Sublime

My home on an island—I was leaving it forever. What to make of everything? I felt a familiar hollow space inside. I felt I was being held down against my will. I felt I was burning up from head to toe. I felt that someone was tearing me up into little pieces and soon I would be able to see all the little pieces as they floated out into nothing in t

Jamaican mothers raise their daughters to be obedient, and some of us don’t know how to be any other way even when we are women. Some of us Jamaican daughters too easily forget the days our mothers were most tender.

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 tha

It is a different kind of shame from that of being the daughter of shop-and-café keepers. It is the shame of having once been proud of being an object of desire. Of having considered her life at camp an emancipation. The shame of Annie, what does your body say, of I don’t know you from a hole in the wall, and the scene by the message board; the sha

Edwidge Danticat story: “Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.”

what about the shame of being madly in love and waiting for a man behind a door he did not open, being called totally deranged and a whore around the edges? Has The Second Sex cleansed me of all that, or on the other hand, completely submerged me?

mbeles