for the navy and in the colonies. In fact, the people of Martinique did not wait for the arrival of the act of April 27 to set themselves free. On May 22, 1848, they took to the streets to demand their rights; this obliged the government of the colony to enforce the act of abolition immediately. 2 Two statues of Schœlcher were toppled on May 22, 2020: the first was located in Fort-de-France outside the former Palace of Justice where it had stood imposingly since 1904, and the second at the entrance to the center of the town of Schœlcher. This second statue was installed in 1965. 3 The 1848 act of abolition stipulated in article 5 that “the National Assembly will determine the amount of the compensation to be granted to the colonists.” One year later, a law was passed awarding 12 million francs in compensation to the colonists of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion, Senegal, Sainte-Marie, and Nosy Be. 4 Not a single nèg mawon (Maroon) with a name has a square, street, avenue, school, or airport named after them in Martinique. I’m not including the handful of monuments, not nearly as familiar as the statues of Schœlcher, that symbolize the resistance of the enslaved, such as the Tree of Liberty, a work by Khokho René Corail, or The Bench offered by the Toni Morrison Foundation as part of the “Bench by the Road” project. 5 The Vérité pour Adama collective, which was at the origin of this mass demonstration, was founded in the wake of the death of Adama Traoré on July 19, 2016, in a gendarmerie in the Paris suburbs. The young Frenchman of Malian origin had been stopped by the police for an identity check and was taken into police custody. The Traoré family, who have always implicated the police in Adama’s death, have been fighting for four years to see justice done. 6 Entitled J’étouffe (I Can’t Breathe), Peck’s text appeared in the weekly Le 1, No. 301, on June 17, 2020. 7 This debt of independence, which dates from April 1825, obliged Haiti to borrow from French banks in order to compensate the former colonists. The total amount of the debt was set at 150 million gold francs. 8 Extremely toxic to water and soil, and carcinogenic to humans, chlordecone, marketed as Kepone, has been banned in the US since 1976 and was withdrawn from the market in France in 1990. However, to optimize banana production—the pillar of the French Antilles economy— the French state went on using the pesticide in banana plantations there from 1973 to 1993. Experts estimate that it will take centuries for the contaminated soil of the French Antilles to return to health. Sunlight & Cedar by Ken Hada strawberry hedgehog press During quarantine, when not watching the news or reading a novel, I find my daily vision drawn to immediate surroundings: geese touching down in the parking lot where we safely walk (no need to come within six feet of anyone); a rabbit eating a carrot a few feet from me as I stare over the fence at a neighbor’s hot-pink crepe myrtle; a lone scissortail flycatcher drifting from pole to tree. Ken Hada’s eighth collection , Sunlight & Cedar, shares a similar focus, with poems populated by the trees and animals native to or flying over Oklahoma, our shared state. Beyond these concrete images, though, something intangible becomes most visible: loneliness. And though intangible, its presence is palpable and mirrors much of our collective loss in the year of social distancing. When we reach “When Friends Gather,” after the midway point, we are ready to mourn what we miss when friends gather: “Even our bones / feel better, joints tighten, / we walk straighter.” We “flourish again.” I ordered this book after joining a Facebook live event in which Hada read his work. Watching him read, alone, as listeners commented in the chat stream was a surprisingly emotional experience, confirming the value of virtual events. Yes, connection is there. We’re lonely, but we can be lonely together. And in these poems, trees “hold darkness aloft...
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Dec 17, 2020
Isabelle Siffert 
Open Access
