“If readers ask what I have learned from writing this book that I now offer to them, my answer is that above all, in how I live my personal life, I no longer see my ancestors as former slaves. I don’t even think of them as a dominated class. Their misery is only the most superficial aspect of their reality. It is the reality that colonialists prefer to emphasize…I have come to realize that my ancestors, as individuals and as a group, never stopped resisting slavery and domination. I am the child of a collective of fighters, not of the vanquished. I have chosen to venerate them, to honor these captives reduced to slavery….” —Jean Casimir