Books Gone Wild / 32nd edition / InterviewGracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi archives twenty-five years of general state policies

Filled to the brim on Corpus Christi, the El Rancho Hotel Convention Center hosted Book Madness, where lawyer and researcher Gracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi presented For a History of the Nation’s General Policy: Reconstructing General Policy Documents Presented to Parliament, 1988-2018.

Filled to the brim on Corpus Christi, the El Rancho Hotel Convention Center hosted Livres en folie, where lawyer and researcher Gracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi presented For a History of the General Politics of the Nation: Reconstruction of the General Policy Documents Presented to Parliament, 1988-2018. The result of twenty-five years of research, this monumental work sits at the crossroads of archival work and critical reflection on the Haitian state. In this interview with Le Nouvelliste, the author talks about this effort to preserve institutional memory, while also questioning the limits of the political system and the need to better structure public strategies for the common good.Mr. Gracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi, you are well settled at Livres en folie this Thursday, June 4th. Le Nouvelliste is happy to meet you. You have written a book with a very long title: For a History of the Nation’s General Policy: Reconstruction of General Policy Documents Presented to Parliament, 1988-2018. It’s an impressive title, because in this book, there’s much more than just documents. It goes beyond the reader’s expectations. The title is long-winded for a book that is itself hefty.Gracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi: The first thing is that I couldn’t make a summary, let alone a synthesis of the title, because the title itself exactly says what the book is about, namely the general policy of the Nation, which refers to the national strategy that the government presents to Parliament and which is adopted by both Chambers, that is, by the Chamber of Deputies and by the Senate of the Republic.

So, I couldn’t avoid a title as explicit as the one of the book.

Moreover, the subject itself is abundant and fundamental, since without a general policy of the Nation, a community risks being unable to cope with the different realities and problematic situations it faces.I believe that this is exactly what’s happening to us today: we have a lack of strategy to meet the needs of the population and, even more, to guarantee their fundamental rights and freedoms.

: So, this is a collection that could be useful to experts, journalists, and students. Is it from this perspective that you gathered all these texts?

Gracia-Joseph Sacélus Maxi: You are absolutely right. I myself wandered and struggled for more than twenty-five years searching for the general policy document of Haiti’s first Prime Minister, Me Martial Célestin, after 1988. I waited a long time before discovering that some libraries and private archives still kept this document.