Sublime

a semidiasporic postcolonial indeterminate like me

First and always was her hair. Long and untamed and red. And there was the milky skin that was standard issue with the hair, and freckles like red-pepper flakes across her nose.

To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared

lank

Money be green, we be black, and the devil be white.

Summer had passed. The winter of boredom had set in and frost had formed in the crevices of Blackshear’s mind.

He is a white man, the kind that Shay defines with the Malagasy word vazaha, although the word simply means foreigner, and she herself can also be defined that way. But in her mind the word denotes the kind of tropic-bespoiled white man who hangs out in the Fleur des Îles café and, in Shay’s opinion, is far too often a guest at the Red House.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be sho