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1 INTRODUCTION A Jour Ouvert Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness: is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anansi story. —Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber Let’s talk, then. —Plato, Phaedrus Labor Day. Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 1999: there I was, standing half-naked in the middle of Eastern Parkway, covered from head to foot in blue paint. Head bad. My costume: horns, shorts, jungle boots, a rough tail, and a nearly empty leather rum pouch around my neck. Watch me, nah! A former Caliban, reclaiming myself in Brooklyn. A comfortably clichéd champion of my culture. A displaced Trini. A shameless measure of the condition that my physical appearance had defined, indulging in one of the few “pleasures of exile.”1 More Caribbean than I had ever had cause to be when I was in Trinidad. The day had already begun to cool, and our band—the “Blue Devils”—had long since dispersed, its members moving back along the parade route to mix into the other bands, letting their drying, sweat-salted paint rub off onto bare skins and sequins that loosened with every gyration, trying to make the day last for as long as they could. Before long, I too would go back to join them. To have a time—wining, chipping, drinking, jumping, grabbing, pushing. But before I did, there I was, an overseasoned “bacchanalist” standing in blue, watching people twist and turn. And for a moment, I was that stripped man, driven back to the 2 Introduction self-astonishing, elemental force that has driven me, at different times, to turmoil and to peace: the mind. For as Derek Walcott writes, the mind forms the basis of the Antillean experience: a shipwreck of fragments, echoes, a tribal vocabulary, and partially remembered customs that are not decayed but strong.2 Stronger than ever. From a distance, those of us in the crowd—swelling, as we are often told, to the millions—seemed indistinguishable from one another, which is the case with crowds. More remarkable was the fact that up close, in the midst, when the differences were most apparent and seemed to matter less and less, all I was thinking about was home. Trinidad. And a familiar lamentation: home. Home: these faces, bodies writhing in the sun, too busy to acknowledge the cooling of the season, whose pleasure barricaded them as they waited for gunshots to cut (offbeat) through the soca, the stiffening bodies of police who resented them and barricaded their pleasure with disgust. Home: the Caribbean. And I had never missed it more. Strange it is that millions engaged in the contiguous struggle for pleasure could evoke a few islands and their citizens, citizens who, I am certain, would find it strange that I would choose to practice hyperawareness in the midst of a fête. But this is the case with crowds, as well as memories and histories: they help us reenact what Walcott calls “the gathering of broken pieces [that] is the care and pain of the Antilles.”3 Recuperative work. The kind of work that makes the perfect kind of sense (and that rum and revelry are unable to mask). It occurred to me that a people should want to demonstrate, in no uncertain terms, that they consider themselves as worthy of recognition as any other people, not merely to get by from day to day, situation to situation, with neither a say nor a stake in the way those situations (and their very lives) unfold, but to have some role in shaping their destiny as a people. It should be as basic an imperative as the need to survive or to secure food and shelter for oneself and one’s family. It is an imperative that is not so ambitious or impossible as attempting to undermine hegemony altogether; rather, it is one of having a reasonable stake in the status quo. Or at least it ought to mediate the conditions of our public interactions and some of our private ones. It occurred to me that our performances ought to be more than metaphors of our desires that dissipate when the situations change, when the euphoria of a sanctioned chance to explode in the public passes into memory. As I see it, then, one of the objectives of rhetoric seen from a cultural perspective is to preserve and solidify the prevailing aspects of identity among...

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