Sylvia Wynter's Dream

by jessiemayers | Class Blog 7 | It’s a new day and a blank slate!

between this mountain ridge and the vague sea
where the lost exodus
of corials sunk without trace— 

There is too much nothing here. 

– “Air” by Derek Walcott

A new middle passage gapes wide, and amnesia fills the cracks. An unbroken line of signifiers, Ste Lucie, the Helen of the West, Santa Lucia, Hewanorra, Ioüanalao, burst like frothy bubbles of foam, melting back into the salty deluge of the sea.

Names carry no weight here; their meanings lost after successive generations of repeated forgetting. A new island is born, renewed in the minds of its children who carve out subsistence in its valleys and glean livelihoods along its coast.

Every memory of a distant past forgotten recovers a piece of the whole self, unencumbered by ancestral karmic debt, a new embodiment of the post-post-colonial being. 

The bay is just a bay now. 

The beach is just a beach.  

It is known only by the specific contours of its topography that bend and bow into the bay that makes it that beach. It’s the beach with the hill on its left side, with brown umbrellas from the hotel shading its sand and the narrow outcropping of rock that contains it. 

Bodies bathe in the blue waters; the waves billow on the shore like a sheet pulling over a long-dead era. They splash in the water and laugh together.

A far-travelled visitor blisters and reddens in the sun and tends to a smouldering coalpot. The fisherman surfaces from the water, a fish gasping at the hot surface world on the edge of his harpoon. After cleaning, he brings his catch to the visitor, who places the fish on the grill. A family of three settles under the brown umbrella; the hotel security guard greets them, and they are welcomed. 

They eat, laugh and enjoy together.

The island claims its spatial identity as just a wisp of green, an iris in the blue eye of the Caribbean Sea. There really is nothing here, but it is everything.