A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter C

Colonial memory

Black American
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Colonial memory refers to the inherited cultural and psychological legacy of colonisation, including displacement, cultural suppression, forced labour, and the distortion of identity, carried forward in Black communities through generations.

Detailed Definition
In African American poetry, colonial memory encompasses both the African colonial experience and the internal colonisation of Black Americans within a nation that denied their full humanity. Poets draw on colonial memory to trace the long roots of present inequalities, connecting American racial structures to global histories of European empire. Related to enslavement memory, diaspora poetics, dispossession, and Pan-Africanism, colonial memory insists that the past is not past but actively shapes contemporary Black experience. It also connects to the African diaspora's sense of irreversible rupture from ancestral homes.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet engaging colonial memory might write about the way European colonisation's destruction of African political, cultural, and spiritual systems created the conditions not only for slavery but for the ongoing devaluation of Black knowledge and achievement; Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage" draws on colonial memory by situating the slave trade within the broader history of European expansion and conquest, connecting the specific trauma of the Middle Passage to the wider project of colonial domination; A student poet might explore colonial memory through the figure of a great-grandparent who was educated in a colonial school system and taught to despise African languages, tracing how that self-alienation passed down through generations; Audre Lorde's poetry engages colonial memory through its recovery of African and Caribbean cultural inheritances, insisting that colonial suppression did not succeed in destroying the cultural knowledge it targeted; A contemporary poet might write about colonial memory in relation to medical knowledge, exploring how African healing traditions were dismissed as superstition by colonial authorities while European medicine claimed universal validity and authority; The linguistic dimensions of colonial memory, the loss of African languages and the imposition of English, French, or Portuguese, are a recurring subject for diaspora poets who write about the experience of inheriting a coloniser's language as one's mother tongue
Additional Notes
Colonial memory in Black American poetry engages the inherited cultural and psychological legacy of colonisation including displacement cultural suppression and hybrid identities often surfacing as haunting echoes or reclaimed fragments; professors can direct analysis alongside creolisation and cultural erasure to show how poets like Derek Walcott-influenced Black voices or Edwidge Danticat use it for decolonial healing providing students context on its interplay with Middle Passage elegy for understanding transatlantic trauma transmission.
Also Known As
Colonial trauma memory Postcolonial memory Imperial memory
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