 Greetings! My name is Dr. Marcia Burroughs. I am Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Culture, Creative and Performing Arts here at the Cave Hill Campus University of the West Indies. Welcome and happy second Caricombe Africa Day. In December, I'm going to Ghana to discuss the very topic that we are discussing here in this set of musings, as I've been told they'll be called. The continuing connections between Caricombe and Africa the continent. First of all, let us make sure that though the imperial narrative says that we were successively conquered, enslaved and we were drained of our creative energies so that we could become in the case of Barbados little England or we could be little France and the Spain up and down the region that did not happen. We came with our cultural practices from the African continent and what the scholarship notes is that as soon as we were landed we were split shuffled into plantation spaces. They know that the Africans would go and cut down trees. Where are they cutting down trees? They want to create that sonic remembrance. They want to build drums. They want to play drums. They want that sonic reconnection to Africa the space that we were forced to leave. Then we noticed that they're gathering beads and gathering wood things that have rattles in them. Why? Again that's sonic and visual reconnection to the space of the continent of Africa performing the very practices that were practiced for generation upon generations in Africa. The reason I'm going to Ghana in December is that there is a conference about the reconnections with the Caribbean and with the diaspora through masquerade and that's what I want us to focus on that we have continued masquerade practices. We have re-energized them. Camel Brathov would say we have creolized them using what we found here with our memories of what was there and we have recreated Africa in the Caribbean. We are African. We cannot help it. We speak our languages. We dance. We sing. We drum. We recreate that sonic connection. The key thing to remember is this. Through a process of intense colonization for almost 400 years. We in the Caribbean were also made to be acquainted with practices of Europe, Eurocentric norms, whether coming from Britain, Spain, France, the Danes, the Danish islands. We were made to know them. We then creolized them. We took them and what we needed and we mixed them and recreated them so that now our traditional masquerade in spaces such as St. Lucia in Barbados, across East and Caribbean, feature banana leaves because bananas became an important geographic and economic earner for many of our countries. The leaves however become a cultural signifier and therefore we dancing. Dominique could be dance sensei. We dance our masquerade with banana leaves. In Barbados our shaggy bear was traditionally danced in banana leaves and I see the recovery of banana leaves all through the Caribbean and Camel Braffit always advised us our unity is submarine. If we look on the surface for understanding of our identities, we might get fooled with the many Eurocentric norms that we've inherited. The tangible culture of the Caribbean tends to portray Europe, our parliament buildings, our forts, our castles. But if you look beneath what we eke out from the submarine, the reality that Camel speaks of, that's where a number of our energies are. Our creative and artistic energies lie beneath and come to the surface through our masquerade, through our dance, our music, our song. Clifford Garrett says that identities are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Let us on this second Karikom day, Karikom Africa day, tell ourselves stories of that renewal, re-energizing, re-creation of Caribbean identities through the African continuum and Ghana, see you in December.