Global Voices Online

kiskeácity remembers two influential Caribbean icons.

Jamaican litblogger Geoffrey Philp is still processing the news of Aimé Césaire's death: “For if the goal of any life is freedom, then Aimé Césaire was a light”…while Caribbean Free Radio remembers a podcast she did with “Césaire intoning, in his impeccably enunciated French, against a musical background, the first few verses of his epic ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land', beginning with the famously ambiguous opening line ‘au bout du petit matin' ('at the end of dawn')…”

Jamaican litblogger Geoffrey Philp acknowledges the passing of Aimé Césaire, calling him “a poet honored throughout the French-speaking world and a crusader for West Indian rights”, while Caribbean Beat Blog says: “It is with heavy heart we say goodbye to this son of West Indian soil and thank him for his never-ceasing fight against colonialism.”

Blogging from Barbados, Notes From The Margin reports that Eastern Caribbean territories are bracing for large waves as a result of “a deep low pressure centre that spawned tornadoes and thunderstorms across the US earlier this week.”

le blog de [moi] blogs the results of the first round of municipal elections [Fr] in Martinique.

In Martinique, le blog de [moi] writes that the port of Fort-de-France is completely blocked [Fr], and has been for a week, by dockworkers on strike. She's not too sympathetic, noting, according to one report, that dockworkers' salaries have doubled in the last five years, and that they last went on strike four months ago. The port is Martinique's main artery.

In Martinique, Le Blog de Moi doesn't know whether to vomit or dying laughing from some of the online commentary surrounding the European Court of Human Rights' decision to condemn France [Fr] for refusing to allow homosexual adoption.

Living Dominica reports that the incidence of Dengue Fever is still high in certain Caribbean islands.