AANY: What’s up? What’s going on?
Lahiny: I need to get my back x-rayed, so off to a chiropractor I go. I’ve been having this back issue and I need to get it straight. Today that is what I’ll be focusing on and then I have appointments with some people to look at apartments. I still don’t have my own little adobe in New York City.
AANY: You just got off the phone. Who were you talking to?
Lahiny: I was talking to a possible contractor to write for a film. He wants to put together a Roots-like project for Haiti. If you’ve seen the series Roots, he wants to put together a similar project, chronologically designed from Africa into Española islands story, an historical fiction type of film.
AANY: Who are you?
Lahiny: I’m a writer. My name is Lahiny Pierre.
AANY: What have you written?
Lahiny: My last publication was a historical fiction novel thriller titled “General Authority”. My next release is going to be attached to a collection of photography about Haitian voodoo. My essay there deals with Haitian consciousness. Prior to that I published in another book of photography another essay, regarding Haitian liberation or Haitian reconstruction.
AANY: We just arrived at 2 years since the big earthquake in Haiti. How is the progress coming along?
Lahiny: Haiti is doing now as it was doing immediately after the earthquake. That’s the truth. At first I took on my active role, blogging a lot. People thought I was just talking badly about Bill Clinton or George Bush, these big guys, just to talk badly about them. If one would take care to inform yourself you would see that everything I had said was exactly what happened.
AANY: Politicians say one thing and do another, often times.
Lahiny: Well, they never intended to get things done, even if they said they would. That was the whole deal. What they said to us and their intentions were totally different. We should have learned from Iraq. They’ve been treating Haiti like a war zone. If you look at all the other war zones they’ve invaded, how are we Haiti different? We don’t even have oil pumping out of the ground. The oil that we have has not even been pumped out of the holes, obviously much less valuable then if it were circulating and earning currency.
AANY: What do you love about New York?
Lahiny: What I love about New York is the line between poor people and a rich person is so thin. You can be the poor guy on the subway sitting next to a millionaire whereas in most countries the millionaires live and separate themselves from the normal people. I love the food of course; everywhere you go there’s something delicious. There is so much about New York that I need to explore myself. New York City is fabulous but the whole state is beautiful too.
AANY: You kind of remind me of Wendy Williams.
Lahiny: Well she is a woman who has worked really hard to make her career happen. It didn’t really happen until the last ten years. For that it is an honor to be compared to her. I think I am as entertaining as Wendy and I even have more funk. I can dance, she can’t. She can’t speak French or Spanish like I do or entertain like I do. So she is wonderful but not quite as wonderful as me!
AANY: Agreed, 100%. Take care of that back, now, and I’ll check out General Authority.
If you would like to help Haiti in ongoing earthquake relief, please click here.
