Cliches are cliches because they embody a recognizable logic, if not a basic truth that is as undeniable as it is annoying (particularly when used in small talk). Remixed, this particular one goes something like:

Ask any writer, any arranger of words, images, sound, or any of those combined, and you will hear that what we do is hard. Not for the faint of heart, pen, fingers, etc.

My colleagues and friends and students will readily attest, as will my Mom. As will I, for that matter. Despite a few decades proving the contrary, many still seem to think that the text emerges already polished from the mind of the writer whose intelligence, sophistication, and experience have all cooperated on the writer’s behalf (and conspired against the student/writer who, once assigned to write on this or that matter of crucial import, must now struggle to do so at the risk of grades and the like).

My sympathy is there—with the struggling writer—because as a writing teacher, I have had both cause and occasion to consider my own process—though, only to minimal effect.

Nevertheless, as part of that consideration, I’ve realized that I’ve taken a number of things for granted—specific to my point in this post, I’ve taken for granted the fact that all the texts I produce have meaning in terms of conception, methodology, and practice. I don’t know why I’ve let that fact slide, especially when knowing, and acting on what is known, is at the heart of my work and of my conception of what we do as vernacular practitioners of every life. Have I forgotten that I intend to practice what I…theorize? No. Have I decided to recant and start anew with an idea that what we do amounts to nothing? No. Is it an internal contradiction I’ve yet to resolve? I don’t think so. Me and my demons are good. The reason is frightfully mundane, I’m afraid: I got caught up. Doing things. Living. Trying to make ends meet. Simple as that. Funny, I imagined this admission with a bit more flourish. I could try restating, but no.

I got caught up.

I’m continuously revisiting the latter parts of this circuitous path that I took to get to it. The book didn’t just happen—couldn’t just happen. These early articulations—the semi-literate scribblings in notebooks—ought not be relegated to the nether regions of untapped memory, dry-rotting in the mind like an unkept artifact.

Instead, I’m interested in whether anyone else would be interested in how this notion of Caribbean Rhetoric was originally articulated, how it developed, how it was turned into and on and away from itself, how the ethos of a Caribbean rhetorical theorist was able to coalesce in a recursive process of composition. It’s a huge presumption, I know, but the alternative is unacceptable to me. I’m also interested in having others join me, confident that their ideas and approaches to rhetoric are not only valid but essential. This begins with me doing what being caught up has trained me to do: to take for granted that the texts I have produced over the course of the last few years of thinking about Caribbean Rhetoric do in fact have meaning, that they ought to be preserved, shared, engaged with. It begins with Notebook One, Notebook Two, Notebook Three, and Notebook Four. It begins there because I don’t have a cool answer for why I do what I do, but I want people to know that it is being done. That’s the thing about vocations—that, strangely enough, doing is the ultimate articulation of that which you have been called to do. No cool answers. Only a bunch of flailing questions tethered, as it were, to a basic statement. On Page One of Notebook One, I write:

My idea is to posit Cbean rhetorical forms as the sine qua non of the superisland ethos.

We’ll see.

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