On the Feast of the Assumption (15 August) in 1993, just two years before Lumiere’s death, Justin White wrote in the Sunday Gleaner (Jamaica), “Cornel’s lifetime ambition is--’Let the real Cornel stand up, please...’” What precedes this summary comment of the interview is a very long list of the things that Lumiere had done, places he had been and people whom he had known. In essence, it is a quantification of his life. Do the numbers add up? That depends.
Answering this question well will require a diligent search for and discriminating use of the facts. It will also necessitate imagining appropriate frames of reference to provide us with plausible surmises. I am not sure that we can ever hope to gain certainty. There will be room for alternate constructions of the identity and credibility of ‘Cornel Lumiere’. However, I think that I have undertaken sufficient research to bring some light to the shadows.
Many questions will remain and new facts may well require an extensive reassessment. Still, it is doubtful that such facts would be brought to light without this beginning. It has not been an easy matter to find all of the necessary needles in the digital haystack. But, I believe that it has been worth the effort. In many respects, ‘Cornel Lumiere’ was a prototypical man of the modern technological age.
It would be good to try to understand him and, thereby, ourselves better.
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