ENTRY DESCRIPTION
“Rebirth from the Ruins of a Great House” pays homage to Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s work “Ruins of a Great House”. The poem offers a complex response to British colonialism in the West Indies by adopting the literary trope of the Gothic house in decay to ponder the legacy of those ‘evil times’. The photograph replaces the imagined Gothic house with the real ruins of a home on a sugar plantation on St. John. A strong and resilient tree can be seen through a window in the wall growing from the remains of those ‘evil times’, just as the peoples of the Caribbean have persevered through the brutality of slavery and colonialism.

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