FEMINISMS IN THE CARIBBEAN. Holding on to Writing Promise No Promises!

Holding on to Writing is the fourth episode of the Feminisms in the Caribbean series, which emerges from a conversation with haitian writer, poet and novelist Kettly Mars. Haiti is at the heart of her creation, being a pretext for her relationship with words, her fondness for storytelling and the exploration of the human soul.During her process of writing words often come before ideas. The writer's body becomes a medium for the words, broadening a visceral relationship with language. One of the extraordinary qualities of words is that they cannot always explain themselves: they are content, but they are also form. They are result, but also process. Writing becomes something that happens and not just something writers do. It is a social, intimate, and responsive encounter with language that allows realities to appear within other realities. Writing can be an ethical tool and a compass in moments of disorientation. Moreover, "holding on to writing", an expression of Kettly Mars during our conversation, can make it a way of life.It was not until her thirties that Kettly Mars was able to devote herself fully to writing. Her previous work in administration brought her into contact with another kind of language very different from that of literature: the language of bureaucracy, which is also the language of institutional power. However, she was not so much influenced by this kind of language as by the people she met at the time. Kettly Mars, who has written extensively in French, also writes in Creole. While the two languages are part of her identity, her emotional relationship is not the same with each of them. This relationship also includes the socio-political context of Haiti over the years, during and after the Duvalier dictatorship. Different from history books, which are a collection of historical facts, names and events, novels and fiction add new meanings, add multiples senses and add everyday lives to official history.