To evoke my mental world in this way is to follow history from its ‘bad’ side, as Brecht has it, focusing on the afflictions which were lodged in our inner lives. This is the story of colonial oppression. But while true, it misses an important dimension. Intellectually there were also virtues in our capacity to see the world askew, from below or backwards, or from below and backwards, free from the desire for domination which characterized the imperatives of the colonial order. This was to live W. E. B. DuBois’ ‘double consciousness’. We never could subscribe to ‘the rational madness’ (in Derek Walcott’s words) which conceived of progress as a programmed sequence leading us to ‘a dominated future’. Walcott believed such an idea to be ‘the bitter secret of the apple’. We grew up knowing the contingencies, the out-of-placeness, of history. For us history was the carrier of no absolutes and conformed to no overarching scriptural commandments. Nothing was ever codified as having its correct place and time. In a suitably paradoxical formulation, displacement moved to the centre of things. To think in this manner enabled us to catch the world in all its unpredictabilities. Out of our subaltern position there emerged the possibility of engaging with history anew. That colonialism, despite itself, bequeathed to us this way of seeing indicates that within what I’ve identified as the ‘bad’ dynamic of history, contrary and liberating forces were also generated. As the Lévi-Straussian in me later came to realize, the Caribbean has been – for me, personally speaking – good to think with. My understanding of the world was creolized from the start.