There is a difference between the transplanting (by exile or dispersion) of a people who continue to survive elsewhere and the transfer (by the slave trade) of a population to another place where they change into something different, into a new set of possibilities. It is in this metamorphosis that we must try to detect one of the best kept secrets of creolization. Through it we can see that the mingling of experiences is at work, there for us to know and producing the process of being. We abandon the idea of fixed being. One of the most terrible implications of the ethnographic approach is the insistence on fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated survival.

                                                                 -- Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

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The more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place — or does not take place — has a name: transference.  Now transference is still repetition: above all it is repetition. If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its ‘demonic’ power.  All cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition. [….]  [R]epetition constitutes by itself the selective game of our illness and our health, of our loss and our salvation.

                                                                      -- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

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In this central African healing brotherhood, the word ndotinya -- to cut, as in cutting a palaver, cutting a deal, cutting medicines, cutting oaths, cutting skin -- evokes the sharpness, danger, and ambivalence of medicines. Some cut-in medicines kill; some cut-in medicines heal. Some deaths kill; some deaths heal.

                                                              -- Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon

(Background photo is from Changuu Island/Prison Island outside Stone Town in Zanzibar. Formerly a holding ground for captive Africans to be sold into the Indian Ocean trade, the space has been converted into tourist destination with a hotel, restaurant, pool, and penned-in tortoises. Photo by author 2018.)