The Greatest Gift Anyone Can Give To

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.

In The 1980s, When People Were Just Beginning To Talk About Aids, There Were Just A Few Categories Of Those Who Were At High Risk: Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Heroin Addicts, And Haitians. We Were The Only Ones Identified By Nationality.

The Greatest Gift Anyone Can Give To A Writer Is Time.

We Still Have Our People Working In The Cane Fields In The Dominican Republic. People Are Still Repatriated All The Time From The Dominican Republic To Haiti. Some Tell Of Being Taken Off Buses Because They Looked Haitian, And Their Families Have Been In The Dominican Republic For Generations. Haitian Children Born In The Dominican Republic Still Can't Go To School And Are Forced To Work In The Sugarcane Fields.

It's Hard To Tell What People Will Do With The Word And How They'll Be Circulating It But I Think The Storytellers And The Stories Themselves Will Always Be There.