May 7, 2024
Each year it feels like the world is confronted by a new challenge, tilting on its axis towards one trouble or another. Seasons shift, people fade, the rhythm of the tide of our lives ebbs and flows. Rumours of shrinking coastlines, whispers of rising sea levels grapple for our attention with as much fervour as beribboned children to the limbs of their parents and guardians. Our hands fan the dying embers under coal pots, or grip, white-knuckled, the steering wheels of foreign-used cars as it snakes slowly in lines of traffic jam that seem in direct odds with island lives. Across the oceans, we sow the seeds of our history into foreign soil while we ruminate over the questions the privilege of distance affords. Our hands feverishly attempt to wave life and meaning into the ordinary – into the mundane.
Undoubtedly, some eras seem to give more than others. Zora Neale Hurston put it best when she said that “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” As people born of the meat and marrow of oral histories, in the Caribbean, we have satisfied ourselves with the plain truth that indeed, sometimes the question is the answer. Oftentimes, in the passing strange of our lives, the questions are never satisfied, and yet we weave entire colourful worlds of lore, fronds of wisdom even, around the complexities and intricacies of ‘not-knowing’.
We invite you to share with us your words, your ideas, your talisman of hope.
Let 2024 be the year that you tell your story, whatever it may be, wherever in the world you may reside.