Who decides what and who is Black enough? What does Black mean? Black is a racial identifier, but some people use Black refer to the African American culture… what makes my Black different from yours, is it language? Some of us speak Spanish, some speak French, others Patois or Portuguese, among others. That is the beauty of the African diaspora.
A panoramic view of the island of Hispaniola in the foreground and Cuba extending to over the horizon. The sunglint is illuminating Haiti and the Dominican Republic while the thunderstorms persist in the late afternoon of the summertime day. Taken by the Expedition 17 crew onboard the ISS on Aug. 19, 2008
A University of Toronto-led team has reported the discovery of a new lizard in the middle of the most- visited island in the Caribbean, strengthening a long-held theory that communities of lizards can evolve almost identically on separate islands.
The chameleon-like lizard - a Greater Antillean anole dubbed Anolis landestoyi for the naturalist who first spotted and photographed it - is one of the first new anole species found in the Dominican Republic in decades.
“As soon as I saw the pictures, I thought, ‘I need to buy a plane ticket,’” says Luke Mahler of U of T’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and lead author of an article on the discovery published today online in The American Naturalist.
“Our immediate thought was that this looks like something that’s supposed to be in Cuba, not in Hispaniola - the island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share,” says Mahler. “We haven’t really seen any completely new species here since the early 1980s.”
What’s more, the new species could help piece together a long-standing puzzle of similar looking species that exist on different Caribbean islands.
The Dominican Republic expelled at least 244 Haitians after an elderly Dominican couple was slain in an apparent burglary near the border between the two countries and a mob retaliated by killing a Haitian man.
Found only on the
Island of Hispaniola they are between 11 - 13 inches on average, with tails around 25cm in length. They are covered in a brown / red fur, except on the legs, underbelly, ears and nose.
Being Solenodon’s, they are venomous, as well as nocturnal. They burrow and survive on a diet of insects.
Some Dominicans swear up & down they’re not of African decent or black. Sorry but your ancestry tells a different story. They like to project their anti-blackness upon Haitians & darker Dominicans, probably BC Haiti was the only & first to lead a black revolution & became the first independent black nation to win its freedom from their colonial oppressor.
Dominican Republic like the majority of the Caribbean was built on the backs of Africans. Everything from their music to their food is Black, yet they like to believe the lies of their oppressors & deny any blackness, racism, or issues of colorism deteriorating the country.
The Hispaniolan solenodon was once the apex predator on the island of Hispaniola. Since it ate many insects and small mammals, it was an excellent form of pest control for local farmers. It is one of the last two surviving native insectivorous mammals in the Caribbean, and one of only two remaining endemic terrestrial mammals of Hispaniola. However, the introduction of predators such as feral cats, dogs, and moongooses have decimated the population of solenodons, and they are now severely endangered.
Junot Diaz on Writing Untold Stories of the African and Dominican Diaspora
Do you feel a responsibility as a writer to remember in your work what history wants to forget?
“Me personally, in many ways, I come out of a history of such profound erasure and silence and evasion and trauma, you know, whether it’s like the deep history of the African Diaspora, I mean Jesus, like, it’s not as if we really have all the literature that we need to talk about chattel slavery and what it means to come out of a community that was bred and raped into existence or even more recently, to be someone from the Dominican Diaspora, where a 31-year, you know, tortured dictatorship and the stories that were never told and the silences that are more presence than presence, some of us are drawn to those things. I, myself, personally, find myself powerfully, powerfully drawn. Certainly I do feel that. ”