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  • Whose Caribbean?*An Allegory, in Part
  • Thomas Glave (bio)

And so it came to pass that upon that time, not so long ago, in that part of the world, there lived a child who dreamt. I am not so sure even now as to the definitive facial features of that child, but I am fairly certain, having myself wandered through various dreams that became stories that were told and did not fade over time, that the child was both female and male—a common enough occurrence in that place of the child's origin at that time, as, contrary to numerous prevailing opinions, happens frequently today. The child—let us know him/her as "S/He"—possessed a slender penis of startlingly delicate green, the truest color of the sea that s/he had always loved—that sea which licked and foamed out and back, out and in again, all about the shores of that place; as s/he also possessed a pair of luminous blue breasts the tone of the purest skies that, on the gentlest days, nuzzled their broad, soft chins against the sea. Nipples did not grow at the end of the child's breasts, but rather berries the inflamed color of hibiscus in its most passionate surrender to the sunsets and dawns that for millennia had washed over that place. The child also possessed a vagina and uterus which, as was common knowledge among all who knew him/her, produced at least twice or three times per year, without assistance from anyone, a race of brazen dolphins—creatures the fierce color of the sun, silver-speckled and gray-bottlenosed; creatures which, despite the rude raucousness of their cries upon emergence from between his/her thighs into the light, leapt without fail with the gravest of countenances into those waiting waves.

The child dreamt; again, nothing unusual in what would come to be known by some as a region of dreamers. S/He dreamt of tamarinds, of course, and of star-apples and green mangoes that, eventually rendered senseless by the days' stunning heat, plunged from their trees to ooze their fragrant juices along the largely still unexplored inner paths of her/his thighs. S/He dreamt of plummeting stars providing a last flash of hope (or, in other instances, a vision of death) to condemned slaves, their wrists bound with heavy chains and thick cords on so many mornings and late afternoons on a public square's auction block; s/he dreamt of tormented hands outstretched, at last vanished forever beneath the night-blackened waves of that eternal sea, as dawn brought her/him dreams of violet hummingbirds intent on sweetness and color, and dreams of shrugging mountains, and cane. Always cane. Field upon field of it, whispering. Muttering. Cane thick with secrets but also with the day's tragedies and joys—the few joys there were, could have been, in those times—and, on nights of the fullest moons, the calls of three-hundred-year-dead jumbies, or duppies, or soucouyants [End Page 671] rising so slowly from the vast water, green-dreadlocked and sober eyed, intent on possessing her/his soul, and yours, and mine.

During my many travels to that place and by way of my own history there—that place which, through the wills and workings of Osun and Oya, stealthy buccaneers or cruise ship companies, slave traders or airline advertisements or a combination of any and all, became what we call today the Caribbean—I have thought often of that child and her/his dreams. In the dreary halls of immigration, while wondering which passport to use on this trip or that one, Jamaican or U.S.—which citizen will I be this time, (re-) entering "my" country?—I have conjured her/him: the (surely) skinny legs, the (perhaps) slightly mottled skin; the all-too-wide eyes and sun-bleached hair which, even this late in human time, yet bears evidence of ringworm, just there, on the scalp; and the gleaming blue breasts ending in those bright red berry-nipples. I conjure him/her, wondering as I conjure if, during this tourist season or the last one, anyone has propositioned him...

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