Bahamas: Christian Campbell

Available for over a year

Photo by Toni McRae Goodman’s Bay II “oh friendly light oh fresh source of light” Césaire Straight to the bush to gather cracked bottles of beer and rum, shards of seaglass smoothed by wind and sand. We Haitian Bahamian descendants, Burial Society flock, crawl through the night. Since the light at dusk is like muslin, we lay the cold body of this man, then, on the shore of Goodman’s Bay. How he wash here we don’t know, but the workers clearing the beach say, This him. John Goodman he name, originally Jean-Paul Delattre, brother of Stephen Dillet, first coloured man in Parliament. Come here on a boat from Haiti back then, back again, so we jewel the edges of his body with shattered bottles, then bear him to the foot of casuarinas in order that his born silhouette self may freely flash and prance— luminous shadow lifting from the sand of this beach name after a black man. Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010)