With its grim and ghastly images of colonial history, slavery still inspires West Indian dreams of individual freedom and collectives independence. It also haunts their nightmares. Slavery’s past is part of the present life of the West Indies and it finds eloquent expression in West Indian Poetry. Here is a epitaph to that inheritance, by the Jamaican Dennis Scott.
They hanged him on a clement morning, swung between the falling sunlight and the women’s breathing like a black apostrophe to pain.
