More on: Jamaica

The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. —Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl” (translated by Paul Blackburn) WHEN I FIRST MET those bedridden children in the Kingston slums, their existence disturbed me. I wondered why God would create such useless beings, whose only inheritance was…

Laughter is one way in which I experience God, and so I want to write about the ways in which I am sometimes lucky to experience the divine, as friend. A friend who makes you laugh out loud, and who makes you weep. I’m a weeper, and that too is a gift from God.

AS A CHILD growing up on the island of Jamaica, it seemed to me that people, especially women, were always singing hymns as they went about their business. Women bending low over washtubs, or standing knee deep in swift-running rivers, would produce scrub rhythms from the friction of soaped cloth rubbed hard between fists, and…