“…and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” – Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Thinking of the Caribbean this week, for obvious reasons. One of the happy aspects of surrealism most people don’t think of was that it opened the door to a number of poets and artists from the Third World. And not just because surrealism was about the “exotic.” Breton’s slanted idea of beauty confirmed what people of African descent suspected: that Western aesthetic ideals were incomplete and exclusive. Years in Louisiana, Florida, and NYC have given me a sense of identity with the Caribbean. But in the inevitable global paroxysm of sympathy after a disaster like this, and what will inevitably be its rapid fading from the awareness of the 24-hour news cycle, I get conflicted. Is there anything beyond a few friends and the coincidences of place (“spots of time”?) that have drawn my allegiance to Haiti and its neighbors? Artists of Negritude saw that “convulsive beauty” is appropriate to the Caribbean, with its precarious islands, diasporic cultural confusions, and political unrest. Likewise it is to postmodern America–
