Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
I'm from the Caribbean, and I love the dance hall sound.
Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.
My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.
I'm representing the Bahamas; I'm representing a lot of islands - it's a whole nation behind me, on my back.
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
You know, I'm a modern day Harry Belafonte; I got the swagger of the island.
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
Cuba has long played an outsized role in the world's imagination.
The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance.... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.
'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.
Every time you hear anyone talk about the Caribbean, whether it's Caribbeans themselves or people outside, there's always talk about women's bodies. Talk about this voluptuousness, this kind of stereotype of what a Caribbean person is. And I think these are stereotypes that even people inside the culture, we actually sometimes claim them and we're very proud.
The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
I've noticed in the Caribbean culture, the women aren't submissive - they're very fiery.
My family were from Jamaica.
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
When you're Jamaican, you don't consider yourself African American even though everyone else considers you that.
Obviously, I rep Jamaica. I'm a first generation born Jamaican-American. My parents are born and raised in Jamaica, my grandparents are born and raised in Jamaica, my other family still lives in Jamaica, and I still go back there.
What was the competition? Well, I remember this Puerto Rican who came out in a short skirt and a gun.
As Jamaicans, we're very resilient and strong-willed people.
I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
West Indian cricket means so much to people who live here. And when we're not doing well, we all feel it.
