Shift

For "Shift" I owe thanks to thanks to writer, mentor, elder and visionary Kamau Brathwaite and to his Comparative Literature class at New York University. Kamau invited me to come and speak to his class in 2000 when I was visiting New York. They were studying Shakespeare's "The Tempest" at the time, and Kamau told me about his notion that Caliban could have had a sister. That got me thinking, and the night before I spoke to his class, I wrote a brief monologue that I attributed to the fictional sister of that troubled island man, Caliban. The monologue ultimately resulted in my short story "Shift," printed in 2002 in Conjunctions: New Wave Fabulists, issue guest-edited by Peter Straub.

Ban...Ban...ca-ca-Caliban...

You know who the real tempest is, don't you? The real storm? Is our mother Sycorax; his and mine. If you ever see her hair flying around her head when she dash at you in anger; like a whirlwind, like a lightning, like a deadly whirlpool. Wheeling and turning round her scalp like if it ever catch you, it going to drag you in, pull you down, swallow you in pieces. If you ever hear how she gnash her teeth in her head like tiger shark; if you ever hear the crack of her voice or feel the crack of her hand on your backside like a bolt out of thunder, then you would know is where the real storm there.

She tell me say I must call her Scylla, or Charybdis. Say it don't make no matter which, for she could never remember one different from the other, but she know one of them is her real name. She say never mind the name most people know her by; is a name some Englishman give her by scraping a feather quill on paper.

White people magic.

Her people magic, for all that she will box you if you ever remind her of that, and flash her blue, blue y'eye-them at you. Lightning braps from out of blue sky. But me and Brother, when she not there, is that Englishman name we call her by.