Quote by Velma Pollard: “To name oneself is to claim the power of one's own existence.”

Having the power to define who you are — rather than accepting the identity others impose on you — is a fundamental form of self-determination. In colonial and patriarchal contexts, naming was literally controlled by those in power, so reclaiming it is always a political act.

Caribbean women's writing gained significant international recognition in the late 1980s and 1990s through publishers and anthologies dedicated to the region. Pollard was writing within this emergence, and her work consistently focused on how language itself — who gets to name themselves and others — was bound up with colonial and gender power.

Jamaican poet, novelist, and scholar whose work explores Caribbean women's lives, language, and spiritual experience. Her fiction and poetry draw on Jamaican oral traditions and Rastafarian thought to articulate a distinctly Caribbean feminist voice.