I keep jottings of various things I come across in communications with persons or in various readings or observations. It’s a practice from years ago, purely as a reminder of ideas, starting in my days in Canada, and it’s often fascinating to go back to those scribblings and to be vividly struck by what was in front of me then compared to now. Sometimes, the contrasts are comical; more often 
than not they’re intriguing; some are troubling. In the latter category, one I noticed recently is a reference to Carifesta and relates to an email with a Guyanese intellectual friend working in the arts in the USA. In the note, several years ago, he was arguing strongly for the embrace of Carifesta, as an agent for healing the ethnic rift in Guyana. As I said to him at the time: “On your recent email about Carifesta, I have to say that while I agree with you on the notion of inclusiveness, I think it’s wishful thinking to see Carifesta as the agent for that. This cultural divide that we have in Guyana is not unique to us. The world is full of examples of it (the Middle East and Africa are but two current examples) and the condition is so powerful and so wide-ranging that it defeats all efforts to quell it. It was what broke Pakistan off from India, and then Bangaldesh off from Pakistan, and now another break off from Bangladesh looms. Right now, we have the prospect of Iraq splintering into three countries ‒ Sunni, Shiite and Kurd ‒ because of it, with the Iraqis killing each other in that turmoil.”
The propulsion for the above is that today I was reading that email exchange with
