Sublime

Poetry! The endemic illness of young malcontents, desperately embracing beauty, hog-tied to the tempting rhymes of a loaned-out language, tossed about between Creole and French like those rowboats over there on the sea I can hear but not see crashing from my shack.

But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?

I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican

These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate

Over the course of the twentieth century, Haitians, escaping poverty and unrest, sought refuge in the Bahamas as well. It was and remains a deeply stratified place, sitting at a crossroads, with the global elites and their tax havens at the top and poor Haitians living in shanties at the bottom. It is one of the tragic ironies of global history