“For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence.” —Saidiya Hartman
Arts for the 21st Century
These islands, where, as Derek Walcott reminds us, “the sea is history”. And here Walcott does not mean that it is just the Caribbean Sea that has history, rather it is the entire Atlantic Ocean. Walcott means the movements on this ocean through which these islands were born at the heart of the European colonial project. Lamming was always clear about this history.
