In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior ‘Gabu’ Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of temporality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.