New Rivers of the Atlantic

✿ This character was illustrated as a gift to my friend Qweezi. Happy Birthday!

In Vekllei, you met all sorts of people. All nations passed through the Home Islands, some to visit, others to live. Tzipora met a great many of them in her time at school.

Sydney came from Kosava, an anarchist island commune in the Lesser Antilles we know as St Kitts and Nevis. Kosava is an independent member-state of the Kalina Islands, which describes a series of autonomous islands in the Caribbean. Together, they form the Kalina Sovereign, an independent full member of Vekllei’s “Atlantic Commonwealth,” which is something between a federation and a superstate. It was anarchism in the confusing Vekllei sense of the word – self-organising, democratic, and totally dependent on bureau overproduction to furnish the gaps.

Commonwealth members, including Vekllei, are united in a belief in Floral Economics and share a lot of social features between them, including education, security, healthcare and bureau labour. A Kalinago girl is not that different from her sister in Vekllei, so it turns out. Together they represent a vanguard of island states in the Atlantic, a self-determining Commonwealth of different people resisting the hegemonies of Europe and the Americas with new ways of living.

Hitori was like Tzipora; she was not from Vekllei. Her parents were Japanese and she’d come here as a baby. It seemed like every second person was an immigrant, which indicated a shift in what “Vekllei” meant in the 21st Century. Under the various regimes of the Junta, it had been a colonial turn-of-phrase to describe the Algic-European metropole in the Home Islands. These days, it was more open-ended and democratic.

Vekllei has been multicultural since its origins as a meeting place of Scandinavian and Algic peoples. Today is no different, except its promise reaches farther and many more are arriving than before. Things are going well in Vekllei, and the quality of life can be exquisite – provided you have certain expectations of what an “exquisite life” looks like. That was what kept people coming; an emerging Vekllei and the happiness of their children.