A man dressed in exaggerated, outlandish bandit costumes would waylay people in the street on carnival day and regale them with a speech he'd written, a stream of consciousness fabulation about how he was the son of an African king who had been stolen away into slavery and escaped, of how he'd risked life and limb in terrifying adventures far from his home until he'd become a bandit to survive. It's a powerful metaphor for exile and longing for home and it strongly references the Caribbean history of the African slave trade. The little girl identifies very much with the midnight robber masque. But a diasporic Caribbean culture might name its computer operating systems after a West African deity with the power to go anywhere, see anything. I'm also experimenting with the complex sets of codes that are Caribbean creoles.
Caribbean cultures are hybrid cultures.
Hybridity was a strategy for survival and resistance amongst the enslaved and indentured people. They all came from different cultures with different languages and then had an alien culture and speech imposed on them. They had to find ways to use elements of all the cultures in order to continue to exist. That hybridity is reflected in the languaging we've created. I've tried to reflect that in Midnight Robber, largely in the way the characters use language when they speak, but also in the language of the narrative.