In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Bloodpeople in the Language
  • Thomas Glave (bio)

And even now being in Jamaica and writing this and knowing that I am writing these words thinking about death and the end of all things and the loss of everything—for loss has indeed recently come very near; has knocked, made itself felt, known, present. And thinking about it, loss, death, so much because there has been so much death in this family, my family, recently, so much: the death of a cousin, a fundamentalist born-again Christian who committed suicide not long ago by firing a gun into his chest after losing custody of his sons in an acrimonious divorce case and also discovering that one of those sons was not his own, his biological own (though very much his spiritual own, the child who had always known only him as, and called him, “Daddy”)—the child not his biologically but, as he learned to his evident devastation, his best friend’s. Then another cousin who died only weeks ago and completely unexpectedly; and that cousin’s sister-in-law who died after a brief time in a coma, and so young, so very young, only in her thirties; and then my beloved and favorite aunt thinking that she was going to die and suffering a profound mortality crisis upon pondering the very real proximity of her own death, who as of this writing lies slowly dying in a Northeast Bronx hospice.1 And then most recently my always-vibrant and impossible and sometimes viciously cruel, sometimes deeply loving mother, who at eighty-seven years of age in the spring of 2011 suffered a stroke, a massive stroke, people said to me over the phone: my mother lying on a bed without speech and without mobility on her right side, first in a hospital, then in an “acute rehabilitative facility,” and then in a “sub-acute rehabilitative facility,” regaining speech though slowly, painfully, with great difficulty, and still no sign of any significant restored mobility. And then remembering my sister, my only sibling, dead these many years from breast cancer at the age of forty-one. It was not right, such a death can never be right for anyone. It was not right for her children who were teenagers at the time; not right for her husband who, though I have never at all really cared for him, and in fact for very good reasons have often despised and utterly loathed him and loathe him still, I know loved her beyond imagining. And it was not right, that death, for my mother, who herself proceeded into an unfathomable tailspin after her daughter’s death—the daughter who, in fact and very unfortunately, she had physically and emotionally abused and tormented, for years, unmercifully, alternating that cruelty with genuine love, or what she had perceived to be love, in the deeply twisted way some people perceive and define love. And then four years before my sister’s death the death of my father: my father whom I had without question worshipped and adored for all of his life, for all of the time I had known him, even as I later came to scorn him at times, and even to repudiate him, as surly rebellious teenagers are often known to do with parents, at least in the contemporary West. My father, beloved, idolized: a gray-headed man who was [End Page 905] born to garden, blessed with intuitive understanding of the soil and green things. My father who, like so many Jamaicans and especially those raised “in country,” in a small farming community in deep central Jamaica, loved his garden, and died in a hospital at the age of seventy-two when I was still quite young, after which death (“after the first death, there is no other,” the poet wrote—but he was wrong, so very wrong) I immediately lost all sense of time and place and purpose and even being, by which I mean my own being—for what could be the point of being after something like that? Who would wish to be, to be alive still, to breathe and walk upon the blessed gorgeous earth, this planet...

pdf

Share