Gaston Vilaire, a migrant from Jérémie, Haiti, who has worked in research laboratories at MIT and University of Pennsylvania, has written articles on Haitian painting and social criticism, served on the board of several Haitian cultural and charitable organizations, and became a founding member of Organization Lavalas Philadelfi, has completed his new book “The Eve of Paramour”: a scholarly account that that presents a phenomenology of questions about metaphysics and its influence on native minds amidst a progressing society.Author Vilaire reflects on the obvious diversity of perspectives, yet seemingly mirrors the collective culture from which one has grown up with or has originated from: “These are fragments littering the American landscape that worldwide immigrants have discarded, sometimes with contempt as they adopted their new nation and their new way of life. I pick them up wherever I find them and mend them in quilt-like fashion, as a symbolic gesture of reverence to our humanitarian heritage. They are vagrants in search of a home. Like the question, they too are experiencing homelessness. Painters and poets of diaspora who capture them on canvas and paper give them a mythical space—though not mythical coherence. They take great care to change them into sterile deities before getting them laid in multicolored media. There, in a whim of fancy, they careen them on one side or the other of the frontier of the sexes. Exiled from their collective cultures, these elements were forced to abandon the countryside for shantytowns, where they would board flimsy kanters for the land of diaspora. They too are as lost and fragmented as their makers.”
Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Gaston Vilaire’s thought-provoking narrative not only confines itself to the Haitian mindset, but it also extends to all in general, as it finds universality in crisis brought about by wars, dictators, and disasters.
Readers who wish to experience this powerful work can purchase“The Eve of Paramour” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble.
