Counternarratives

You even wrote your thesis on Amilcar Cabral, another poet, one of ours.

Poetry, history, psychology, ban all of it.

You banned most of it.

they have read his Macunaíma and studies and poetry

nd a Broadway matinee of Porgy and Bess

black, Mexican, it wouldn’t matter

“I am a Jinbada, or as one says in your language, Quibanda. I can read the past and the future. I can speak to the living, as now, and to the dead. I can feel the weather before it turns and the night before it falls. Every creature that walks this earth converses with me. I am such a one who is both. Sometimes the spirits fill and mount me as one and the other.

“I know all this and more, such as that you are giving those boys from the town special knowledge for they, as you do, wear the Roman faith like a mask, so

that you can send them out to sustain the heritage of your ancestors, just as I do mine. I also know that you are in great danger if you remain here, because you are in the presence of real evil, but that evil is not mine, nor, in your case, will it come from the Dutch.”

before they transform into the language of the Lusitanians.”

I know that you have written to her in that tongue you speak among yourselves; that you have written to others in Olinda and in the town in that tongue; that your thoughts come to you first in that tongue sometimes