Associations

“I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form—a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author.” [1]

--Creator

-- female, Mary Shelley/Shelley Jackson, English/American

“I was gathered together loosely in her attention in a way that was interesting to me, for I was all in pieces, yet not apart…I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole.”[2]

--Creature

-- female, no name, Eve, no home

“Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. In other words, the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized. ‘No people there,’ to quote Froude, ‘In the true sense of the word.’ No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken (67).” [3]

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole (69).”[4]

--Creator and Creature

--male, Derek Walcott, Adam, Caribbean

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[1] Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Engironment: Storyspace. Cambridge: Eastgate Systems, 1995

[2] Ibid.

[3] Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. This quote is from his Nobel Lecture entitled, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.”

[4] Ibid.