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Who are we?
Who are our elders, our children?
What do they know?
Who do we remember?
How do we remember?
How do we wish to be remembered?
Time is the master, and we aim to trick it.
vi.
A truism, not widely known:
In the past decade of my sometimes tenuous engagements with the rhetorical significance of Caribbean1 traditions and the forms of inquiry they yield, I have come to conclude that every aspect of my pursuit began with, and has continued to draw its meaning from, a kind of haunting. This is because the Caribbean is a haunted place, and because the people themselves are haunted. To be haunted in the sense I refer to here is not merely to be tortured or harangued by anything in particular, but rather to be moved in a way that may defy easy identification or logical explanation. My understanding of rhetorical subjectivity is a negotiation of the fact that I am as much a subject as I am subject to. My explicit reflection has taken on a heightened significance in the current moment. This essay is being composed in Trinidad at the height and depth of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am still unable to return to the United States, which itself is reeling. A recent spike in cases over the past few weeks and months has amplified the fact that my own mortality is not a tagline or a metaphor, but a reality. A reality that is only the memory of a fact reasserting itself. If the relatively "localized" academic contexts of rhetoric and rhetorical failures that we are now called upon to challenge were not trite enough on their own-our behaviors and misbehaviors-then the stark, objective truth and the subsequent reprioritization of what really matters would be there to place them all in harsh relief.
Though the bold, seemingly incontrovertible tone of this statement may be jarring in the larger culture of equivocations and nuances that shape (and often misshape) the attitude and practice of academic discourse, it is nevertheless true. It will be true when the Caribbeanist (or, if you like, the Caribbean rhetorician) dons like a mask the elaborate terms and trappings of a field in which we and our practices are typically...