Written piece
Threads The Rivers Left Behind
Sasha Maynard
St Kitts and Nevis
About this piece
A poetic retelling of the 1896 Basseterre flood from the perspective of the rivers themselves, exploring destruction, loss, resilience and how tragedy reshaped the people, landscape, and future of St. Kitts.
It was three a.m. No lamps. No moon. Just darkness.
Hundreds were in their beds, unaware they had just minutes remaining to live.
They did not hear us barrelling toward them at top speed.
Then they felt our unrelenting power. Turbulent waters, thick with ghaut sand, tore through the town.
Homes and buildings collapsed as we surged forward - unyielding.
Men, women, and children were dragged from their beds, torn from the night they thought was theirs.
Many were lost. Some were found buried beneath the sand, trying to make it through the Square to the Courthouse.
King’s Ground, Market Street, College Street – mash up. We lifted houses from their wooden stilts and carried them away. We spared nothing – not even the businesses along the Bayfront. The Treasury was badly damaged. Wattley’s Hardware disappeared from the horizon. Barrels, hogsheads of coal, splintered boxes and broken puncheons lay scattered—the remains of what once stood.
Bodies, scattered along the Bayfront. Others we carried out to sea, some to the shore of neighbouring St. Eustatius. There, they were laid to rest.
In the aftermath, the people gathered what remained of their lives and began to rethread them.
They learned to watch the sky, to read the land, to listen for what went unheard. They built stronger homes further from our banks. Some stayed – and adapted – raising barriers, fortifying against the force they now respected.
In loss, they found cooperation. Through grief, resilience took root – becoming the foundation of Kittitian life and the thread they carried forward.
A pink Obelisk stands in Springfield Cemetery, marking the lives we carried away but did not erase.
The greatest thread of all – they learned from the past, and in doing so, reshaped the future of Basseterre and St. Kitts.