Cherub-road - Cherub Road

How do I politely tell people that they need hobbies that don't involve the internet or activism?

Start a garden. Get into birdwatching. Join a diamond painting group. Join a book club. Learn how to embroider. Take a pottery class.

Just. Anything that doesn't involve constant arguments about theory and praxis. Interact with people who are outside of your immediate friend group. Shove your hands into some dirt. Create something just for yourself.

HEARTBREAKING: coworker you had normal casual conversations with reveals their rancid political views one day and you can never look at them the same

by Onkel Luecke

hi here’s more medical trauma / deconstruction stuff

In Cesaire’s triumphant acceptance of the “special geography” of the Caribbean land and sea-scape, he imagines the archipelago as a “world map made for my own use” marked with the historical wounds of slavery and colonialism, on which “beached hurricanes” appear alongside “demasted hulls, old sores / rotted bones, vapors, shackled volcanoes” […]. The hurricane is almost over-determined in Caribbean literature as a figure signifying a social ecology - the dialectical “poetics of Relation,” to use Glissant’s term (or “tidal dialectics” to use Brathwaite’s), between humans and extra-human Caribbean nature – whose particularity European poetics cannot capture […]. The word hurricane itself was received into English from the Spanish huracan, which derived in turn from the Taino word hurican […]. The word is a palimpsest of the eruptive history of multiple colonizations, dispossessions […] in the Caribbean, […] and recording the continuity of extreme weather conditions as they marked multiple cultures throughout the longue duree. ‘Hurricane’, as a word denoting the particularity of Caribbean ecologies, has been crucial to geopoetics […].

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In the Hispanophone tradition […] the description of the cyclical rhythm of storm-events, a periodicity which seems to contradict the linear, homogenous time of […] modernity, gestures to an experience of temporality which is particular, eruptive and rooted in the lived experience of regional environmental conditions: a ‘metereological pulse’ which pulsates through the storm-aesthetics of generations of Caribbean and Latin-American writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez similarly conceives of the hurricane as embodying the […] diversity of the Caribbean, and thus underpinning his magical realist aesthetic: I believe the Caribbean showed me how to see reality in another way, to accept supernatural elements as something that forms part of our daily life. […] I know all its islands: […] hot and dusty towns whose houses are destroyed by hurricanes; and on the other hand skyscrapers of solar glass and a sea of seven colours. (Garcia Marquez cited in Browitt, 2007, 55)

Again, in Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s oft-cited theorization of the “repeating islands,” the ecological features of the “generalized instability of vertigo and hurricane” and the repeated bifurcation of lands across the Caribbean archipelago are inextricable from the cultural features of “historiographic turbulence” […].

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In the Anglophone literary tradition, the most famous articulation of the hurricane’s centrality to Caribbean identity is Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite’s declaration in History of the Voice (1984) that the “hurricane does not roar in pentameters,” thus presenting the “rhythm” of “environmental experience” as integral to the formation of Caribbean poetics: Shakespeare’s tempest must become a hurricane and take on the dialect of the Caribbean earth (Brathwaite, 1984, 8). […]

Even in Francophone literatures, where the word used for hurricane is cyclone, the image of the Caribbean storm still dominates poetics, as in the famous example from Martinican Aime Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939), […] a demiurgic utterance […] the lived experience of the Caribbean environment: “I would say hurricane. I would say river. I would say tornado” (2001, 12).

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Haitian poet Franketienne, member of the Spiralism movement, similarly imagines the poet’s mythic utterance as a “storm of words” in his poem “Dialecte de cyclones”:

Every day I used the dialect of lunatic hurricanes.

I speak the madness of the clashing winds.

Every evening I use the patois of furious rains.

I speak the fury of waters in flood.

Every night I talk to the Caribbean islands in the tongue of hysterical storms. I speak the hysteria of the rutting sea. […]

Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Languages of storms.

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All text above by: Sharae Deckard. “The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature.” In The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, edited by Campbell and Niblett, pages 25-45. 2016. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]