and literary works and gave many lectures here, it was this impassioned and
charged paean chaos theory applied to the ever shifting, ever syncretic
machine of the meta-archipelago that so impacted my early formation as a
Caribbeanist. This essay articulated what my personal experience had begun
to glean at the time, as an outsider on the verge of gaining a considerable
amount of insider information, as my culture shock gave way, and the
systemic logic of a place "where time unfolds irregularly and resists being
captured by the cycles of clocks and calendars" became pleasurably clear.
Though we now have a bit more critical distance from the concept of
Caribbean syncretism-after all European Christianity is also deeply syncretic-
we are profoundly indebted to his creative and critical performances for
helping make such perspectives possible. This, along with the generous
graciousness with which Antonio consistently lent his support, for he will
also be remembered as a caballero in the best sense of the word.

Ian Anthony Bethell University of Puerto Rico, College of Humanities

One of the most awesome things in life is to have someone put into words
what you live: a repeating rhythm that crisscrosses the Caribbean. What an
immense pleasure and even honour it was to actually socialize with the
individual who could croncretise my life in such a simple, but also
multifaceted or polyrhythmic theory of difference and repetition, sameness
but individuality in the repeating island that was my life. To meet the man is
to discover a part of oneself yet to see something new, unseen but always
hinted at. Antonio Benitez Rojo allowed me, gave me the tools, the words to
articulate the flow from Cuba to the Bahamas, from Nassau to Haiti, and
from Georgetown to Miami to London, to Vancouver, always bifurcating on
its watery journey through islands marked as uninhabited but full of life and
memories of lives lived before; to tell of the great, great grandparents,
bisabuelos, tataraabuelos who crossed seas and islands to manifest in me.
All of this I was then able to verbalize, though not a quarter as eloquently as
the master of repetition of repeating themes and polyrhythms that make me
who I am, but that allowed my imagination to flow into a text that would
become my thesis.

Lowell Fiet University of Puerto Rico, College of Humanities

In the same direction but different?

Antonio Benitez Rojo's work redefines the Caribbean. The anti-colonial and
roughly Marxist tradition that included writers and scholars as diverse as
C.L.R. James, Aim6 C6saire, Fernando Ortiz, Eric Williams, Frantz Fanon, Juan
Bosch, George Lamming, Lydia Cabrera, Gordon K. Lewis, Jos6 Luis GonzAlez,
Roberto FernAndez Retamar, and Edouard Glissant, among others, radically
shifted direction by finding itself -in a "certain manner"- incorporated and