By Carmin Wong

Black diaspora is at once about particular locations (actual and imagined); roots/uprooting (principally understood as from Africa, but just as much to and within Africa, in other cases); and routes that bodies, ideas, and texts travel. By diaspora, we refer to these conditions of movement and emplacement, and to processes of (dis)identification, but also to relationality, as Jacqueline Nassy Brown points out. Commentators often miss this vital piece. 
— Jafari S. Allen 

A Caribbean exists in the public imagination.  

In this imagination, it is a land of visually aesthetic, incandescent beaches, suns that peak over volcanic mountains, a place where rupture only happens in shady breezeways. It is a market manicured by tourism, far-away vacation homes, brochures accessorized with words like “escape” and “paradise.” Somewhere under closed eyelids, thick bushes of grass graze the sworded hands of market-people, who by day, offer thinly sliced mangos rubbed in salt and pepper sauce. There are coconuts everywhere, there are mouths, but hunger is distant.   

In this imagination, residence is temporary — an annual act of visitation. Memories of colonial history, settlement, and confinement are hidden along the passageway from white picket fence to sandy shores. Time does not pass; for Mother Earth holds still the Caribbean.  

In this imagination, the Caribbean is not a daughter of empire or a son of war.  

Her tongue, more vibrant than mutiny. 

Despite the seasonal hideaways, a parallel reality exists. The Caribbean is both a physical place and a metaphysical space. Alive, awakened, and actualized, it holds culture, kinship across borders — where people practice Creole languages across extended households, play with talking drums and songs out of fossil memory, and ink, and old-age amber. A diaspora formed by that which could not be sold away or tossed overboard. 

People tie garments around their heads, their bodies carrying stories within ancestral dances. 

The Caribbean for Caribbeans — both located geographically and elsewhere — is a paradox. A reckoning of oneself, one’s land, one’s nationhood as both a subject of a colonial past and a lawless, unshackled path to freedom.  

This Caribbean is interspatial, cosmic, and Earthly.  

It is both then and now—and will be. It is both now and future. 

It is cloak and refuge. It is fiyah and watah.

It is a universe of stories brought back from dust. 

Poet Samantha Thornhill meditates on these intersections, the ruptures of here and before, explaining both the temporality of one’s homeland and the urgency of memory in her collection The Animated Universe. Harkening back to the collection’s title, her poems animate and enliven the varied experiences of Caribbean life. Whether poems are set in Trinidad or the United States the speakers in each piece illuminate Caribbean history as a past in motion, unshackling itself from the idea of an end. Infinite possibility is present in each piece, as she dreams ideas of freedom and provides a critical view of how western ideals have masked the true culture of the Caribbean.   

In her poem, “Origin (After N. Marin),” Thornhill illustrates one of the violent wreckages of colonialism — that is, the enforcement of a linear time, a preconceived beginning — by challenging, what is (the time) of the Black Diaspora. As the poem opens, she writes: 

Here Thornhill summons an answer to the predetermined demarcations of time — and of African diasporic people’s relationships to time — by proposing a different way to understand one’s origin as not from a beginning but from the “Bend. Break. Mend.” of oneself (10). By the end of this poem, the third in this collection, the speaker’s temporality and acceptance of their own ontology has grown in their recollection. In the final lines, the speaker interrogates their own origin by saying “ Accrue. Forget / to remember myself / again. Born” (10). 

Here, to be born is to experience return, over and over again. It is a process of renewal and the mending of time, to liberate the soul from the physicality of a defined beginning. Moreover, this alignment centers on African values that call into being the circle of life. Life is not to be destroyed; it begins anew, again. 

Throughout this collection, Thornhill gives readers the language to think about a myriad of intimate and infinite moments that cluster our lives, and ultimately, assure us that we are our own universe. She reminds us that power is both spirit and system, it is the cosmic energy within us and in relation to the realities of the outside world. If the demand of colonial power mythologizes us as inferior — if the Caribbean is seen only through the lens of its conquest — how can we affirm our power, as stars do in the galaxy, to combust from this state of othering? How do we release ourselves from a Western center and return to a nebula of our creation?  

In the poem, “Elegy for Wishbones (for Dapo),” Thornhill evokes the body as a vessel that holds memory. She writes: 

In this part of the poem, she laments the tragedy of violence enacted on the flesh while also grappling with the speaker’s autonomy to grieve, digest, and assert their own power. Power becomes a form of self-actualization, a desire to “unleash / [one’s] most enlightened parts” (63). Through heavy imagery and alliteration, this poem makes visible the invisible space between reality and possibility, as the speaker ruminates over historical carnage and its influence over present circumstances, mobility, and access. 

Towards the end of her collection, poems such as “On First Hearing A Child Call You Old” and “Ancestor” offer another linkage between life and death. Thornhill reminds us that human connection is also tethered to spiritual connection, which transcends the bonds of flesh and transports audiences, again, across time. Situated only a few poems apart, these two poems spark an inter-generational and spirited conversation across the page, just as light travels between galaxies.  

In the poem, “On First Hearing A Child Call You Old,” the speaker understands “birth as a mere / widening of mouths, and death divine tectonics” placing the natural movement and evolution of one’s life — that is, aging — a sacred experience not apart from the youngness of birth (78). The speaker’s wit across the first seven stanzas displays comedic discontent between this new “insurrection,” the immortality associated with the fading illusion of youth, while the final stanza reveals the peace they have come to know: death is but a state of moving on. This is furthered by the voice of the ancestor in the second poem, who speaks from the point of ascension. The speaker animates this experience saying:  

The speaker of the poem conjures a familial past to comfort her in the present. The ancestor reminds her of the power of dreaming, for that is enough to resurrect histories, cultures, and people, and breathe new life across generations.  

One of Thornhill’s greatest strengths lies in her ability to conceal her speakers’ motives while forging stories of ownership and calls to action. Her carefulness of language, hidden messages, and oral style evokes diasporic traditions of insurrection from the plantation to thereafter, and in doing so, offer an idea about what freedom can mean or look like from within. Even in the cover of her book, Thornhill veils the image of new life — an image of a newborn baby made from a constellation of stars — behind the collection’s title. This sentiment is projected across her poems, whether they touch on the rhyme and rhythm of Caribbean music or Black families and kinship, she reminds us that there is infinite life to be gleaned in the pursuit of both restoring what has been stolen and sitting with what remains.   

This debut collection reflects Thornhill’s voice as a seasoned writer, spoken word artist, and performer, as she seamlessly positions herself in a tradition of decolonial worldmaking. Using her poetry to participate in creative theoretic approaches to Black freedom struggles, she evokes introspection while exploring the complexities of identity and belonging for African peoples across the Caribbean diaspora. The Animated Universe becomes a poetic cartography navigating us towards a formation of freedom that reminds us of the divine power within.  

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Works Cited 

Allen, Jafari S. “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 18 no. 2, 2012, p. 211-248, doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472872. 

Thornhill, Samantha. The Animated Universe. Peepal Tree Press, 2022. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Carmin Wong is a poet, playwright, and scholar whose poems and plays have earned her much recognition. She has been awarded grants by Poets & Writers and Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr. She has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Phillips Academy — Andover, and the Cooper-DuBois Mentoring program at Penn State. Wong’s recent research has been supported with a grant from the Africana Research Center at Penn State. Her work has been featured on WRBH: Radio for the Blind & Handicapped, Obsidian, The Quarry, Sou’wester, Xavier Review, Antenna.Works, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of A Chorus Within Her, produced by Theater Alliance, co-founder of Carmin and Aye’s Prom Giveaway, and founder of Feed Those Without Shelter in NYC. Wong is currently pursuing a dual-title PhD in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Penn State.