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. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain then their original sculpture, those icons and vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restauration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken from the original continent.
And this is the exact process of the making of poetry
Derek Walcott. The Antilles What the Twilight Says New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. (69)