I come from that part of the Americas, the Caribbean, which is arguably the living laboratory of the dynamism of the encounters between Africa and Europe on foreign soil, and of both the Native American who had inhabited the real estate of the Americas, time out of mind, during periods of conquest and dehumanisation, along with the corresponding process of struggle and resistance. For these purposes, northeast Brazil, with its iconic centre in Bahia, New Orleans, and all of the eastern littoral of North America referred to as plantation America, constitute, along with the island-Caribbean, a geocultural area that houses a civilisation with its own inner logic and its inner consistency.

The advent of later arrivants to the Caribbean after the abolition, first, of the trade in the enslaved Africans and, later, of slavery itself, did not save them from labour exploitation. But those new arrivants did enter as free men and women into a society which by then had the promise of decency and civility informing human, if not an altogether humane, existence. This has been made distinctive by the catalytic role played by the African Presence in social formation within a psychic universe, a great part of which has been plunged, wittingly and unwittingly, into subterranean and submarine silence, to mix a metaphor. Mixed metaphors are, in any case masks to hide real visages, audible decibels to mask the ultrasound, or mute buttons to impose that threatening silence which Jimmy Cliff, the reggae superstar and talented lyricist, characteristically described in his song Price of Peace:

You stole my history

Destroyed my culture

Cut out my tongue

So I can't communicate

Then you meditate

And separate

Hide my whole way of life

So myself I should hate.

It is fitting that ones like us in the CARICOM Caribbean should be concerned with breaking the silence, that second abstract from the article: The Psychic Inheritance: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. The conclusion of this and other interesting perspectives on abolition, emancipation and post-slavery society can be found in Jamaica Journal Vol. 31 Nos. 1-2.

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