ABSTRACT
For the people of the Caribbean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea are charged with symbolic power. They are not merely the generic “Ocean Sea” of certain literary or cinematic fantasies. Such fantasies continue to exist and thrive, from Baudelaire to Walt Disney. But if we believe Claude Lévi-Strauss, such “innocent” imaginary treasures of fi ctional and poetic magic have been forever tainted by the “half corrupted memories” of a “proliferating and overexcited civilization [that] troubles forever the silence of the seas.”1 In the literal, scientifi c or symbolic sense, this original silence is of course debatable. At any rate, since Columbus, if ever the sea was silent, it now speaks, multifariously, and the subjects of its enunciations are not necessarily mythical adventures, neat hybridity, or exotic memories.2
