A sense of place

I moved islands when I was born; I was placed in the belly of

Motor Vessel (M.V) Edwina and headed south. She was red and

long, white chairs lined her deck, putrid smoke exited her exhausts.

When I was fifteen, she was taken to the windward side of the

island and sunk. They welded holes in her hull and let the

bottom and stern touch sand. She stayed on Mt. Wynne’s black

shore for years becoming a haven to fauna until she was labeled

defunct, an eyesore. They took her out to sea and buried her

along one of the deepest crevices.

In the year of our Lord, 1985, five years after I was born, my father

put me on the counter of his first ship, M.V Pattree, which had a

map affixed to its surface. It was blue and white, its lines obscured

by the plastic sheeting laid over it to protect it from the elements,

it’s edges curled from the humidity. White turning yellow: faded,

crinkled and salty. The bridge affixed with the permanent scent of

diesel, rust and engine oil coursing over the cabin’s façade and

seeping into the very composition of the lacquered plywood and

hard vinyl changing its instruction, its nature.

We were out to sea, tossed between God’s billowing waves, back and

forth; into and out of the strange aqueous that was no longer sky

blue and placid, but angry, vociferous and unforgiving. It was dry

season because that was the only time my father would let her walls

protect us, some myth about the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone,

convection and wind pressure travelling west off the coast of Africa

aligning to make the conditions perfect. The converging tides pulling and

pushing us North, South, East and West, all at once.

This undertow ruptures the delicate history of the archipelago,

redistributing and corrupting its parts, the sea’s violence pronounced,

piercing and omnipresent. It consumed my ancestors in a gulp over

a century and a half ago, left them like beached whales stranded

on small topographic slippages. Barren and bare, they dispersed.

Journeyed to find homes that would occupy the abandoned cavity left by

the surge of the sea. Ravenous, they scoured lands putting roots down;

they occupied the periphery of expanding shores, of protected ports and

harbours and of elusive ground.

I am where I come from, nine degrees north of the Equator. I speak the

language of this place. The specificity of language is important to the

region; it is the way we come to know ourselves through the ritual of

an aural and spoken (oral) tradition. The function of memory within

these constructs becomes distorted, maze-like, an amalgamation

of the past’s past. Through synapses, chemistry collides with image,

sound, taste and touch; Iit is re-experienced as confusion, as

displacement. I try to locate myself within the time line of the region,

within the stories that spill from elder lips; always I am confronted

with a gap, a space that seems impossible to reconcile.

I attempt to reassemble, to put to order things that seem out of place.

It becomes an opportunity to confront memory, its disobedience,

half-truths and exaggerations. The fan appears, the fan of memory

that Walter Benjamin describes, the one that spirals out from its

circumference into forever. Along its rungs questions multiply and

truth evades. This spiral has no folds, no folds to lift up and push oneself

against, it is smooth, forever retreating into the beyond. The possibility of

dissection, of splitting the helix, its tangent line and angle becomes

treacherous.

Thus, it races past me, beyond my perception into that infinite space

where language becomes the fight. The fight is synonymous with my

relationship to reality. Pen to paper, in binary, within code, shrouded

within language, the fight manifests itself as fists and blows. Instead

of the world being knocked off its course, it is I who am dislodged.

Exiled. Through this controlled retreat into the past, I explore the

fragments of souls given voice again to reflect on territory, on the encircling

salt that courses through veins, and on the ever slowly travelling being

back and forth wondering and wandering within waves.