The Sea is History
Where are your monuments,
your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory?
Sirs, in that grey vault.
The sea.
The sea has locked them up.
The sea is history.
---Derek Walcott, "The Sea is History"
Collected Poems, 2007
Caribbean Discourse
Our landscape is its own monument:
its meaning can only be traced on the
underside. It is all history.
---Edouard Glissant
Caribbean Discourse, 2007
Community and Nation
From our various affiliations and groupings, real or imagined, our lives derive meaning. They provide a sense of context, order and continuity by transmitting knowledge, values, ideals and aspirations from one generation to the next. In short, they tend to provide rudders to stabilize us on the turbulent seas of life on earth. [...] [W]e must reinvigorate the meaning of freedom and brotherhood, lest we lose all that our forebears sacrificed to secure for us.
---Patricia Glinton-Meicholas