbeister sima by jacques stephen alexey which we translated with carol coats as in the flicker of an eyelid and i edited these two books haiti noir and hiding which we can't we translated many contemporary haitian writers so um and then we have writers now who are haitian american or haitian canadian
like uh roxanne gay and mariam chancy who write directly in english so it's uh it's a it's a literature now that it's a kind of multi-language literature through my you know immigration and migration and there we have writers who are writing in chile in the dominican republic uh in spanish um and that's another uh growing layer of of uh haitian literature abroad you know
that the station literature um that's so far mostly produced a lot of poetry in spanish um but there was a novel before by haitian writer the michelin giuseppe who was who had written one of the first novels about haiti and spanish so it's a growing i mean it's it's very it's a linguistically interesting um literature and to see all the like of the tentacles of
it if you will what do you think of the you might call them outsider novels about haiti so there's graham greene there's victor hugo's bug jargle right which is about the haitian revolution are those cultural appropriation are they bad novels how do they strike you some are good you know some are bad there's some you know there's some wonderful ones like um
madison smart bells trilogy um also was rising you know in the haitian revolution i think that those were wonderful um i mean i i i there's some really great ones there's some that are a little cringey um but i i wouldn't say to anybody that you can't write about you know again you can't write about it i mean i think i think really writers should be able to write whatever
they want you should expect people to respond and i think you know if you do it with um nuance um and care that's that's really important i mean they're they're the temptation you know there are some tropes that often sometimes people just fall into when they're writing about haiti that the zombie situation um you know and they sometimes they
approach it like it's never been done before um so i i think you know they're they're if you do it with care if you do it with nuance um i i you know i'm open to to reading it you know why does haiti have the very best food in the caribbean well because we just do um i you know i'm a little i'm perhaps biased you know and i and i i just have to say overall in the
caribbean we have a amazing food you know there's wonderful food throughout the caribbean um but i think haitian food in particular i love because we have great spices and even you know if the food is a little fad in some cases you have like the piclease which is um sort of a pickled cabbage carrots like a spice um you know that you sprinkle on top you know
if for people who like meat there's grill which is pork tasso goat um and and there's stuff that even if you're vegan you can like like maimolen which is cornmeal this i think it's a very rich and wonderful um cuisine but i am biased and i think if people who have not had haitian food you should definitely if you know anybody who's haitian on january 1st
go over their house for when we can go over people's houses again go for which is a squash soup that we drink on the first of january to celebrate haitian independence why is haitian black mushroom rice so good ah it's the mushroom that's the that's the key and and actually you know i've had i live in miami and that gives me a little more access to the jojo and so i've had to ship to friends
throughout the throughout the states um and there's a key to it in terms of just how you um like washing the mushroom and and just the right they try to make a kind of like cube thing but the cube thing is just not the same as just like the actual mushroom that you boil and you squeeze and and if you ever like some people if you're from the north like
my friends from the north will put some cashews in that that's like another level with some cashews the collective buses in haiti the tap taps of course why are they so beautifully painted why does that make economic sense well the thing is i mean it's um people who like i and i've gone to haiti with a lot of uh you know foreigners uh at some point yeah when there's a time when um
i used to go we had a program for college students every summer and um and i used to love like when when they land to see the tap tap so it's just really it's so it's so striking because it just feels like oh i'm in this world full of art you know and it's like they seem to be moving canvases and what i love personally most about tap tap even after you get used to the
to the visual feast that they are i loved the sayings on them and um and i used to and you would see like you know uh of course basketball stars from here i mean i think at some point like not too long ago there was like tony morrison after she died was on a tap tap um it just you know people really soak what's happening um around but the sayings are also great
so there's one of my favorite sayings on the tap tap was um like you're you're just you're talking and i'm working like and i felt like we're so powerful in terms of like how like how you respond to to sort of people who talk badly about you it's like you know you're talking i'm walking you know i'm working so and then things like that it's just really and also the tap taps
would on the with the art sometimes like we'll have messages of gratitude like so a tap tap might have a message of gratitude to the driver's mother or to whoever like contributed a lot of them are you know to the jesus to god to the virgin and and other religious figures but also to people in the the person's life who contributed to the business and
so it's really a i always find them very uh beautiful to look at but also really wonderful moving like moving pieces of art if i think of the haitian arts today i think of painting possibly as having peaked between the 40s and the 70s and the most interesting work today tends to be in voodoo sculpture why has that shift come about and those are very large pieces they're like
installations they're hard to buy they're hard to transport well i think i i think that i think if you stayed there you would be reducing like your your possible level of enjoyment right because uh what's most in the in that that early period you know the sanctuary period in the 40s like the early period where when the tourism that you were talking
about when people went to haiti they what they bought the most was what they called the like the naive primitive art which is a super colorful really beautiful figures often market scenes and so that that traveled very well but there was always at that same time artists who are a little bit more adventurous artists who were like somewhat abstract
um at the same time that there were these artists who were like this is what the tourists want that's what i'm going to produce right and so throughout the caribbean even if you went to other islands you would see these paintings and and then they became almost a little bit mass produced but they were they're gorgeous i have i have some but um the sculptures you're talking about i
think we um those were started actually um by uh there was a we used to call them i used to work for jonathan demi the filmmaker who was a huge collector of haitian art and in the office when whenever we acquired those sculptures you know when we bought whichever i traveled a lot to haiti with him and when he would buy he called them leotos
because the original artist was uh leotou who and you know and when i was growing up in cemeteries often you didn't you we had metal flowers really because you would do like a wreath of metal with and it would be metal from oil drums because that lasted longer right as opposed to like if you have a wreath of of just like roses that dies quickly so people would make these
beautiful wreaths and so leotou was a great he wasn't from saint mark which is really the home of these sculptures and um and now there's a whole industry in in those sculptures for sure and and i have i have to say like they're very hard i agree to they they can't you can't just like put that in your suitcase often like you would the paintings the way people used
to roll them so but they're they're gorgeous and now they're almost three-dimensional you know like one christmas we bought one that was like a nativity scene that was just like 3d um but there are other you know there are a lot of wonderful young artists now um that just some of them are moving away from um the the sort of the more primitive naive um you know there's
there's so many that whose names are escaping me but there are just wonderful artists worth exploring you mentioned who's outside of haiti um but there are quite a few other young artists who were inside haiti who are doing who who'd use both just that that style of sculpture but also do paintings who do installations or doing really really um exciting things i
own a zobop by leotoe by the way ah it's by the fireplace oh wow yeah why is it you think that black african americans have not evolved as natural collectors of haitian art it seems to be much more than nerdy white guys who buy it or well-to-do families oh i know a lot of african-americans who collectation art you know starting with for example uh ishmael reed um who
his wife had a gallery you know uh people like danny glover so and and even you know friends that again um when we traveled with folks to haiti a lot of them were african-american and oh i know there are quite a few african-american collectors i i you know i don't know my friend uh karin fabius who has a gallery in l.a called galilei um and
she has you know she has quite uh it's it's a wonderful gallery because it's in their home her husband pascal is an artist who's worked with the artists and we who do actually have really amazing urban uh sculptures with um you know discarded like dolls and computer boards and sometimes skulls um they recently had a show here at moca and um and karin for example i think has
worked with a lot of african-american collectors including you know some in hollywood but some and um outside of uh also you know ordinary people who who collect as well i mean there's there's been uh you know like i think also this marriage of african immigrant art in some cases with haitian art like uh lori malu jones who went to haiti uh who you know who has spent time there
and and kind of this this connection there with with some african-american artists who who are very aware of haitian art at as well how much voodoo inspiration is there in your writing um well i i it's part of the you know of haitian culture and it's a you know and um i try one of the things that when you're asking about the outside gaze of on um on the haitian
in haitian literature i i think sometimes it's easy like to fall into that trap of like oh let me throw in um some vodou just to like you know exotify things so i try to in my in my work i tried you know i treat as a world view as um and you know some people might be practitioners some people might not be you know and i also like to show a whole range of
religious practices in my characters because not everybody is monolithic you know just in their just as they're not in their behavior they're not monolithic in their religious practice as well so uh i try to show it as a whole range of religious practice uh like in breath eyes memory for example you know the family certainly has you know they have their their
family lois they have you know they have things that they have their own practice but they also you know their members of the family also practice other religions so like the so to to show the whole range like of religious practices that they would be in a family like that some of them also you know protestant and um and and and sometimes that actually
leads to some conflicts within some families so i'd like to show that the whole all the nuance of of all that your novel about the twins untwine isn't that just a voodoo novel and i mean that as praise um i mean i i didn't think of it that way i didn't start a um there's certainly you know there are certainly twin lois and um and um vodou and these girls are twins i had
always been fascinated by twins um but i i i i don't think i you know that i think maybe that could be one interpretation but that wasn't i mean it would be kind of um yeah i i just i that wasn't sort of how i and you know i i started out but i i think that could be one interpretation uh to me i just think marasa when i'm reading it right the whole myth of
the twins and the rivalry and beginning the end struggle yeah but i think if you um uh is it is it because they're mara because there are a lot of novels about twins as well but they're written by uh you know by people who are not from haiti like i said i think i i i don't object to that as an interpretation but i don't think that's that's the only thing that it is as
you know it's also about you know sisterhood and you know and and illness and separation and so forth but but again i you know i'm fine with that interpretation in a world with so much mobile and social media do you think radio is still of central importance for haitian politics as it had been in the past um i think uh it remains um radio remains very important there for
example there are a lot of you know cultural figures um even younger people in haiti who emerged out of radio culture and now now have transitioned into more social media you know who do uh lives and facebook and but who started out in radio i mean radio certainly was very important when i was growing up and um there weren't as many other outlets
but now i find for example you know my mother-in-law who's 85 who lives with us she's in haiti most of the time but she in addition to you know though sometimes she'll watch a youtube um video about something that's happening in haiti but it will be uh it's a it's a youtube video of someone in a radio station and she can watch that on youtube someone can send the clip on whatsapp
so i i think radio now is part of a series of like many different ways that people get information it remains like when we're in the country if you don't have internet it remains one way that you get news on the radio you know it's but it's also people also i find like even the older people in my life get a lot of news through their phones through whatsapp you know
through also through youtube clips and so it's there's a constant loop of information now that radio is just one part of whereas for example when i was younger it would be um it would just be it was prime it was the primary if not the only source of information that we had when with a haitian background do you think you have a different perspective
on the fake news debates of the united states because haiti it seems had a lot of fake news well before social media it was a kind of country of rumor in some ways or not i think you're you're thinking of this whole thing of uh maybe that expression tilly jor which is like the mouth that would go i guess would be like chili and that was a way that information is spread i i think
i don't know i i think every culture has that kind of um sort of rumor mill if you will i don't think that's that would be unique to to haitians um i think what we do what i i what i recognize in the whole fake news debate is the um sort of the the gradual slide towards autocracy um certainly that is um i that is those of us who have lived through dictatorship and other uh
moments like that you recognize the slippery slope the you know the sort of the um demonization of media the you know that just sort of for silencing it's you know this the the summer i was reading with my girls we were reading animal farm and um and it was just really striking you know so like the the all the parallels in terms of like what
your eyes are seeing you're not seeing so all that is very familiar in terms of like that whole thing of of of diminishing the press of course at full autocracy you you know i fooled then you kind of destroy the people who are giving the news um but there are ways now with with you know with the social media to to do it why do you think haitian political
history has shown so much instability in terms of turnover in the number of rulers um well you know i think haiti's history started we started as a country with everything against us right there haitian revolution was an impossibility to so many people um so these enslaved people fought the french the british the you know the spanish and to make to to start the first black republic the
first place in the world really when slave people overcame their masters and started this nation in a world where uh slavery was the norm so haiti was you know stop you know shunned and um and they had we had to pay uh to the french for this independence until into the next century and so i i think there was so much you know stacked up against us and then you know in the
19th early 1900s you had the very long us occupation and then the dictatorship so i i think the it's just we were set up in a way to fail because this you know was not meant to exist and slave people starting their own country was not meant to exist it's kind of you know a lot of people have said it and these stories and have said it like how dare you and i think to this
day uh haiti's being told how dare you and and and many instances when people you know when they've elected their own um when they've elected their leaders when we've elected our leaders then suddenly there's a coup or there's so i think the instability is not fully um the fault of of of our patients i mean we've had our part where people who have you know who
sort of have decided to turn against their own but this but it's also something that has been set up to you know to fail what did the united states get most wrong in its 1915-1934 occupation of haiti being there um sure but there's better and worse occupations right oh i don't i don't think the people who have been um occupied anywhere would ever see that
they are like oh what a great occupation um because barbados may have gone better than say some other countries in the caribbean its occupation um i would ask i you know i would i would ask the barbadi i mean i think you mean grenada or well grenada also yeah i say they've been better than suriname the dutch were more extractive in suriname than the british were in
barbados um i would ask them i don't i don't know i would ask i would not speak for them i think um i think people always want to be in charge of their fate and and the people who come often you know i i can only from what i know of the u.s occupation it wasn't um and and you know the writers at that time wrote about it you know they were like
african-american scholars who were living the moment who visited who who wrote about it because it was meant to keep um it was meant for influence in the region and you know and um there's uh one of the uh heads uh i i think it's butler uh his name was who wrote about uh who had a mia culpa many years later who was in charge of not just the occupation of haiti but
also when at that time when there was a common occupation of haiti in the dr where he said you know we were there for the for city corps we were there for money like he that was his mia copa he was psychic and so um and for example you know people there's the example of and you know you've talked about haitian art with um who's a haitian artist from the north has a very
famous painting about shalmas peralta who was a leader of the uh cacos who fought against the occupation who was murdered and attached to a door for you know as a kind of frightening and and there were some horror stories some massacres during the uh the occupation and what was left i mean the uh was left behind after the occupation i think both in haiti and the dominican
republic was this military structure right that went through the generations in the dominican republic side it became tohil who then carried out this 1937 massacre of haitians uh and then on outside it went all the way through down to the the army that the that ended up in that dictatorship and and there was also sort of a deeper layering of just
basically moving jim crow to these islands because then they had to you know for the comfort of these people they had to kind of create these clubs these sort of to separate people who were light versus people who are dark in terms of how they interacted with them so um you know it's it's it's not fun in retrospect do you think the u.s restoration of aristide in 1994 was a
mistake was it more colonialism or was it the best thing that somehow had to be done well i think that was a very uh difficult moment at that time um i and i and there was those generals um in that moment had uh you know doing that that kudeta thousands and thousands of people had been killed um at that time i worked i was working on a film called um and
we were interviewing uh many people who had been uh victimized by the doing the the kudita and one of them was a an incredibly brave woman named aled bilas who had survived and being really butchered and i'd lost her arm and other people and so i think i think at that time i mean the you know president obviously was part of that decision and
he wanted uh he wanted to return at that time i guess that was the the right thing to do because people were really in the generals they were ready to stay and and people were dying and so you know i looking back i you know i think that that probably was a really that was the decision that was made for his house student he he returned if you were minister of education in
haiti and had a fair amount of latitude what would you do um i would uh you know i i would give the job to to a woman i know who runs an organization called cape whitey and her name is uh najin in eugene works with um schools actually she works with educators um i would get people i if i reminisce i first of all i would make sure people who are better qualified
than me were minister of education but i would uh one thing i think would be important to actually make sure every single child is educated and to make sure that uh creole is part of the education it's like that there is education um and creole because often children just jump into school in french and it's uh and and there's a lot of rote memorization um so i would i would just
that would be an important thing i think to make sure every child has access to education because in haiti uh something like a parent's 40 uh something like 40 of a parent's income is spent on education and often not the you know the children are not getting the best education um because they're it's a memorization and and um but what i know is um there's such a love
for education in haiti that parents really really sacrifice a great deal to have their children educated that um that every child of course uh deserves an education so i i think i would love um for every child to have that opportunity i think that would be that the most important thing to have like a good education that could serve them and
and and help them to function and grow um in their in their country as a haitian-american how do you feel your perspective on black lives matter might be different from that of many black americans it's not different i think i believe that black lives matter of course and um and i think maybe as a you know as a haitian american with the history that i've just
outlined to you you know with having come out of a culture of revolution you know and and the constant fight that happens have always had we can certainly identify with that absolutely and one thing that's been really wonderful to see with this generation is that as black immigrants we can um we you know there's no separation i think um maybe in previous generations you know
there was that feeling that oh this is not my problem but you know in the demonstrations you see haitian flags you see dominican flags you see you know people from the continent and um i think because we realize that this affects all of us you know and and um it's it's um my nephews it's my you know that my african-american friends that i grew up with their
children my children it's it's a it's a common it's certainly a common struggle and certainly you know if that cop is not going to be asking you or which country you're from you know when when doing these types of encounters now in all of these conversations there's a segment where i present to the guest my favorite haitian proverbs and he or she reacts are you ready for a few all right so you
have you you've been sharing haitian proverbs with your guests here's one after the dance the drum is heavy oh my god what does that mean to you um so i actually have a book called after the dance um it's on carnival uh yes for me it means that there are consequences to everything like even um like even the most joyful thing right like you have to be prepared for the
consequences of of things that you've done you know and it's something that you know my like if you my mom used to say quite a bit too like if you have just had a really big celebration or if you you waited too late to do your homework because you're having a good time watching a program you're like she was like you know after the dance drum is heavy
so there's always it's kind of like the morning after hangover situation and the most joyful outcome but that but really that there are consequences to everything here's another one it is the owner of the body who looks out for the body oh this one you will not believe how much we hear that these days um and and it's something that we say a lot now in the coronavirus era um
and you hear it on the radio you hear it you know people say when they talk to their neighbors that means that really the you are the best uh person to take care of yourself like um so like if you want people if you're saying um wear your mask when you go out doing the corona virus era wash your hands it's like like the best the most qualified person
to take care of you is you so it's not the doctor it's not you know they're your loved one say med cog vehicle uh it's the owner of the body who takes care of the body so it's like watch out for yourself it's it's very good advice these days when they want to kill a dog they say it's crazy yep that's that um the dehumanization you know just those like if you want to
um what you do it's i guess that's fake news it's like um it's connected to the fake news right if you want to diminish or slight someone you just you you call them names um so that's uh that's uh that's also a a timely one i think how about this one the constitution is paper the bayonet is steel yes um again uh back to our conversation about you know uh
dictatorship in a way i think i believe that one was often cited by um one of the generals actually doing the the 90s doing that that could or it might have been even before but it was um i think it speaks to the fragility of of documents right like the constitution i think yesterday was constitution day in the u.s um so that might also apply here right that if
um it's it's that whole thing with freedom right freedom is something that is is always like we have to always keep watching out it's not doesn't slip away right because uh sometimes we we think the like these documents or these uh rules or uh you know are just set in stone and and i remember i think this this general who kept saying this saying was saying well you know i have
the weapons and um and we can all like with weapons you know paper it's kind of paper scissors paper rock scissors and which is which is stronger when the mapu tree dies goats would eat its leaves yes this one i think is about humility because we you know we have this expression that we say when someone has died who has contributed a great deal
to to our culture to the we say that a mapu has fallen and a mapu is a cell cotton tree it's a a kind of sacred tree um and it's also a big tree that that's so that lasts uh forever and um so it's a it's a regal it's just a it's an institution and so what this one is saying that even you know the it's actually the goat is a kind of meager creature compared to a mapu
and there's no way a goat would actually be able to access the leaves to a mapu but when it dies it falls and then it's it's just saying that we're all um i think it's i've always heard that proverb as a way of um uh encouraging humility that we're sort of all vulnerable to all our leaves are vulnerable to the goat if you will one more proverb beyond the mountain is
another mountain yes they are mourinho that's a very famous one yes and i i actually use that a lot myself you know um i have a neighbor one of my neighbors just passed away um and she used to use that problem a lot and so i think it means that um no matter what uh we can see there's more i think it's it's about there's more to everything we can actually
then there's more to everything than what we see it also speaks to the physical uh layout of haiti because uh it's a very mountainous place you know i.t and the arara called it i.t it actually means um land of the mountains and so um and it and it's physically true like if you're traveling across haiti literally um there's always a mountain behind the
physically behind the mountain but um in a in a kind of spiritual sense it also means that there's there's there's always more you know and and you know this this there's this mountain connected um saying that i love you know um which and it's a great closer in a way it means um two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and i we can meet again have you ever been to west africa
i have not i have only been to south africa and actually this year we were hoping to to make a a trip to different countries in africa but we're obviously not able to but that is um i i often feel like you know i'm 51 now i feel like i should have already made it but it's definitely it's something that i've wanted to do with my with my family with my girls and and
that hopefully will get all to do together what is special about jacques mill in haiti um jacques mel is um one thing there's a a wonderful novel by a great haitian writer lenny in all my dreams which was recently translated by kayemma glover and that novel will tell you everything you want to know about mill it's sort of a it's a it's a beautiful place at a physically like
location it's got both the mountains and the sea it's got a wonderful waterfall called bassin blue it's a it's a gorgeous uh place that it and after the dance uh the book that i wrote is about carnival and jackman and it has a spectacular um carnival as well and and there's some wonderful artists who live there actually um who i write about in after the dance one of
them were not moose who who still lives there next to a beautiful mountain there now in your own life how did you manage to be such a prodigy so you come to the us you're 12 you grew up speaking creole right by the time you're 14 you're writing for something called new youth connections perfectly fluently and then your first book is published as
an undergraduate so what accounts for this what's your own story about the beginnings of your own success well um my first book actually was published when i was 24 that's still that's still early but i loved writing i i loved stories and i loved writing and for me it was always fun and even when i was doing other things i was um you know studying at school but i
love to write and so um you know it's that but saying that people say uh it's if you love what you do you've never worked a day in your life so i i for me that was just really i i wanted to write and it started with new york connections that journal that i started writing for when i was 14 and went through all my books to this day i never saw myself so much as
i mean i knew that my book was published early and and a lot was made of that i think as when you publish when you're young but for me it was just always a joy it was something i loved doing and i i always felt like really blessed to be able to do it and i still feel that way today what's your most productive or most unusual work habit um working at night and
the older i'm getting the harder it is to actually do to stay up all night but i find that writing at night is my is really my most productive time like because somehow at night you just feel like everybody's you know safe and bad that i'm responsible for and and there's not too many distractions the internet is always there but it's it's it's just easier to imagine a whole
other universe at night so that's i feel that that's when i'm most productive and being a haitian-american writer what criticisms do you feel you get from haitians is there any tension there um i i think there's always intentions um but not so much because of um the the people who read me i think i think it's the same when you come when you and i i have friends who from other
groups it's the same so you're you seem to be plucked out of your group and people think like you consider yourself a representative i've never considered myself a representative for haitians or all haitians i don't think i speak for all haitians but often in the you know when you're spoken about in the press like people put you as a kind of sociologist as a
kind of h expert on haiti when when i started pretty young and i really it was like i just want to tell this story i want to tell that story and then i started to realize that people were at times over generalizing my stories right like that they would say oh this character in your book does that and that's what all haitians do so of course my some of my compatriots didn't like that
because they would say you know people would literally say to me like oh that person read your book and said that like they think that's my life too so i think and that happens i think with the work of of writers of color a lot you know for example alice walker that people say oh because she writes this character then she hates black men or because
you know that for me they were saying oh because you wrote about this girl whose family really wanted to be a virgin that means like you know everybody who's haitian has the same situation i think i think that people in the the mainstream culture sometimes generalize the what we write and so that leads to some tensions within within you know within the culture um
but i've had you know i've had some rebuke which is normal again you know it's kind of like um you know there are circumstances to whatever you write whatever you do and and i learned from that and and i have to i started out very young so i think over the years i've also had to learn and how to tell maybe more nuanced stories and how to be conscious of just how what
i write will be read by by not just you know by different types of people now you've taught a history of haitian cinema class at ramapo college correct what did you do in that well actually that this we taught that class when um which i it was jonathan demi and haitian journalist john dominique and when jean was in exile from haiti jonathan wanted to do actually a
festival of haitian cinema and we used that class as a way of first of all finding the films um that we would show and then to talk about them so um we there's a haitian film called for example called anita which is about a young girl who's a domestic servant in a home uh haitian singer t korn is uh featured in it with a and and so we would get that film we would
show it and we'd talk about it in xiahu was more versed in haitian cinema than either of us would speak on it and then the students would film it so i i hope all of this is in the archives at ramapo college but it was both a a history of cinema class but also a a class one which the students got an opportunity to to film what were what we were doing and
we were trying to figure what had been done in haitian cinema before and and soon after that not because of us but there was a kind of explosion of of haitian um cinema you know there were a lot of films made some of them wonderful some not so great but there were a couple of uh keepers you know that like if we were doing this project now for example we would have a
lot more to work with you know with the films of uh la rupac and um and other uh filmmakers uh and inside haiti two final questions first let's say our listeners are thinking of doing a trip to haiti which by the way i would recommend strongly but what tip would you give them for how they can make it somehow manageable and safe assuming of course they're not haitian well
i'm a lot of people you know go to haiti um and i think you have to go with an open mind right and i would say um try to get out of port-au-prince um to go outside um go see the countryside they're for example in the in the the south there's some wonderful um grottos or caves there's some hikes i think there's uh to not to try to stay in the urban space but also to go
outside there's um i think it's palmer's guide to both haiti and the dominican republic that has some wonderful tips in terms of where to go and there's some also local traveling groups like try to try to find a uh if you've never been to haiti and you don't know anybody in haiti to try to to find a a group to to to accompany you but to go with an open mind um to
um try to learn and listen and and certainly um go outside the urban space into you know into the countryside i would i would recommend that and to close finally if you could give us one more haitian proverb that is dear and important to you well this one reminds me very much of um jonathan who though he was not haitian we i probably traveled with him more to haiti than my
own parents when i worked for him and he always used to say ptpt zwazo fernish little by little the bird builds its nest that was his favorite answer to like if you ask him how he was doing um he would say ptpt's razor foundation unfortunately as you know he passed away not so long ago and and um that was one of his favorites um and that remains very
special to me for that reason but also what the what the proverb says it's really um it's kind of like that you know like that like every journey begins with one step and so um i i feel like it's it's good advice these days too ptpt little by little the bird built its nest edwards dontika thank you very much it's been a pleasure thank you thank you for having me