SARA BASTIAN
Homecoming is not meant to outlive the holidays. For a homecoming to be respectable, it must cease. We must leave again to seek out something better, a place where the waves will not gulp down buildings. A place where the sea minds its manners and knows not to trespass.
ADAM PATTERSON
I was weeding the back garden and thinking about you –
you,
stranger of the fields,
fugitive farmer,
runaway planter marooned from your dirt,
TANICIA PRATT
All my chirren is leave aftee sometime
an once dey does go
dey does don’t come back
sometime
all a mine is come back yinno?
ELIZABETH JAIKARAN
in my parents’ country
they discovered spiders big enough to
eat small dogs.
LAUREN DELAPENHA
During World War II, the mining town of Shinkolobwe was dropped from maps of the Belgian Congo to protect the secrecy of its uranium ore. This rock would later supply most of the raw materials for the world’s first atomic bombs.
I climbed onto land, wringing my brackish hair
dry, like I was squeezing sour over fish
gasping for air. The refuse: splintered
wood, shattered concrete, twisted trees.
We sat in the dark,
Shared drinking water with our neighbors,
Watched historical buildings
Break into communion bread for hurricanes.
How to survive a disaster or what insurance companies call a ‘force majeure’. As we’re finding out with the Corona virus pandemic Caribbean countries, like most countries, are ill-prepared. As Angelique Nixon says “The Bahamas is not prepared. Neither are any of our island-nations and countries in this vulnerable region. And neither are most countries really prepared for this kind of disaster— a disaster fueled by climate change, injustice and inequality.”
ALIYAH KHAN
King Sugar dreams long gone since slavery and indentureship. Production drop mightily, the European Union ent want Caribbean sugar no more, and Guyana facilities backward and rightly cripple by labor strikes.
In this article artist Annalee Davis draws a thread between the one-dimensional notion of tourism as the panacea for small island economies (with a particular focus on Barbados), and the potential role of contemporary visual art and artists in offering other lenses through which we can see ourselves and consider our contexts. COVID-19 will infect this text. How can it not?
LISE RAGBIR
Long before the turtles stopped burying their eggs in the sand of narrowing beaches, and fishermen stopped dragging nets into the sea, and tourists stopped taking selfies at plantation houses…
KRIS SINGH
An extended rumination on cows, the cow’s central place in Indian culture, Hindu culture, being an East Indian West Indian and other intersecting dilemmas.
