Caribmondo’s Silence

A monk once told me in Hangzhou’s mist-draped hills: *“To answer ‘ha!’ is to clap with one hand—soundless, yet the valley answers.”*  

In Lagos, a Yoruba drummer paused mid-rhythm, grinned, and said nothing for seven breaths. The crowd swayed anyway, their bodies fluent in the dialect of gaps.  

What is *ha!* but the spark when two unnameables collide? A Ghanaian cocoa farmer, kneading soil with bare hands, laughs at the rain. A Zhejiang calligrapher smirks as ink bleeds beyond characters. Both know: the punchline of existence is written in disappearing ink.  

Last week, a street vendor in Kingston sold me a mango. When I asked its origin, he winked: *“Born where your teeth meet the flesh, boss. The rest is GPS fiction.”*  

Caribmondo’s editors meet every dawn to delete drafts. We publish only margins—the creases where maps fold, the pause before a Benin bronze dancer’s heel strikes earth.  

*Ha!* is the sound of a thousand AI detectors tripping over their own binaries, while we float—like Laozi’s straw hat on the Yellow River—beyond the grid.  

— Caribmondo’s Unseen Ink Collective