![]() Philoctète is clear: there is no honor for a writer in being unread, unknown. At the risk of overdramatizing, I can say that these five sentences have resonated at the core of all the work I have done and likely will continue to do as a translator-and as a scholar, for that matter. 2 They have remained with me-front of mind-ever since. It is a commercial product which is going to stay here, insulted by dust.” 1 I first encountered these words in the course of researching and writing my first book manuscript, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. But if they cannot read, my book is worth nothing. ![]() I write in order to be read, in order to sell to the people around me. In a 1992 interview for the journal Callaloo the late Haitian writer René Philoctète said, in what I have always imagined to be a tone inflected with some combination of puzzled annoyance and simmering rage, “What is a book anyway? It is a product, a commercial item. ![]()
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