ABSTRACT
There are ancestral and spiritual journeys taken with the strength of those who struggled before me, whose anchors reside in my (physical) ancestry, Vodun religion, languages, sexuality-all cultural vectors in which one acts and is acted upon. These are the core, the center, the parameters and “la source (the river).” I salute my mother, her mother, all those before her until we reach Ezili Danto (Yemoja, Lasirenn, Mammy Wata), the broad elements described above and all their subsets, would warrant considerable expansion elsewhere. But suffices to say that in my view, they both tended to reinforce an argument for an incipient and evolving cultural unity writ large-a universality of sorts within particularities. An illustration of that process might be the detribalization of South Africa before and under Apartheid in the United States and the Caribbean, and the (re)constitution of these populations into Africans, Blacks or West Indians over historical time; or, as argued by some anthropologists, for instance, the overarching cultural unity of the Caribbean archipelago under the process of creolization, from similar historical conditions though the masters were not the same.
