Kei Miller Quotes

Know then that every heartbless
given is collected by Jah like mickle and muckle,
or like a basketful of cocoa, and comes back to you
like a dividend.

To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab.

Look, this isn't magic realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No. You don't get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You might as well consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.

How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word
for it -- at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers.

Some days have more roads than others, and some roads more distance, so that when a woman complains how long the day is, maybe she is counting its roads rather than its hours.

If you hear him beat that drum he will reveal something of himself to you, for what is a drumbeat, after all, other than the sound of a great hollowness, like death amplified ?

After all, don't care how you want to sit there and deny the knowledge of River Mumma sitting on her rock - don't care how you deny the knowledge of fallen angels who can jump into your body as they please, or the knowledge of ancestors who sit beside your bed and watch when they not harkening on to the sounds of drumming - don't care how you deny any of it, all of it is still true. All of them things still exist, because them do not need the permission of your belief.

This place was no freedom, and Massa Day was not done. Massa had only changed his name. He was no longer "Busha" or "Buckra" or "Massa". He was now "Boss" or "Miss" or "Sergeant." Sometimes Massa even changed his skin from white to black, making this whole freedom thing complicated. There was further to go; a longer journey ahead.

Now focus. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. We have gone inland. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar - a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin - as if a kind of ruin has befallen them.

The great philosophical question goes: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound? But this is a troubling question, exalting one kind of being above all others. What then of the ears of snakes, or wood frogs, or mice, or bugs? Do they not count? What then of grass, of stone, of earth? Does their witness not matter? If a man flies in Jamaica, and only the poor will admit to seeing it, has he still flown? (...) Always - always - there are witnesses.

It don't take no great skill to write down a story. All you have to do is put one word after the next and you continue like that until it done. But it take a special skill to hear a story-to incline your ears toward what may seem like silence. For nothing in this world is silent, you just have to learn how to hear.