The Strength of our Roots
September 21, 2022There’s a mountainous area in Clarendon, Jamaica, a parish to the west of the capitol, Kingston. My grandfather, Frederick, was born there on a mountainside…
Author: JColemanMerritt
Why CARICON?
May 31, 2022Why Caricon? When I was a child I was a West Indian. I didn’t know it then, but I was an Indian because Christopher Columbus…
Alcántara…
April 12, 2022Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara keeps protesting for freedom of expression in his country – Cuba. And he keeps going to prison for his protests. Every…
Banning Truth? No!
February 25, 2022Recently there have been some concerns expressed in the general media – major networks, I should say – about the fact that various political and…
A New Year for Cuba…
January 27, 2022On the second day of Kwanzaa, we light a candle for Kujichagulia – self-determination in English – autodeterminación in Spanish. In this New Year, it…
Chilling words…
December 27, 2021Checking in on the trials of the three vigilantes who lynched Ahmaud Aubrey and the one who murdered two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded…
Seeing Ourselves When We Read…Appreciating Others
December 9, 2021Seeing Ourselves When We Read…Appreciating Others We all love to “see” ourselves in whatever we read. We relate, sometimes, to the way characters look or…
Submit/Submission
November 24, 2021I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about this term: to submit. My oldest association with the word comes from religious contexts: submit to the…
Caste… framing an American dilemma
October 27, 2021Isabel Wilkinson’s latest book, Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, immerses the reader in what it looks like, what it feels like and where it…
Why Fear Women?
September 28, 2021I read this comment some weeks ago. It sticks in my mind – comes back to the surface often: “Women are the greatest untapped, unused…
