Art Is A Luxury But

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.

The Whole History Between Haiti And The Dominican Republic Is Complicated. We Share The Island Of Hispaniola, And Haiti Occupied The Dominican Republic For Twenty-two Years After 1804 For Fear That The French And Spanish Would Come Back And Reinstitute Slavery. So We Have This Unique Situation Of Being Two Independent Nations On The Same Island, But With Each Community Having Its Own Grievance.

After The Dance Was My First Attempt At Nonfiction. I'd Never Really Participated In Carnival, And I Really Wanted To Go. It Sounded Like A Wonderfully Fun Thing To Do. And I Wanted To Write Something Happy About Haiti, Something Celebratory. And Going To Carnival Gave Me A Chance To Do That, Because It Is One Of The Instances In Haiti When People Shed Their Class Separation And Come Together.

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.

I Also Know There Are Timeless Waters, Endless Seas, And Lots Of People In This World Whose Names Don't Matter To Anyone But Themselves. I Look Up At The Sky And I See You There.