Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments A few of these essays have appeared in different form, updated with new content for this collection: A portion of “Connecting Stories: My Grandmother ’s Violin,” was published as “Secrets of My Mother’s Sweetness,” in Caribbean Erotic (2010), edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Weir Soley (now with two additional sections); “Women, Labor, and the Transnational: From Work to Work,” was published as “Caribbean Women, Domestic Labor, and the Politics of Transnational Migration,” in Women’s Labor and the Global Economy (2007), edited by Sharon Harley; “Haiti, I Can See Your Halo,” was a plenary address published in the Journal of the African Literature Association (Spring 2011); and “‘Changing Locations’: Literary Pathways of Caribbean Migration” appeared as “Triply Diasporized: Literary Pathways of Caribbean Migration,” in The Routledge Companion to Caribbean Literature (2011). A portion of chapter 4 appeared as “Transformational Discourses, Afro-Diasporic Culture, and the Literary Imagination,” Macalester International 3.20 (1996): http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol3/iss1/20. Thank you to Marcia Douglas for use of the poem “Voice Lesson,” which first appeared in Claiming Voice, a student poetry booklet compiled by Douglas for the author’s Black Women Writers course in 1994. The poem “Leaving ” appeared initially in volume 1 of Moving beyond Boundaries (1994), edited by the author. My friend Abena Busia is acknowledged here as well for reminding me about the film “Twilight City” and for critical affirmation. When I showed her the book’s cover, she offered the opening line from her sister Akosua’s novel: “There is no blue like the blue of the Caribbean Sea.” Thank you to Brian and Dalia Davies Flanagan for providing a beautiful pre-wedding location in a villa in St. Lucia where this manuscript was a x . acknowledgments companion; a lovely corner in their apartment, significantly in Brooklyn, for work on the final draft; and above all for the gift of a first granddaughter , Ila Rose. My colleague Kenneth McClane deserves my unwavering gratitude for affirming this book from the start and helping me maintain my sense of a creative/intellectual self in the midst of then swelling contradictions surrounding Cornell’s redesigning of its Africana Studies and Research Center. And, ironically still, Cornell University is acknowledged for providing the research location again in upstate New York that brought back to actuality how twilight zones work and what was needed to finish this manuscript. Thank you especially to librarian Sharon Powers and Africana Library director Eric Acree for providing the actual research environment and support that a scholar like me values. You have made my research time so pleasant. Opal Palmer Adisa, Merle Collins, and Kamau Brathwaite encouraged me to write the family and personal narratives included here. Much love and Nuff Respect! I want to specially recognize the editors at the University of Illinois Press for professional elegance. I am also indebted to the unnamed reviewers who offered insightful readings, wonderful suggestions, and the kind of critical affirmation which allowed me to go forward with this book. Wonderful graduate students at Cornell, such as Courtney Knapp, Alyssa Clutterbuck, Kavita Singh, Ryann Alexander, Jessica Alarcon, Keshia Hicks, Ayanna Parris, and Patricia Abraham, and bright undergraduate students, including Tia Hicks, Elizabeth Rust, Rocelio Rocio, and many others, have always brought fresh insights, references, and their own creative, political, and intellectual work that inspires and must always be recognized as the lights of hope in sometimes otherwise dismally regressive academic settings. Kadija Sesay and Michael La Rose in London provided helpful connections for photographs by Armet Francis about the early Caribbean experience in London. Photographers Noelle Theard, Jean Willy Gerdes, Carl Juste (Miami), my dear friend Charles (Chuck) Martin (New York), and master artist LeRoy Clarke in Trinidad gave kind permissions for the inclusion of their work. Thank you to Babacar M’bow of Multitudes Gallery in Miami for help with photographs as well and for the choice of the art for the cover. My nephew Joseph A. Boyce Jr. provided urgent technical computor support at a critical point and is offered my deep love and respect. Thank you to Cuban artist Alejandro Mendoza for use of “The Border”, from his Locations series, the artwork that is featured on the cover of this book. Caribbean Spaces ...