Dear Editor,
My, my my, mighty thoughtful indeed. I love it! Brent Simon’s essay trembles with the force of necessary truth telling.
He unearths the irony of a people who walk serenely past monuments to empire yet erupt when an Antiguan hand shapes stone in the language of its own vision.
His reflection exposes the spiritual fatigue of a society more comfortable with inherited reverence than with creative revelation.
The statue, like the calabash of Anansi’s wisdom, has been cracked open and the truth spills into the street. We are compelled to look, to think, and to ask who truly commands the sacred in a land still haunted by colonial echoes.
Two radiant affirmations rise from Simon’s meditation. First, he exalts the power of indigenous imagination to reclaim authorship of our symbols and stories, affirming that the Caribbean mind must sculpt its own meaning rather than bow to borrowed metaphors.
Second, he honors the artist’s audacity to create in the face of suspicion, fulfilling Fanon’s conviction that the artist in a colonized society becomes both witness and warrior.
In these affirmations we rediscover the divine gift of creativity, for to fashion beauty from stone is to participate in the creative pulse of God who formed humanity from clay.
The discomfort the statue provokes is not profane but prophetic.
Still, Simon’s discourse holds subtle contradictions.
While he unmasks moral hypocrisy, he risks reducing sincere faith inquiry to the noise of self righteousness. Not every objection is rooted in fear or ignorance; some arise from a sacred tension between revelation and representation.
Caribbean spirituality has long wrestled with that tension, from the drums of the Orishas to the hymns of the Moravians, from Kumina to Calvary.
To mock such wrestling is to misunderstand our region’s spiritual genius which finds holiness in argument as much as in awe.
Simon’s essay soars in critique yet leaves little room for the reverent curiosity that also defines an awakened people.
The path forward demands more than outrage; it calls for integration. Our nation must learn to hold art and faith in creative communion.
As the Akan proverb says, “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.” Let the artist shape, let the theologian question, let the people reflect.
Only through this dialogue can we transform reaction into revelation and confusion into communion.
The statue stands not as a scandal but as a summons, urging Antigua to rise beyond borrowed morality toward a faith mature enough to imagine and a culture courageous enough to see itself clearly.
Mercy!!!
Bright and sunny regards,
Dr. Isaac Newton
