Looking for books about Haiti to read? Look no further than Kreyolicious Reads…your portal to books about Haiti, and written (mostly) by folks of Haitian descent. Oh, and your portals to authors too! Today’s author of interest is Dimitry Elias Leger, author of God Loves Haiti, a novel about how the 2010 Haiti disrupts a love triangle. The author is a graduate of St. John’s University and worked as a journalist before publishing his novel. After living in several U.S. cities (mainly Miami and Brooklyn), he makes his home in Geneva, Switzerland.
Photo Credit: Jill Krementz
Kreyolicious: So, you were born in Port-au-Prince, and then moved to the USA. Do you remember what it felt like to make the move?
Well, the final move from Haiti to Brooklyn happened in February ’86, right before the fall of Duvalier. The departure felt violent—like a rupture—because I was 14 and just coming into my own as a teenager. But I’d been going back and forth between the States and Port-au-Prince since I was 3 years, spending the summer in one country while going to school in the other. I don’t even know what my first language spoken was for sure.
Kreyolicious: You were raised by your father. Do you think that has affected your writing?
Sure. The most literal way my father affected my fiction writing is that I’m fascinated by the mysterious of many of the things he loved quite passionately, like family, Haiti, and honor. He was an atypical man in the way he was naturally very maternal and wore his feelings on his sleeves.
Kreyolicious: You earned your first degree from St. John’s University. While there, did you take any creative writing classes, or any psychology classes that helped you craft your book?
I never took a creative writing course. Not at St. John’s twenty years ago—nor after. I learned to write for mass media at St. John’s, print journalism, screenwriting and radio. Writing for great magazines and newspapers for ten years was good training for crafting my book, and after leaving journalism, reading poetry and novels and watching films about people and countries dealing with war, or the Caribbean, and Latin America helped me write my novel immensely.
Kreyolicious: I noticed that you dedicated God Loves Haiti to the survivors of the earthquake, rather than in the memory of those who perished.
Sure. Much is made of our dead and how we grieve and deal with death. My novel’s about the people who live in Haiti, who live Haiti 24/7, with a special shout-out to the people who could leave or could have left for Canada, the U.S., Europe, at any point in their lives, and specially after surviving the earthquake, but chose not to. Je les félicites [I congratulate them].
Kreyolicious: As you wrote the novel, were you a bit apprehensive about whether your readers would try to match up the characters with real-life counterparts?
Nah. I worried about telling a good story in an original voice. I wanted to entertain readers, surprise them over and over, literarily and intellectually. The novel has so many layers, there’s something for every reader who digs it to obsess over.
Kreyolicious: From the moment when we first meet her in the first chapter, Natasha Robert practically takes over the book. How did you come to create her?
She came to me—like all the other characters—as I began writing about the internal life of a very sensitive character experiencing the earthquake and trying to get on with life. I love music, jazz and hip-hop in particular. Natasha could be seen as my falsetto voice.
Kreyolicious: Whenever a guy writes a novel where his main character is a woman, people might think he was able to create her so well, because he drew on the women in his family, or women he’s known.
Those people would be right. My mother, my sister, my sister-in-law, my nine older cousins, my wife, my daughter, my lovers, like my father, my brothers, my male cousins, my son, my self, they’re all in the novel, and they always will be in my novels. I like writing about strong feelings, so every passion I’ve felt and received will be in my characters and stories too.
Kreyolicious: I think it’s interesting that you’ve lived in Port-au-Prince, Brooklyn, then moved to Paris, and currently make your home in Switzerland. If you could only live in one of these places for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
I’ll probably settle down in Port-au-Prince eventually. Or Miami. Depends on my health and wealth.
Kreyolicious: Is the writer and author Dany Laferriere one of your heroes. Your novel is preceded by a quote from one of his books, and later on in the text, there’s a reference to Librarie Sidney-Nina, a bookstore owned by a family of one of your characters—Alain Destiné—that stocks all of his books.
I love Dany’s books, his entire bibliography. He’s our funniest novelist ever. Along with Junot Diaz, Dany’s writing and success gave me permission to write humorously and affectionately about us, our humor and lust for affection.
Kreyolicious: At any point during the writing of God Loves Haiti, were you like, “This earthquake thing is too recent. Maybe I should wait a few years to let it simmer, and make it part of the plot.”
Nah. Part of literature’s job is to entertain. But literature, like art and film, plays an even more important role as the means to honor and commemorate a people, a place, a time. The earthquake’s the most important event in Haitian history since the Duvalier dictatorship and the terror of Tonton Macoutes. Like World War II for Jews and Europeans, and 9/11 and its wars for Americans, I expect goudou-goudou [the Haiti earthquake] to be a part of Haitian culture for centuries. After all, death tends to be the number one theme of serious books. There’s beauty to be found in the things that make us most uncomfortable, both as a writer and a reader. I had a blast writing about god and the earthquake. I’d wanted to write novels about Haitians for years and couldn’t come up with a good one—one that worked—until I confronted the horrors of the earthquake. I had no choice but to write it.
Kreyolicious: You started writing your book one late winter in the 2010s. How long did it take you to complete it?
Eleven months.
Kreyolicious: Were there moments when the writing was difficult…like writer’s block.
No. The way I write controls for blocks. In other words, I spend a lot of time doing nothing but driving around or laying around and flipping through novels, songs, and TV shows, and movies, magazines, and essays for the sounds and ideas for a novel section, a chapter, and a character’s conflict and journey. And then the music and joke comes to me, and I lock myself in a room and write it down furiously, like a torrent of words. It feels like I’m transcribing the words from another source. I smile the whole time when it’s happening.
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BE SURE TO CHECK OUT PART TWO OF MY INTERVIEW WITH DIMITRY ELIAS LEGER! COMING SOON! MEANWHILE, CLICK!CLICK!HERE! TO READ OTHER BOOK-RELATED ARTICLES ON KREYOLICIOUS!
