I love how you bring us to the sand and the alternative metaphorical possibilities it holds. Instead of focusing on the horrors of the middle passage, you attend to what happened after, on land--how resistance and rebellion shaped the landscape and is remembered and archived. Where water is often seen as ephemeral, something that cleanses, washes away, or renews, the sand is something that holds and stores. By comparison it may seem stagnant but in fact, as you show us, it is dynamic, mutable, pliable, and full of possibilities.

something about the ambiguity, the inability to find an objective, logical, empirical "answer," reminds me of the sand. it is the stuff of legends, of tales, of inherited stories that shift as they move through generations--a duppy epistemology. It reminds me of the question, who is in charge? what is the source of the power that is exerted over this landscape?

This whole section is brilliantly done. At once I hear many voices, the voices of those who walk alongside us, but also I see the moment of encounter as something messy and overlapping, which reveals the porousness of borders between worlds and worldviews. Both conflict and confluence are effected. The use of the em dash is just excellent.

wow! so evocative

real love!

land remembers--it documents, bears witness.

Like Sweet Home. The cruelty of sweetness & beauty.

black is delightful, beautiful, mutable, melting

Throughout your story are questions of agency and power. WHO and/or WHAT is in charge; how these are sites of negotiation, how power is always unstable and changing hands; different kinds of power (and knowledge) meeting and clashing. There are so many moments where people are "pulled" or "guided" or "driven." This all plays out dramatically by the end of course (where we are faced the ultimate question of agency in death), but little bits of it emerge as we read.

just wrenching. I can hear and feel this

thinking of how often Toni Morrison's characters are repulsed by sugar and sweetness. Guitar, in Song of Solomon, says candy reminds him of dead people and white people. These memories mix together.

a number that ghosts like!

a reenactment (like the husband's play?) of the colonial relation. the persistence of colonial shape & structures in the "post" colony...we also see this in the story of the pink sand.

the blackness of the sand is energy, mobile, dynamic

again, surface is so important: what it conceals, what it is meant to re/produce, who it is for.

the underside of luxury; the labor and violence and disrepair beneath the smooth surface of late capitalism!

repentance as an alternative reading of the pandemic--what might the pandemic look like/mean within other epistemologies? So much epistemological conflict plays out in the space of the resort.

beautiful image

I love how the night appears; how blackness appears. Something that can shift and move and kiss. Reminds me of this Fred Moten phrase, the "midnight of category's beyond" (Black & Blur, 226).

The use of the second person is so effective here and throughout the story--it raises the specter of the reader's complicity, but also gestures to the presumed neutrality of the white sovereign subject, the Tourist. YOU neutralizes and naturalizes the perspective of the colonizer.