A Jamaican-born poet chain-smokes as he listens to a circle of drummers in the old market of Marrakesh, circa 2015. The drums sound in the present, but they also sound in the sense of measuring — they sound historical depths: an eleventh-century Berber dynasty “broke musical / devices and put a stop to dancing”; the dynasty also founded an empire, with Marrakesh as its capital, that spread over the Maghreb and al-Andalus, an empire that was in turn broken by the Catholic kings, whose descendants would lead the bloody conquest of the Americas, initiating the trade of goods and bodies-as-goods…