Victimed

Breaking my retreat at last, I took a taxi to the campus of Florida International University and spent an hour with a professor named Anthony Maingot, an expert on the Caribbean, a refreshing man who impatiently waved away all thought of what poet Derek Walcott called (Maingot quoting him) "the historiography of the oppressed and the historiography of remorse" — meaning, I take it, the interminable cliches of the victimed and genocided.