the fear, the wasting away, the tortured extinction, the obstinate means of resistance, the naive beIief, the famines that go unmentioned, the trepidation, the stubborn determination to learn, the imprisonments, the hopeless struggles, the withdrawal and isolation, the arrogant powers, the blind wealth, the maintenance of the status quo, the numbness, the hidden ideologies, the flaunted ideologies, the crime, the whole mess, the ways of being racist, the sIums, the sophisticated techniques, the sirnpIe games, the subtle games, the desertions and betrayals, the unshrinking lives, the schools that work, the schools in ruin, the power plots, the prizes for excellence, the children they shoot, the computers, the classroorns with neither paper nor pencils, the exacerbated starvation, the tracking of quarry, the strokes of Iuck, the ghettos, the assimilations, the immigrations, the Earth's illnesses, the religions, the mind's illnesses, the musics of passion, the rages of what we so simply call Iibido, the pleasures of our urges and athletic pleasures, and so many other infinite variations of life and death. That these commonplaces, whose quantities are both countless and precise, in fact produced this Roar, in which we could still hear intoned every language in the world.
E. Glissant, "Poetics of Relation"
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