Memoir of an Amnesiac

"This is one of the Haitian novels I read as a teenager in the United States. I found it in the Brooklyn Public Library one Saturday and it simply blew my mind. It’s a fascinating stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman writer. It’s about her relationship to power and her relationship with her father and her eventual exile in Canada. So you hear about her experience of trying to silence herself, of her migration. It is also a great book about migration and writers in and out of Haiti. It is written in this very different style which isn’t a formal narrative style but the prose makes you think, laugh, cry. It is one of those books that you find something new in each time you read it. Oh yes, even though the character was much older than me, certainly it struck a chord in terms of being about a young woman writer and also having this fear that people have when they migrate that they will forget everything. You are worrying about forgetting what is important, especially if you are leaving, not knowing whether you are going back. Forgetting is probably one of a writer’s greatest fears and she does a fantastic job of capturing the artistic essence of that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I feel like Haiti is always with me. The smells, the sounds, the tastes. Everyone says that, I know. But memory is a powerful thing and love is one of the things that keeps memory alive. That’s one of the themes of J J’s book. When I was little my parents always used to say: ‘We left Haiti, but it didn’t leave us.’ And we were always surrounded by Haitians and living in a Haitian neighbourhood, so that was our way of keeping Haiti with us. I live in Little Haiti now and when I look out of my window, I always see something that reminds me of Haiti. Of course, this place is its own thing, but one of the things that is extremely interesting about the immigration experience is seeing how people try to reproduce a part of their old lives in a new place, and, whether through our music, our art, our literature, Haitians try to do a bit of that everywhere we go. I think of it in a smaller and more manageable way. I see the faces of the people I know, I see the countryside where my grandmother’s house was. I see individual images rather than TV ones, even as people are dealing with the earthquake. I see the children in between the ten alleys. I see my friends, the young people who read to them in this wonderful group called Li Li Li. I just see folks. I hear voices, individual voices. No, they are not getting easier at all. Like everyone else I have family with a different range of means. But even for people with some means it is extremely hard because, for example, they recently suffered through a terrible storm which was very difficult. People were hurt. People were killed, thought not my family members. Although some people are back home and not living in camps, some are sleeping in camps in front of their houses. Many have also gone back to the countryside. We’re still in the middle of hurricane season so it is very hard for more than a million people who have no choice but to live outside in tents that are thinning after nearly nine months of use… One can hope but I think a lot of people are weary. It will be a year soon. People need so much. There is a great urgency. We are not only electing a president here, but a whole government. Since the election is going forward, let’s hope that we have people with vision, with empathy, people who will not be able to ignore what is under their noses, that more than a million people are homeless, that half the children of the county are not going to school, that people are hungry and thirsty, that they cannot count on people’s resilience forever, that they need new ideas and new visions that will feed people, house and educate them and create humane and sustainable jobs. This is all urgent. It’s an emergency. It has not stopped being so since January 12, 2010."