Me, I have a style, words and I try to tell my time, because it's now or never.

always in revolt, against everything, against myself, against society, against the world

I am very happy to receive this award.

That's wonderful.

I have applied several times and twice have been a finalist.

This year, I have it, it's great.

This country that we call Haiti, lately it sends deaths every day, it sends the dead here like grains of rain. .

Opera Dust

Sanite Bélair is a Haitian anti-colonialist resistance fighter.

She got involved very early in anti-slavery battles in Haiti, towards the end of the 18th century.

She was to be captured by French soldiers in October 1802. At the time, captured male rebels had to be shot and female rebels beheaded.

Sanite Bélair will refuse to be beheaded and she will end up not being shot.

I found there that there was already a very strong political act.

It is from there that I became interested in its history to try to make known its history.

And above all to talk about the fact that today she is under-represented in the pantheon of heroes.

In the canon of heroes, it is not found very often. I discovered it through a Haitian historian and anthropologist, Bayyinah Bello, who taught at my faculty in Haiti. Suddenly, I wanted to see Sanite Bélair reappear as a figure of resistance. We make odes for the heroes, but why not for a heroine

? It is a figure where all the struggles that have been led by other women crystallize as well.

"

somewhere

very dark

terribly empty”.

In theater writing, I always try to give life to characters through words.

They are often beings who are grappling with silence, with darkness, who try to speak out in order to exist, to become alive.

In the play, for Sanite Bélaire, there is this voice which returns from beyond the grave and which will come back to haunt us.

In this awakening from the dust, I used a lot of elements from Haitian voodoo mythology to create this atmosphere: the night, the dust, to get this voice out of this abyssal space.

"

Rigoise is a very common word in Haiti. It's a whip made from animal skins. We use it to hit people. A tool widely used at the time of slavery in Haiti. And me, growing up in Haiti, I was confronted with this, because it is still used. There are street vendors with bundles of rigoises. As a child, I hated them, like all children, because we were afraid that our parents would buy them to beat us up. Later, when I learned the history of this element, I wondered how it is possible that it is still used today. It's a tool that has a terrible, horrible history, because it was used to hit slaves in Santo Domingo. So,I wanted to reuse this vocabulary to immerse the reader in this world of slavery in which Sanite Bélair had lived, things against which she fought.

"

hashtag

For some time now,

I have noticed

: many social movements are born on the internet and social networks.

This side interested me, among other things for the question of the disappearance of the body, that is to say that we go through social networks to claim things, but this often poses a problem: where is the person who claims such a thing?

Why is she not showing up?

In the text, at one point, I say: why do you need to see her again to validate her words?

At the same time, it can create a kind of blur around a movement.

How it can amplify voices or give substance to struggles.

So, there you have it, Sanite Bélair comes from beyond the grave and she goes through social networks to launch her movement.

"

Jean D'Amérique, it was a way for me to be reborn. Perhaps this is my poetic birth certificate. As soon as I really got into writing, I took that name. It was a way for me to be reborn, because I was also at odds with my family, with society… and it was a poetic evocation. And I also always say, ironically, to take it out on the United States for believing America is theirs [laughs].

"

“

It's a capital D, because it's a big dream of travel - not of conquest, but of travel.

It is not nobility that I am looking for, but there is something big and musical for me that rings in this name.

So a capital D.

"

P is my favorite letter. P for poetry, p for poem… And also, because I really like to carry texts aloud. In the p, there is something which chants. We can really rely on it to create rhythm

: the word, the poem, the poetry, the thought ...

Little flower of the ghetto

No path in the skin that bleeding embrace

Atelier du silence

Sun to sew

Yes, for me, writing is always in a place of urgency. It's an inner necessity, like a kind of torrent inside me and it has to come out. So the act of writing will go through this movement, with a lot of dizziness, a lot of torment. I try to convey this anger through the words so that the reader can be worked up by that as well. May the words reflect the anger that runs through me and that pushes me to write.

"

opera dust

I am the last generation / corpses on vacation / I have finished my time of silence / I revoke my fate of dust

Perhaps it is not me who will edit the text,

but, in any case, I see it a lot like a great song carried by the voice of this heroine. I imagine a large space, something that almost evokes the sacred to me in the voice of this heroine. So, yes, it's quite adaptable to opera.

"

I am starting to age, I have almost 27 years old, but I have always said to myself that age in itself is not a quality. What do we do with what we are

? What do we do with the time we have and what is at our disposal

? (…) I always have the feeling that the book I'm writing is going to be the last one I'm going to write.

"