Musicians, met in the streets of Port-au-Prince, who greeted me with a musical salute under the noon sun, 2015. © Jean-François Nadeau

It was in 1997, I had just published the sequel to The Scent of Coffee, this book with a long, nostalgic title where I was still engaged in this butterfly hunt of childhood. The Charm of Endless Afternoons, such was the title of the book where I reunited with Da simply by erasing time and through the magic of writing. I thought I was done with this endless childhood, that I would move on to something else. My dreams are still childlike visions where animals from the equatorial Africa roam, horned devils, and that crowd of masked people speaking to me in an unknown language.