Wyclef Jean Reflects On Haiti Earthquake
Wyclef Jean has revealed how the devastating Haiti earthquake caused him to reflect on the “importance of life.” The musician wrote about the disaster in new memoir Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story and confessed to MTV that the earthquake was “the hardest thing for me [to write about] in the book.”
The Haitian-born star told the site about his personal experience of arriving soon after the quake had devastated the Caribbean island in 2010:
“Landing on the ground 24 hours after … there was a young kid, and I knew he was going to die and he called [out] my name. There’s no ambulances, no EMS, there’s nothing but I have to give him hope to think that they’re coming for him, so he can exit earth in a peaceful way. That made me understand the importance of life.”
Wyclef Jean also revealed that fans can expect plenty more reading material from him and described how he had aimed to give fans a close, personal look at his life and career in music and, briefly, politics:
“I’m gonna write seven books, and the first one was a memoir because of one of the things I learned when I ran for president and got bamboozled. The mass world, what they know about Wyclef is basically that he can sing, he can produce, he can write songs, but they don’t know how smart musicians actually are and where they’re from. The memoir, [it] was important to me that it’s raw, it’s honest, it’s like my music and if you’re reading it, you just feel like you’re a one-on-one conversation opposed to reading something.”
The memoir also records how Wyclef Jean’s affair with fellow Fugee Lauryn Hill led to the break-up of the band, and Jean told MTV the response had not been universally positive to the revelation:
“Now my Twitter is going off and a lot of people are like, ‘Clef is going at L on this memoir’ — not at all,” he said, addressing the immediate feedback. “Because a true Fugees true fan is gonna want to know what happened to the group. It was very important for me to be as honest as I could be. And when you read my memoir, that’s the age I was, that’s the period [it was].”
