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| "Ancestral Rage" - Oil Pastel by Angelique V. Nixon |
To the Caribbean, with love...
*~*~*
"Caribbean Crossings, In Motion"
by Angelique V. Nixon
"What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands." - Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse
I.
Under the surface, bursting
in my bloodlines
these genes of rememory
Trinidad feels like home
maybe I know here – this place
this space of my ancestors
I want to know about their lives,
my maternal great grandparents
what did they experience in these streets,
in these hills of Port of Spain, whispering
to me
finally, you have returned,
we have been waiting
I know they moved to Inagua, Bahamas
these lines of African descent
movements across and inside
the Caribbean Sea, stories lost in motion
all I have is this picture of my great-gramma
in my head, a photograph mummy carried of
you,
tall, poised, proud in brown flesh, long arms
heavy
with salt, eyes full of wisdom, stature full
of strength,
mouth curved and hard, from the experiences
of your life
I will never know
but can wonder and imagine you,
wield you into an existence,
if only in my mind, if only on this page
these words come to me,
mummy telling me about you,
how you loved and held her up through
hard times, dreaming you into being,
the stories, these Caribbean gifts
of Anancy magic, walking with spirit
in this place, where I make sense
my face, my mix-up Blackness
my fyah, woman loving, cosmic warrior self.
II.
Jamaica, knows me
before I reach, get to know her
I was here before
by way of spirit, perhaps
through ancestors, for sure
my paternal great-grandfather
I hear much later through lost stories
moved to Nassau, Bahamas
from Jamaica
by way of China, details
submerged
like his memory
gramma born out of wedlock
these lines of Chinese descent
messy and spoken in secret shame
yet his blood rebukes this silence
haunting generations
mixed with great-grandmother’s
blurry ancestry and hushed tones
of Blackness, hidden through light-skin,
straight hair and light eyes,
separated from brown skin siblings,
these lines create forgetting
I trace myself back
through the streets of Kingston
seeing reflections, in motion
red, Black-Chiney, brown, mango skin, woman,
sun kissed,
Bahamagal potcake, to make sense in this
place,
rooting self in Reasonings at Blackspace,
Woodside,
we people of the African Diaspora
I rememory for all of us (African, Asian,
Indigenous)
diving into all we darkness
to make sense of we stories.
III.
Caribbean spaces of here and there, crossings,
linked through shared horrors and struggles, histories/herstories
(conquest, removal, slavery, the middle
passage, death, plantation,
labour, indentureship, another passage,
colonization, control,
migration, extraction, detention, occupation)
yet our differences, our uniqueness,
we be struggling still for emancipation
of our minds, bodies, and spaces
beyond geo-political-graphic location
spatially expanding, Caribbean communities
and identities striving to become whole
at home and abroad, rising with the tides
connective tissue around all these spaces
fiery mix up of people, cultures, languages
yet we twisted into silence and divisions
that serve us no longer
remember, the sea and bush know, we secrets
stories of defiance, strength, battles,
rebels, trouble makers,
resistance, crossing lines of color, status,
sex, and place,
from the magic of Boukman to Nanny and the
Maroons
and Morant Bay Rebellion to the Grenadian
Revolution
when we fought against slave masters,
colonial walls, and oppression
fighting for we stolen lives, stolen stories,
stolen resources
carving spaces for independence and self
determination
but we still just surviving
when we need to thrive
and recreate we spaces to be
as complex and ever-changing as we see
interplay of being in motion – the past being
ever present –
forging a future that is ours and free.
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| "We Resist" - Word Art, Oil Pastel by Angelique V. Nixon |
for our blood, mixed
soon with their passion in sport,
in indifference, in anger,
will create new soils, new souls, new
ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed
to the star by which this ship floats
to new worlds, new waters, new
harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed
with the wind and the water
the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed
fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.
~ Kamau Brathwaite “New World A-Comin”
