Schultz Laurent Junior… you are gone.
Not for a writing retreat, not for a literary festival, nor for one of those self-imposed exiles pompously called “new opportunities.”
No, you left as only lucid dreamers do quietly, without applause, struck down on October 28, 2025, outside an American pizzeria you, whose hunger was always for words far more nourishing.
A former contributor to Le National, Le Nouvelliste, C3 Hebdo, La Scène, and Écho Ayiti, you became one of the most distinctive voices in Haiti’s cultural press.
Fifty-one years old, twenty years in journalism, thousands of battles fought with your pen and now reduced to a brief headline on Philadelphia’s local news. In a land where even poets die without poetry.
The cruel irony: the man who once denounced human tragedy and the excesses of sensationalism has become the perfect subject of a crime report.
Surveillance cameras now offer your posthumous tribute in place of literary critics.
I remember you at Le Nouvelliste: slim figure, sharp words, subtle smile.
You dissected mediocrity like a surgeon-poet.
And yet, despite your brilliant mind, you believed that by crossing borders you would finally find air to breathe.
Ah, America! That grand cemetery of Haitian hopes where our finest minds die politely, stabbed between two shifts of survival.
You exchanged the cultural stages of Port-au-Prince for the silent sidewalks of Philadelphia, hoping to escape chaos.
But chaos, faithful as a shadow, followed you.
Its name: racism, precarity, loneliness and now, violence.
Your death mirrors the tragic farce of our collective destiny:
the bright minds flee, the fools flourish, and the homeland that ungrateful mother continues to devour her children, whether at home or in exile.
You wrote about the sea, the light, and memory.
How cruel that your flame went out in the darkness of America.
But rest assured, dear Schultz in Haiti, we still know how to mourn eloquently.
Tributes will fill Facebook, your name will be quoted in two conferences, mentioned on the radio between a beer commercial and a power outage.
And then, slowly, we will forget as we always do.
You had three children, they say.
They will inherit your truest legacy: a poet’s name, and a homeland of ghosts.
You were too dignified for this world, too deep for this profession, too honest for this era.
Farewell, brother of the pen.
You left the stage in silence like those verses we no longer reread yet can never forget.
And now, you are immortal for that is the only comfort left to us,
the survivors of a Haitian press in ruins.
Amos Cincir
Ambassador of the Kingdom
