It is now a hundred years since TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’, appeared in The Dial. Numerous global  commemorations have taken place, both academic and popular, many of which have been uncritically hagiographic or, otherwise, laudatory.

There is a great risk in the translation of decolonial poetics: namely, of reducing this forging of novelty to a mere relationship of influence, or, at best, a subversion of the Occident. As the complexity of the global is poetically remade in the poets of the Global South, it is necessary they be disseminated in the very languages and spaces of the North that they would remake.

We should absolutely call out cultures that manifest and effect behaviours that are harmful. But in doing so, we need to know something about culture beyond these neoliberal language games that are, presently, quite lost between a concrete sense of individual action and an external sense of social force.

From Georgetown, Guyana to London, England, sugar and ideas have long circulated. But the history of the Booker prize is itself imperial, its funding originating from agribusiness conglomerate that has its routes in the nineteenth century sugar trade. Where many are aware that Cecil Rhodes owned large swathes of what is now Zimbabwe, fewer recall the Booker’s reliance on slavery in Guyana.