Part I.
I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me. I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time. The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful. I let myself be on my own. Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose. I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes. The sun was hot on my face. I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me. I started to time travel. My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore. I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me. In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children. I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever. I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean. I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails. He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.
I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea. I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this? I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven. I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here. I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados. I concluded that it was possible. Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with. That I might find my way to myself somehow.
The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open. Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness. But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction. She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.
Part II.
I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself. She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep. She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful. She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken. I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist. I don't say that with pride. But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise. A two year break from the grind. We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?" I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.
I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white. In Barbados I was black but a different black. I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker. I was efficient, abrupt, focused. I acted with precision and purpose. I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses. Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds. My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones.
I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue. I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities. That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people. Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else. Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented. Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle. There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time. I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats. I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.
I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame. In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out. Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me. Wasn't I her kin? I had no friends. Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies. I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier. I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted. I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.
I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic? Why couldn't she? Why did she always have to show her contempt? Her wounds? Her pain?) I asked her not to be as she was. (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life! My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.) I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape. (Let them feel special and important. Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you. Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.) I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet. (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success. Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.)
In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians. It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile. The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape. There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide. That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me. That they believed it made it worse. When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove. We both did.
In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot. I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life. Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day. The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island. It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips. She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission. She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things. She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.
I got lost in Barbados. Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her. I fell in love with this place and then the east coast. My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise. It was morose and melancholy. There was a Victorian sadness to this place. Ghosts, secrets, and whispers. It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me. They shared their secrets and let me tell mine. This included my shame and my pride and my confusion. I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected. That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected.
I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her. I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad. I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it. I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler? I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world. I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets. I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right. I wanted antiseptic correctness. I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me. Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair. I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.
Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news. I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes. I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there. I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus. I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back. When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See! I knew you were from the islands!" To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person. My parents and their parents are from here too. We've no Caribbean roots that I know of." They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes. They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret. There is no secret.
My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected. Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception. There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors. That's no secret. They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family. We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records. What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade. My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas.
As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived. I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me. I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity. I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs. These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were. That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.
It is with that love that I return to Barbados. To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection. That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving. I have been that way for myself. Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough. That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest. That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was. Than I am. When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted. I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors. I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face. I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story. I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose. I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat. I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.
Barbados nearly broke me. She did crack me open. And is now filling those cracks with moon dust. What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life. Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am. I have learned to love being this black woman. I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate. I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own. It isn't only mine to bear. What is my own is the light. What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water. What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves. What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Black National Anthem
Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)
When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals. We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country. A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family. This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats. It was not the past. It was the ever-fluid present.
The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness. I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it). That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that." But we weren't. We aren't. That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding. That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me. That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home. This was my cross to bear. Everyone else got to have the day off.
I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive. I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was. As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed. I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed. But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized. I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted.
It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance. They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people. Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen. Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype. My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French. We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up. We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course, in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority. They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.
We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home. They have never said they wished they were not black. Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful. Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another. We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families. And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain.
As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked. If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty. That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives. That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others. They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words. It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear. Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend. This is how it hurts. As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle. For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.
Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately. I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way. But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep. They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together." The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense. I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart. I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.
I was a young person and am now a grown woman. What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally. We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing." I am working hard to keep that love in mine. I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Please. Take your time. I am just waiting on this news feeling like hearing it out loud could pull down the poll of the circus tent of my life and cause everything to collapse, hurting, maiming, maybe even killing some of the performers. Was it two to three business days you told me? Was Monday a holiday? I checked the cell every few minutes thinking maybe the phone was still on vibrate. Answered lots of solicitations on the home phone just in case, somehow, the call from Arizona was the lab, knowing full well that the lab was up the street and that it would, in fact, be from my doctor's office that the call came. But it didn't come. Not for two, three, four, five, or six days. I waited and let myself be convinced and reassured by friends that no news was good news. "They would want you to know right away if it was indeed C," still no one wanted to say it and I surely did not want to hear the letters that follow 'c' in that word.
My dear husband, seven plus years older than I am, always (so sweetly) reminds me that I am young. "You are still young and beautiful." And this not only when he is feeling frisky. Nowadays when we say things like this, it is often in relation to how much more of life there is to live, that yes I CAN still wear a short skirt if I like, do something crazy to my hair, start a new career, try new things. But when it comes to health issues--aches, pains, pinches, twists, tears, and pulls, age has slowly crept up with us. When I see pictures of some of my childhood mates, I see their parents' faces staring back at me. I read posts about injuries from doing things that were once facile, part of every day movement until just the wrong thing slipped or "went." We laugh about those pains. "Getting old," we say. But aging also brings more serious health concerns and a need to make at least annual trips to a physician. The laissez-faire attitude of our youth has given way to consideration of each new freckle, rising cholesterol, too much sugar in the blood, lack of time for exercise or sleep, lack of time for anything really as a sign that we are creeping over that hill. We feel young inside but our bodies demand us to acknowledge that time has passed and that we need to be tender with them.
My dance classes and my meditation practice, my family and my love for them gave me the physical and psychic strength to prepare for the worst news but really expect the best. I, full to the brim with anxiety and too much nervous energy, found ways to distract myself from the waiting for results. My house is now spotless and that includes all closets, drawers, cabinets, and the attic. I danced my brains out and allowed people to love me, care for me, bring me food, invite me to parties, looked them back in their eyes to thank them, and just breathed in and out every single day. I breathed to the top of my head and down to my toes.
On the fifth day I started calling and leaving messages. I felt embarrassed to be calling as though it was expected that I'd wait patiently for the news. I wondered, in all the prep I was given for the biopsy, had anyone in the medical profession thought about my feelings, fears, hopes, anxiety. While I'd been warned not to take aspirin 48 hours prior, and been told how the procedure would happen (ultrasound, cleaning of the breast, numbing local anesthetic followed by a tugging or pulling sensation that would collect the cells to be examined, then days of soreness, bruising, swelling, a little pain, and a tiny scar underneath), very little was said about the shallow breaths I was taking, the tears that came to my eyes when I thought of having to tell the girls that something was wrong with Mommy. When they kicked or pulled or tugged at me and accidentally hit my ailing breast, I'd wince and then smile. I didn't want to give them anything to worry about. I was reminded only once to go back to my life as usual. I felt, and I could be wrong about it but it felt this way, that no one wanted to say what it was they knew I was afraid of. One does not go in for a biopsy the way one might for a new retinol cream for wrinkles. The biopsy signifies there is something in there that is unknown and the big unknown, the one that sets most of us on edge, is fucking cancer. I was scared shitless that I might have breast cancer.
For every day that I waited and meditated and danced and wore a brave face, I was scared, humbled, awed by the life I'd managed to make for myself. For people who loved me, for a community I belonged to, for friends, family, strangers, humankind that had the urge to live, to be part of this carnival called life. It had never been called into question for me in such high resolution. Yes, I was full of anxiety in Barbados and did fear losing it there and once there was some crazy turbulence on a plane where we dropped a few feet and I grabbed the girls and cried my face off, telling them how much I loved them over and over again until we steadied, but I never put myself, allowed myself to see myself as old enough, ready spiritually, to imagine the end of my life. Breathe in. Breathe out. This I would tell myself every moment that I drifted to those thoughts. Because that was what scared me the most. I went all the way there every time.
A rogue nurse in the office sent me a secret text to tell me that the results of my biopsy were negative two days before my doctor's office gave me the official word. I want to say that I danced on the ceiling, but I instead sat quietly on the floor, complete silence all around me, save the ticking of the clock in another room and the hum from the fridge. I felt relief for myself and compassion for those, many of whom are my friends or family or acquaintances, whose tales don't or have not ended on this note. I can still not touch the bullet resting on the inside corner pocket of my left breast. The bruising and soreness has proven a longer healing period than expected, but I know my little lump is there. I want to remove it. It is no talisman and I am not brave enough to carry it. Even knowing that it is benign, it presses at everything dear to me and threatens to pull the tent down. I'd prefer a scar where it once made itself cozy, an 'X' to mark the spot where my fears were released and my dreams held tight in a deep inhale were released.
Do your self exams and get a mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, or thermal scan if you are over 40 or have a history of breast cancer.
(c) Copyright 2013. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
The flying fish, a symbol of Barbados as popular as the trident and national colors of blue and gold, is loved and revered on the island nation. Fishermen cast their nets for the catch and holiday shoppers open their purses for aprons, drinking glasses, tea kettles, and t-shirts with its image. During the two years I lived in Barbados with my family, I only once saw a flying fish as I tread water on the glorious beach at Sandy Lane. I was so shocked and startled to see it pass overhead that I quite believed it was a mirage. The flying fish population was dwindling due to overfishing and the slow destruction of the coral reef around Barbados in which they dwelled. I'd heard rumor that the fish were moving to different waters closer to Trinidad and Tobago, causing greater tension and unease between the two nations, never great bedfellows to begin with. Having only witnessed one in flight without really knowing if I'd actually seen it, I wasn't moved by the tall tales and kind of giggled at the overabundance of imagery in the souvenir shops much like I laughed at all the Big Apples in New York City.
And then, on our return to Bim, a vacation designed to heal old wounds and change my perspective and perception of the tiny island nation and our years there as expatriates, years I consider some of the darkest of my life, I saw schools of flying fish leap from the sea, fleeing the catamaran on which I danced and drank and seized life with our dear friends. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the urge to purchase as many pot holders, fridge magnets, and key chains with images of flying fish as I could. I shouted out every single time I saw them leap out of the water. Every single time. They were marvelous simply. We'd run into them after a delightful swim with the sea turtles and a chase that ended with a jaw-dropping sighting of a whale. A whale! Just when I thought I couldn't be any happier, our race to shore produced the schools of flying fish soaring and darting along in front of us, to the side, all around, using their wing-like fins to glide in the air, catching the light and leaving glitter trails on the water.
The flying fish had been gone and then returned. Just as I had. When I left Barbados, I was so angry with this place, so hurt, so destroyed and everything that was wrong in my life was connected to the bad years spent here. My husband's job, culture shock, severe post-partum depression and anxiety, made the landscape of Barbados haunt my nightmares and stand in for absolute horror in my life. Many wondered if I'd ever set foot again in Bim but any who know of my loyalty and love of friends had to have known that I could not be kept away forever. My friends here are some of the best in my life and as they love their home, I knew I'd have to find a place in my heart for Barbados. The return to Barbados as a vacationing family and not as expatriates has not only changed my perspective and perception of the place, but has given us all, collectively, an insanely incredible trove of memories.
There is nothing we set out to do here that we have not done. We have snorkeled, swum with turtles, relaxed seaside, eaten and drunk with abandon, seen friends, made peace with monkeys and even the white lizards (yuck), gone to little beach bars never visited and toured places never seen. We've gone back to old haunts, our old home even, and released the hold of bad juju and bad vibes. Even the dreaded hotel where my husband once worked lost some of its sway in its miserable, drab sameness, and tales of its continued troubles.
I knew all along that there was no way around this mess. That I had to go through it to break its spell (years of self-discovery and therapy had taught me that). That I could never free myself from the quicksand that those years of depression and hurt and sadness and fear brought about if I could not return and see that the quicksand was just muck and that it was never meant to hold me down. Those sweet, sweet flying fish soaring over the aqua blue waves with white crests sped up my heart, invited me to the chase, lead me back to a place where all the journeys are valuable, even the dark and scary ones, even the ones that seem to take it all away from us, even the ones that lead us right to the belly of the whale. When I saw that whale breaching, turning, showing itself to us out in the calm, blue waters of the Caribbean Sea, when I glanced around the catamaran to see the faces of people I love, my family--my husband, my girls, my life--and my friends, witnessing the awe and beauty of that moment, of that step on our paths crossing and converging, my quest for closure and peace was met.
I returned to Barbados hoping for an apology, offering a white flag, agreeing that we have differences, different wants and needs, but prepared to acknowledge and respect that we once shared time and space. We are still quiet frenemies, Barbados and I, hurting each other sometimes on purpose and mostly on accident. But when we see each other from far away, I will remember that she showed me the turtles and the whales and the flying fish and her beauty. I will remember that she made my skin glow and gave me pride in my womanly curves (at least when with her). She made my hair grow long and strong and taught my children to love nature and the water and sun and sea. She allowed my hubby to swim to her depths with fish and reefs and turtles and gave us a test that finally strengthened more than it broke us. I hope that she will remember that I gave fully and tried and tried and tried though I was scared shitless. That I traveled all around this island in search. Sometimes I found what I was looking for in the enormous waves of the Soup Bowl and quiet dignity of the East Coast. Sometimes it was watching the setting sun while liming with friends and kids. Sometimes it was in the music, in the dances that I'd never have known had she not shown me. Sometimes she frustrated me to no end like an annoying sibling, but I still rooted for her to win.
The flying fish have returned to Barbados and who knows how long they will stay. How long does not matter. They are already a part of this place and it a part of their glory. I'll go back home, settle back into the life I've dreamed for myself, continue searching and seeking but now, my time in Barbados will stand as a moment where I triumphed, having feared and felt encroaching darkness and turned it to light.
(c) Copyright 2013. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
