A wedding is at once a crowded place and a private room, packed with trusts and empty of all but the heart's letters which one other heart may read and decipher.

Production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution.

My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.

Anyway, culture and nation are partners, inextricable from each other. National culture and nation, they are reciprocities.

A wedding is earth and water and a species of irreducible light and the flat belly of a harbor and a mango about to ripen and fall into gravity's caress and the waves subsiding and resuming their concerto in a minor key and the rush hour canceled by the stun of auspicious beginnings.

The best thing you can do is to keep riding your snowboard and love what you're doing. Without a passion for the sport it's difficult to take your riding to the next level.