Armageddon With a Soundtrack: Caribbean Poems of Sorrel and Salt by Abake Mensah explores ancestry,
migration, cultural mixture, and a personal DNA journey in which the reported results shifted over time.
In ‘Cosmopolitan DNA,’ West African, South Asian, Scottish, Scandinavian, Latvian, Italian, and
other traces become a starting point rather than a final answer. Changing results sit beside memory and
imagination, keeping the difference between evidence and interpretation visible.
Mensah uses poetic license to imagine cousins, kitchens, climates, and cultural echoes across
continents. These details are not presented as verified genealogy. They explore the tension between what
DNA can establish and what poetry can wonder about, with connection rather than division as the aim.
Mensah balances the painful history of forced crossings with the creative life built by descendants.
Drums, tassa, roti, sorrel, language, music, and family habits carry memory into the present.
Other poems in the collection extend the theme through Trinidad and Tobago’s multicultural
food, Carnival, chutney soca, markets, and community traditions. The Caribbean is presented not as one
origin, but as many histories learning to move together.
The collection’s humor makes the subject accessible without simplifying it. A Scottish cousin
stands in the rain, an Italian relative argues about sauce, and a Scandinavian ancestor wonders why the sun
will not rest.
Written for readers of Caribbean poetry, diaspora literature, cultural history, and family memory,
Armageddon With a Soundtrack invites audiences to see ancestry as a living conversation rather than a
fixed category.
The book’s message is clear: ancestry can contain several continents, while the meaning people
make from that complexity may remain open, evolving, and deeply human.
