i’m from St. Kitts/Nevis. really Nevis. two separate islands. one government. columbus stumbled upon us. bastard. first we were Kalinago Indians and we named our little space Liamuiga which is a vernacular description for ‘fertile land’ and a fair warning of our volcanic soil and high productivity. sounds a lot like me. check wikipedia if you think i’m joking. sometimes wikipedia gets it right.
anyway. someone came up with ‘Oualie’ (people still use the word to describe my land) which means, ‘land of beautiful waters.’ even with all these names, we still managed to get NEVIS which is derived from this beautiful spanish name ‘Nuestra Senora de las Nieves,’ the archaic (old school) version being ‘Noestra Sinora delas Neves.’ (that’s gonna be a tattoo soon enough on this body of mine) It literally means ‘Land of the Snows’ which can be attributed to the way our clouds look over our mountain tops. though columbus got it twisted, the british called us ‘Dulcina’ which means ‘the sweet one.’ either way, the descriptive names of my island are pretty accurate or rather pretty, accurate and then some.
i’m just saying if the people are (and i know for a fact that we are) anything like our namesake, we are beautiful, productive and sweet. and that’s really all i need to be anyway.
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