No one will protect you from the sea
The sun
It’s late.
The sun is falling on its face.
Drunk on this chaotic day, whipping the backs of the negroes of the Antilles.
The sun is sad.
It’s guzzling all the water of the seas.
We should still give the stumbling foreman-sun a crutch so he can rise tomorrow morning.
He must rise anyway.
For the masters, a good sun is a sun that works tirelessly.
The sky
You angered the sky.
You angered the sun.
Even the flowers are angry.
Even the birds of paradise and the ladybugs are angry.
No one on earth wants to do you good anymore; and the sky blows cyclones, spits its hail on you, it chills you in the summer, and gives you droughts in the rainy season, because it’s sulking.
You have wasted the earth, the trees and the animals; you have made your zoos, your cash cows, your blood-spattered hummingbirds, your sugarcane plantations where you sweetened humanity.
You have ruined the world; you made slaves of little girls, raped at the foot of cocoa trees; you exterminated entire families during the Shoah; you exploited your child slaves at an age when they should be playing; your insecticidal genocides; and to build your beautiful wooden houses, you burned down the forest.
You who drew borders to protect yourselves from the black tide; you who are responsible for the waters overtaking islands around the world; you who are far from the cyclones; and, you who let blacks sink to the bottom of the seas, the waves crashing back and forth against the beach, drowning in salty water; you think you are untouchable.
You will see the wave of tsunamis reach your cities.
You may run, beg the sky, ask your immigrant housekeepers for forgiveness, kneel before our watchful fathers in your white-owned shops, the great waters will pour down on you.
The Atlantic
Do you hear the grumbling of the waves?
How many oceans and seas must swallow our black bodies to pay the price for America, for tobacco, tabasco, cocoa, cobalt, and coconuts, to pay the price for Europe, for its rafts of El Dorado?
The Mediterranean
How do you protect yourself from the sea?
Magnetic Lampedusa, Gibraltar of the false starts of disillusioned migrants, beauty of the European beaches, cradles of drowning, land of asylum where Africans wash up, thirsty for Europe.
Centuries gone by, thrown to the sea of slave traders and never rescued.
Negroes drowned in the white salt of the seas, for the sweet money of white colonists.
Gluttonous Mediterranean Sea that swallows the black bodies of refugees.
The Caribbean
A Caribbean Sea that drums against the earth. From which angry winds was this storm made? Tropics swept by unjust cyclones, peril of hurricanes. Overseas devastated, sugar islands soaked in salted waves. A typhoon soaking everything, causing survivors’ tears to flow, undoing family ties, branches from their tree, and water from its stream. A Tropic of Cancer, sick with the wind’s rage. Unloved, bitter sea, salted with sin. A coiled wave pouring out on the sand. A fragmented beach, a crumbling cliff of a salt ocean. An island of sugar, a landscape of servitude. A land of slaves excavated from Africa. French colonies, Greater and Lesser Antilles. Caribbean Sea, a single mother, you birthed all these little isles that you embrace with your waters. Black mother, nurtured by misery, a sea guilty of carrying Triangular Trade slave ships on its back; a sea of deportees, Mother of the ancestors who were dismembered from Africa. A sea overwhelmed to have carried Christopher Columbus in her currents, demon conquistadors or white devils. Where do you throw yourself from to evade this history that you dislike? Sea of white foam, white-skinned salt, an adolescent sea, a sea of fatherless sons, a sea of men drowned in punch, a sea of rum routes. Raging Caribbean Sea, your salted tears pour down your cheek; you calm your waters, suppressing your waves of anger before slapping your children’s lands with your tsunamis. You shed your waters on us, over and over you drown us in your tears. Tell me why you fight against your islands that you hold responsible for all the wrongs the world has done you. You mumble your tears into the azure wind, you weep from your cyclone eye, restless whirlwinds of the one like you who hurls herself against the boulders because she’s tired of living. Your inconsolable sorrow, your roll of salt groans; in loops, you weep against the shore, pouring your arms of sea against the sand. Back up. Back up. Roll yourself up in the foam that makes your tears, fight once more with the little bits of land. With every wave, a tiny piece of you evaporates, your face wet with salt. Tell me what your tears can do against this seafront. Tell me what your waters can do against the stones of proud lands. Bash your head, wave after wave, bash yourself against the sharp rocks that line the coast, bash your water and tear yourself against the cliff. Oh, relentless mother, unload yourself against the impenetrable rocks, weep, rip the arrogant coconut trees from the private beaches, lay your entire wave across the great seaside cities where the tourists from the metropolis lounge. Pour out your grief into this hurricane. Gust your winds upon us. Shed your waters on us. Wash our cities of the sins of history. Slide the lands of our islands upon us.
When I grimace with tears, I have the same face as you.
The beasts
And here, this end of the world that is here yet remains nowhere for those who live here, not being from here, being here by force, in the world of here where neither animals, nor plants, nor men know how to say if they are truly from here, in a world where we made everything come, where we imprisoned beasts from all four corners of the world on an island.
Raccoon, island raccoon, do you know where your ancestors are?
The revolt coming from here, always from the world of beasts, from the noise of trees, from the depths of excavated slave lands, from magic Maroons with the appearances of cat, catfish, catbird.
Magnificent Frigate, you no longer dare to nest in Guadeloupe, for centuries now the colonizers have massacred you in your nest to make a remedy of your flesh.
Gwo-bèk, Gran Gosier, pelicans of the mangroves, beaches, bays, and lagoons, you die in the Caribbean because of pesticides.
Rhinella Marina, Cane Toad, Mating toads singing the music of raining nights, Cane Toad, the whites brought you here so you would account for your voracity, so you would put your hunger at the service of the master, you had to eat the pests that hindered the sugarcane.
Little Mongoose, Indian Mongoose, we brought you here to eat the rats. You too were brought here by force in ships from the end of the world. You too were captured to work for the whites’ gold. You were to devour the rats that ravaged the sugarcane that made France’s fortune. You are a ‘good migrant’, a model foreigner, but you did your job poorly. You failed to eat enough to fill your belly, but you did eat, kill, digest, and finish off the burrowing owl, the Giant Ameiva lizard, the Mabuya, who were at home here.
Wolf and white man’s feud.
And all the barbarities you have done to Babar, Barbarian Barbados, merchant of slaves, fortune of Alibaba and Bamboula, white necrophilia of wretched negroes, formerly ‘Negro yams,’ immigrated or deported, stripped of their names: iguana, land crab, Touloulou crab, delicious flesh eaten with peppers; caught in Easter season when you cross sideways through landscapes to mate, bee, fly, from flower to flower, cassava ant, ants accidentally introduced here during the importation of plants, Mountain of Suffering, suffering Soufrière bearing the stunted trees of Guadeloupe on its brow, wild pineapple, immigrant fruit and important plants, papaya, cacao pods and coconut of India, lychee from China, starfruit from Indonesia, guava and avocado from Brazil, mango tree from Réunion, breadfruit tree and flamboyant from Madagascar, butterflies traveling in the holds of white boats, Guadeloupe, butterfly island, oxen brought by colonizers, imported from Spain and Portugal, tropical safari, zebu cattle from Africa, cattle from India and Europe, herons, cattle egrets, mongoose to kill the parrot, papaya, cocoa pods, tiger mosquito, Dog’s Tooth jasmine, catfish, Thin Cow creeper, Ladybug, pig and pike, violated countries of Africa, wasp nest, recruiting Zebra, tooth-rage, parrotfish, wolf-dog, guinea pig and bird of ill omen, and the chlordecone banana tree, and the banana tree deported to grow in cold earth where it bears no fruit, flayed bare, and African goddess, sorceresses, herds of the world, of mule, of pack, and of inseparable. Your savages, your fools, your idiots, your brutes, stuck in the stupidity of beasts, your white dogs set on your negroes for the clash and crash, for the high and the blow, your evil white fangs that you make kamikaze then leave to burn like Kleenex thrown to the ground.
The flowers
The flowers of Guadeloupe, nestling on my butterfly island, Flowers of the tropics, aromas of Martinique, essence of Jamaica, zeb à pic. You yourselves remedy and romance of all those enslaved women deprived of love. Symphony of Africa drums, Flowers of the Antilles, Rose of porcelain, so fragile in a broken world, you yourselves the colour majesty of rainbow magic, multi-coloured nature of the nations of people of colour, you yourselves Creole epic flower, you yourselves nectar of fairy-plumed hummingbirds, in a world of red hibiscus, colours of blood.
Forest flowers, Wild Orchid, woody scent; you are the hope of our disobedience to the masters, flowers of here that take us back there in their pagan perfumes, savagely trampled by pesticides from elsewhere; you are the wild encroaching on the paths of solitude; you are the ones we can pick to go rot in the sugarcane fields.
Flowers of wonders, birds of paradise, enchantment of your beaks that sing the miracles of life, vocalizing in the trade winds of manicured gardens, flute of wind, perfect perfume of impatient freedoms, prayers chanted over the broken chains of suffering.
Flowers of flamboyant, nesting high in the branches, oranges, carmines, setting sun, colours of flames and volcanoes, dragons of the skies of fire on the eve of cyclones, you are the jewels of sulphur mines, the flames of riots and mutiny; you are confetti of hope in a world of buried dreams and crumbs of love for slaves forbidden to exist.
Cotton flowers from branches wounded by whips, cotton of fibres, cotton of spinning mills of exploited childhoods, cotton of white flowers watered by the blood of black slaves exhausted from the Black Code, cotton of the rich, cotton of the slaves of King Louis, glistening with the sweat of Louisiana; who grew rich from America’s cotton?
Overseas
I try to sleep, but the huddled worries of my cramped shack keep me awake. The odour of tobacco in the sheets, the chlordecone bananas sweating their poison beside the bed, keep me awake.
Translated by: Ash Pearson
