I Think It's Hard To

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.

The Best Moment In Writing Any Book Is When You Just Can't Wait To Get Back To The Writing, When You Can't Wait To Re-enter That Fictional Place, When Your Fictional Town Feels Even More Real Than The Town Where You Actually Live.

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.

It Seemed From The Media That We Were Being Told That All Haitians Had Aids. At The Time, I Had Just Come From Haiti. I Was Twelve Years Old, And The Building I Was Living In Had Primarily Haitians. A Lot Of People Got Fired From Their Jobs. At School, Sometimes In Gym Class, We'd Be Separated Because Teachers Were Worried About What Would Happen If We Bled. So There Was Really This Intense Discrimination.

The Justification - The Idea That We Have A Right To Invade Another Country And Determine Another People's Destiny - Is Frightening. And I Fear Really For The Future Of That Occupation. What Happens Now, And Twenty Years From Now, And Forty Years From Now, Given Our Case? People In The United States May Feel Like When We Don't See It On Cnn Twenty-four Hours A Day, It Sort Of Disappears. But It Doesn't Disappear For The People Who Have To Live Under Occupation - And Their Children And Their Children's Children.