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the ship docks at noon, the sun still angled slightly toward the façades of buildings running perpendicular to the waterfront. i see rows and columns
of relentlessly pastel retail shops, flanked by scotiabank on one side and a hulking hotel claiming to be atlantis on the other. a glut of tourists
saturates the pier, channeled by strategically placed palm trees straight toward the nassau colonialism created for them: stores selling perfumes,
gold by the inch, and diamonds clearly cut from black south african toil, a harley dealership, and further in, stall after stall of wooden or woven crafts,
trinkets in every color at once, whose destiny is to remind the curio cabinet, the guest room, or the attic that someone has been to the bahamas. none
of these goods go for free, but all relieve the purchaser of any duty toward the seller. seven streets back from the water, pastel gives way
to green: first, storefronts, then lush trees blocking my shipboard view of the island’s inner life. i curse the brand of caribbean fantasy [End Page 767]
that stands like a levee between me and the nassau i scan for through my shades, leaning on the deck rail fifteen stories up, in spitting distance
of the graffitied wall of the pier, where the dispossessed lay claim by name to the whole horizon of concrete above the water line. [End Page 768]
Evie Shockley is the author of two books of poetry, the new black and a half-red sea; and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems and The Gorgon Goddess. She has also published in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including MELUS, Indiana Review, Southern Review, Callaloo, Harvard Review, Hambone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. Her critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, will be published in fall 2011. Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University.
