ADAM PATTERSON

(2016)

THE URCHIN
Home may easily always be elsewhere, by which I mean a place that is
recognised as not quite yet, at every moment in which ones feet touch
ground.1
In the reclamations of ones plot (in land and self) of the Caribbean, there is a continued
wading against colonial influence. In the contemporary Caribbean, touristic intervention has
worked as an impediment against the formation of identity, while recognising ones self situated
in the oppressed dialogue. The Antillean is left flailing and thrashing in doubled attempts of
rejection and hasty grasps of European and imagined African ideals; all in the hope of
refinement and reparation of those shreds and scraps of identity into something new. This
complicated resistance (which keeps itself open to the entry of desired culture) is a Caribbean
wrestle the crux of open-mouthed resistance.2
Humans are not so hardy that we can thrive in our bodies as castles we are spoiled or
tasked with building shells [homes] as lines of defence and emblems of territory, property and
personal space. Sea Urchins are not so fragile. They are the perfect model for the Antillean openmouthed resistance the performance of clinging to this land, claiming dominion, absorbing
what is truly ours overcoming dispossession with a back of thorns to deflect assimilation and
imperialism.
Each can return to the Skin without any inhibitions imposed by the exterior
attributes of the Castle.3
This invocation, rather than accessory, of the Urchin is a tactic of the Paradise Militant,
through which we must mobilise ourselves toward ingestive interpretation the posture faced
downwards, mouth to dirt, consuming landscape as analysis followed by the excretion of
culture the production and establishment of culture as waste-product of our analytical
ingestion. We spend so much time, as a people, directing our mouths upward / outward, hoping
to be quenched by food that falls from a colonised sky, one never thinks to look at his feet
downward to the land that grounds him as Caribbean.

THE HERMIT
To invoke the Urchin is to invoke the ability of the Hermit that which involves a capacity
for meditative and defensive states in similitude. The pursuit of identity, as experienced by the
Antillean (in his wake of Postcolonial reflection and neocolonial encounter), is arguably a
hermitage insofar as it requires a submergence into the Atlantic pool of memory, a self-burial
1

Forbes, C. Between Plot and Plantation, Trespass and Transgression: Caribbean Migratory Disobedience in
Fiction and Internet Traffic. Small Axe, 2012. 16(2 38), 2012. 23-42.
2
The coining of open-mouthed resistance is indebted to the anatomy of the sea urchin, whose mouth is a
central orifice situated at the base of the creature. The urchin ingests food, which is digested upwards and
excreted through the anus located at the central peak of the urchins dome. This term is to refer to a practice
of repossessing the Caribbean landscape and cultural identity by returning a focus to the land, itself, while
backing the distraction, interruption and assimilation of foreign neocolonial forces, in resistance.
3
Lamming, G. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 159.

beneath the soil of plantations ruined of long erased Amerindian bone yards alongside a
negotiation against the gale-force battering ram of contemporary foreign visitation /
consumption [a tourism as formidable as Sargassum]. A hurricane may only devastate what it
can see as penetrable the Hermit / Urchin is, fortunately, invisible and hardy in his decision to
be laid locked in stubborn refusal of the storms incessant knocking. A land already ravaged by a
history of storms need not be mourned but rather reinterpreted and analysed. As long as we of
the Antilles remain, persistent in a culture of resistance, a storm may be discarded as trivial as
the seasons and bracing it, the same.
In advocating a collective hermitage, what must take emphasis is the sublimation and
fluidity between manoeuvring states that is, a mastery of the Hermitic approach in his
proverbial ascent up the mountain / into the cave [a marronage] whereby through a gaining of
insight, in a meditation and a protective negligence against the Outside [the Foreign / the
Overseas / the Abroad], an almost alchemical transformation occurs by which the Hermit
descends or emerges graced with a nation language,4 a language and cultural negotiation
sophisticatedly illegible to the will of the coloniser. To reword this, an importance lies in the
Antillean Hermits capacity to be present as a factor of influence in his society and culture, while
still invisible and impenetrable to the touristic gaze and will; an Urchin who may face his island
without risking his sanctity to the West of whom he backs.5
All music born in the West Indies [...] were born from silence. Because it was
forbidden to speak aloud and to sing. It was born from silence and in silence.
One of the common cultural points of music in all the plantation areas of the
Americas was the necessity to sing without being heard by somebody else,
by the master or another person. The art of silence is fundamental in this
kind of music.6
[Aside] Let it be made clear that this proposition is not instigating a historical rejection or denial
of colonial rule or Western influence in the Caribbean, like proposals before that seek to restore
a lost Africa untouched by history [impossible]. This is, instead, a proposition that bears a
consciousness and hypersensitivity to the European presence and is hereby worn and
embittered by its ongoing injection. Frankly, this Urchin has had enough. How may an island
stand to look at itself if still knelt to a stature of servitude? How may an island stand to care for
itself if still bent in gape to the prick of Empire? This Urchins flesh is tired of being picked by
transatlantic flies who see an idyllic charm in the poverty and immobility of Caribbean people.

Brathwaite, K. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.
New Beacon Books, 1984. 5-6.
5
The eye of the foreign storm from which the Antillean as Urchin seeks to stay invisible, throws its gaze in vain.
Scientific studies have shown that sea urchins have light-sensitive cells embedded throughout their body
which allow them to detect light and its direction, so they may hide from it. The Urchins tendency towards
invisibility is a quality we must adopt. See more: Yong, E. "Sea urchins use their entire body as an eye." Not
Exactly Rocket Science. Waukesha, WI: Kalmbach Publishing Co., 2011.
6
Brathwaite, K. and douard Glissant. A Dialogue: Nation Language and Poetics of Creolization. Presencia
Criolla en el Caribe y Amrica Latina/Creole Presence in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ed. Ineke Phaf.
Frankfurt am Main: Verveurt, 1996. 19-35.

And so we collapsed into the ocean, creating a catastrophe of sunken

memory and leaving only the sunken tips of these volcanic memories, the
islands of the Caribbean. It is my impression that even now, a million years
later, we still hear the echo of that catastrophe, and much of our work
relates to that memory. We somehow lost the sense of the mainland, the
sense of wholeness and we became holes in the ocean.7
The weight of contemporary Western influence sinks us and forbids us any time for the
contemplation of culture and identity. The faces of our islands have been shaped now is the
time to learn and assert them the continued treading of the visitors foot will only recede our
shores further back towards uncertainty and dispossession; towards something that will only
be ours in memory, in passing, in mourning, towards something that is taken from us once again
everything that constitutes we as a people.

THE MONSTER
Following the previous articulation of the Hermit, it must be clarified that this notion is an
appropriation and adaption made suitable for Caribbean thought. Any quality or connotation of
solitude produced by the Hermit archetype should be discounted in favour of a collective
hermitage. What is meant by this is a mass transformation and movement of the Antillean
community towards the posture of the Urchin, therefore a communal assumption of the nation
language in an effort to deflect and resist touristic and outside persuasion. A cast of strewn
islands erupting and foresting a black spiny cloud, every Antilleans mouth to their own soil,
each foot inter-crossed and woven to spin a net fat and soaking with an identity unhindered,
uttering a salt language amongst itself, too spicy, too flavourful, too explosive, too excessive to
ever be reduced to the limits of foreign interpretation a harmony of resistance raised by a
choir of cobblers. It is miraculous to see a rock pool or a coral plain coated in urchins such a
sight beckons fright and caution in the knowledge that no tread may pass, no foreign body may
step nor land nor claim nor possess nor own nor colonise nor nothing. The miracle lies in the
utterance of which the symbol of the sea urchin represents, Doan cum round me!
[...] another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to
the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with
glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful8
In collective assumption of the Urchin posture, may we undergo another sublimation; the
invocation of the Monster. The qualities and potential inherent to the Monster involve a
negotiation of invisibility alongside the accessory of the Grotesque [excess]. To be monstrous is
to manoeuvre rather mythological attributes to maintain a sense of being hidden, while also
exuding a weight or presence in excess.9 Echidna, the monster of Greek Mythology, who is
7

Ibid.
Hesiod. Theogony. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White.
Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 300-305.
9
Excess in the realm of the Grotesque is to be read as an unquantifiable state of being similar to the Sublime,
yet based in the material, bodily world in flesh. The body when inflated to a plane of inconceivable physicality
is an exaggeration of bodily potency and capability; a heightening of the bodys ability to expand and exhaust
8

described in opposing dualities of irresistibility and awfulness, may be linked in character to our
understanding of the notion of the Paradise Militant10.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to
endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.11
The split characterisation of the Monster is one of both temptation and repulsion,
highlighting the dangers of that which is desired. Beholding a sea urchin the black silken glow
of crimson that melts across its spines, wet with pearls of light that drip in its gyration is
exciting and seductive, comparable to the thistle, a thorny rose or even the rich candied blue of a
man o war legend is spun in tales of seeing, but fortified through an inability to grasp. Lay a
naked hand on a thorn, spike, tentacle and your skin will break, bleed and sting. Admire the
fruits of the Tropics but forever lay humble and restrained in the promise of their pluck; a
Paradise lost.

THE CARNIVAL
The sort of bodily excess to which I am alluding is of the same nature as our Carnival. The
mobilisation of this posture as a collective act of resistance, while maintaining invisibility
through the nation language, conjures the urchin rock pool, the spiked archipelago, the islands
crowned with thorns, the Monster that is seen and admired but may always hinder tangibility
and exploitation. Excess, as observed in Caribbean culture, may be enacted through the
expansion of the body in collective celebration of the flesh. The agency of celebrative
transformation may involve the transcendence of the individual towards the potency of the
community as well as the compensation of one anothers limitations so as to promise a rising of
the whole. The spirit of the community, as emphasised and exaggerated in Carnival practices,
seeks to transgress the idealised individual, overriding the competitive ethics and economic
cannibalism associated with Western Capitalist thought. The concentrated effort of the mass
body in celebration, the collective body in excess, the Antilleans decision to assume the Urchin
posture in resistance, may counter the crisis of cultural exploitation faced in the Caribbean.
Earth at that time was so excessively heated that it broke into an enormous
sweat which ran over the sea, making the latter salty, since all sweat is salt.
If you do not admit this last statement, then taste of your own sweat.12
The transformative potential of the Carnival space is the optimal environment for invoking
the Urchin posture. Given Carnivals cyclical process a rhythmical progression of inhaling the
material and the bursting of ones seams, a repeated mass death and rebirth in excess, exhaust
in fat, blood, sweat, excrement, etc. Moreover, in the case of the Monster, this capability may expand to the
extent of cosmetic qualities; the excess of beauty or conversely, ugliness.
10
This characterises the notion that Paradise is not passively beautiful idyll in servitude but may be
activated to become Monstrous, resistant and autonomous in defence of paradisiacal natives and their culture
against foreign exploitation.
11
Rilke, Rainer M. Duino Elegies. Translated from the German by Stephen Cohen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1998. 21-43.
12
Rabelais, F. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated from the French by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin
Books Ltd, 2006.

and revival the collective body dances in synonymy and similitude, consuming one another
(not cannibalistically but in a sense of osmosis) and allowing ones self to transcend towards
[and to be transgressed by] the other. There becomes a radical materialisation of the world in
which cultural negotiation is a material engagement whose discourse may only be understood
in the participatory Antillean flesh.
When the body is freed (when day comes) it follows the explosive scream.
Caribbean speech is always excited, it ignores silence, softness, sentiment.
The body follows suit. It does not know pause, rest, smooth continuity. It is
jerked along. [...] He keeps moving; it can only scream. In this silent world,
voice and body pursue desperately an impossible fulfilment.13
The membranous sublimation of the revelling bodies is a dance spoken in laughter. The
performance of nation language, finding its climax in the laughter of participation, leaves the
tongue and coats the Antillean in camouflage, reiterating the duality of invisibility and
presence.14 In the ambiguity of the shift of bodies passing through one another the sheer joy
of it all, the mass smile and the earthquake laughter become the nation language. For this is a
means of cultural relation and communication unique to the flesh of the participants, falling deaf
to the oppressor. In the overlap of spikes, does the black of urchins seem to form a single source
of beautiful terror where does it begin or end? In the nesting embrace of the Carnival space,
where bodies [shells] and limbs [spikes] crowd and cluster, does a culture emerge in sweat [the
same sweat that kept a people from burning in the toil of the sun]. In the dissolution of our
individual flesh, to its meshing concretion in unity, do our islands erupt into being.
I will raise up a cry so violent
that I will spatter the sky utterly
and by my shredded branches
and by the insolent jet of my solemn wounded bole
I shall command the islands to exist15 (55-59)

No longer shall our shores bend and gape to the prick of Empire. Let the black urchins on
our backs extend arms outstretched as barbs behold our islands crowned with thorns. May the
empire who maims and reduces us to paradise run aground our coral teeth. By its sting, does a
nation rise from welts. By our sting, does paradise bloom and throb as floating terror.

13

Glissant, E. and Dash, J. Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. 120-150.
Glissant, E. and Dash, J. Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. 21-22.
15
Csaire, A. Lost Body. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. England: Oxford University Press, 2009. 39-40.
14

WORKS CITED
-

Brathwaite, K. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone

Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984. 5-6.
Brathwaite, K. and douard Glissant. A Dialogue: Nation Language and Poetics of Creolization.
Presencia Criolla en el Caribe y Amrica Latina/Creole Presence in the Caribbean and Latin
America. Ed. Ineke Phaf. Frankfurt am Main: Verveurt, 1996. 19-35.
Csaire, A. Lost Body. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. England: Oxford University Press,
2009. 39-40.
Forbes, C. Between Plot and Plantation, Trespass and Transgression: Caribbean Migratory
Disobedience in Fiction and Internet Traffic. Small Axe, 2012. 16(2 38), 2012. 23-42.
Glissant, E. and Dash, J. Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1989. 21-22; 120-150.
Hesiod. Theogony. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G.
Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
300-305.
Lamming, G. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 159.
Rabelais, F. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated from the French by M.A. Screech. London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 2006.
Rilke, Rainer M. Duino Elegies. Translated from the German by Stephen Cohen. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1998. 21-43.
Yong, E. "Sea urchins use their entire body as an eye." Not Exactly Rocket Science. Waukesha,
WI: Kalmbach Publishing Co., 2011.

IMAGES
-

Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Speightstown, Barbados, 2016.

Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Speightstown, Barbados, 2016.
Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Walkers Dairy, Barbados, 2016.
Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Walkers Dairy, Barbados, 2016.
Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Gibbes Beach, Barbados, 2016.
Adam Patterson, Echidna, Performance. Gibbes Beach, Barbados, 2016.