RESIDUE: WORLDS THAT INHABIT US

As humans, we walk through this world hauling remnants of all our individual and collective experiences. We are composites of the things we have seen, been through, the things that have touched our lives and marked us permanently. We are, ourselves, residues of the things that shape the worlds we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us. On a collective level, people of the Caribbean, particularly those of African descent, are residues of a colonial past that was fraught with violence on every level and a successive local legislature that continues to perpetuate much of the exploitative practices of colonialism. On a personal or individual level, most of us have suffered injury to our psyche and to our bodies that have rendered us what we are today. We are, in a sense, residue (what-lefts) hauling residue, carrying the twin load of what Paula Morgan describes in her book, The Terror and the Time, as “violence and trauma induced by the outworking of [historical and] structural inequalities” along with dust we accrue in our personal walk through this world (2). And whether we admit it or not, the lives we now live, the relationships we sustain or fail to sustain, and the lives we impact are touched by the residue of experiences we carry with us into those spheres.