Edwidge Danticat: Dawn After the Tempests
'I WAS HEADING to Grenada at the same time that the island was hosting the State of the Tourism Industry Conference, one of the region’s largest gatherings on the subject. Though the conference was planned before Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated many Caribbean islands whose economies rely heavily on tourism, the timing seemed prescient. Indeed, on the conference program I scrolled through on the plane were discussions focused on disaster preparedness as well as recovery and rebuilding. I was not going to the conference though, because I am not a tourism expert.
The people sitting on either side of me on the plane were not tourism experts either. They were tourists, two young American couples on their honeymoons. After listening to them exchange wedding stories, I turned to the poet and essayist Audre Lorde’s “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report,” an essay she wrote a few weeks after the 1983 United States’ invasion of her parents’ homeland.
I had read Lorde’s essay many times before — it’s the last chapter of her seminal 1984 collection “Sister Outsider”— but I wanted to read it again before seeing Grenada for the first time.
That we landed at Maurice Bishop International Airport, which is named after the former Prime Minister of Grenada who was assassinated six days before the start of the U.S. invasion, might have intrigued Lorde. I felt her begin this journey with me as I walked down the airplane steps, the sun that is only this sparkling bright in the Caribbean, beaming down on my face.
“The first time I came to Grenada I came seeking ‘home,’” began Lorde’s essay of her 1978 visit. She had flown into the now closed Pearl’s Airport in Grenville on the northeastern coast of the island. Back then, there was one paved road, she reported. Now, there are many smooth and winding ones through lively neighborhoods as well as tree-covered hills. . .
I watched an interview with the tireless mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, and heard echoes of Audre Lorde in her voice.
“There is nothing that unites people more anywhere in the world than injustice,” the mayor said. “We have to get food, we have to get water or else we are being condemned to a slow death. It may be easy to try to disregard us. It may be easy because we are a U.S. territory and a colony of the United States. But we’re a people, damn it.” . .
The people of the Caribbean speak, the poet wrote, because we “were not born
to be your vassals.”'
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/travel/edwidge-danticat-hurricane-irma-maria-tourist-grenada.html?