Quotes

'Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symetry for granted when it was whole... This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent... This is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.  They survived the Middle Passage.'

The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memory

Derek Walcott 

'...this outsized reality... a reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty... Poets and beggars, musicians and prophts, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridles reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.'

Garbiel Garcia Marquez, on Magical Realism (1983)

‘In truth, it was in the spirit of priesthood that Aldrick addressed his work; for the making of his dragon costume was to him always a new miracle. A new test not only of his skill but his faith: for though he knew exactly what he had to do, it was only by faith that he could bring alive from these scraps of cloth and tin that dragon, its mouth breathing fire, its tail thrashing the ground, its nine chains rattling, that would contain the beauty and threat and terror that was the message he took each year to Port-of-Spain. It was in this message that he asserted before the world his self. It was through it that he demanded that others see him, recognize his personhood, be warned of his dangerousness.’ 

The Dragon Can't Dance 
Earl Lovelace