Remembrance

It often comes in phases,

Sometimes, at the end of the day is,

'How yuh doin son

Yuh eat anything for the day yet?'

It eh play it hot outside eh? That blasted sun

Other days, she can’t be bothered to say a word before the sun done set

She started forgetting things when I was about fourteen years old

Little things at first;

Grocery lists, phone numbers, stories she was told.

But as the years went by,

So, did my mother’s memories

They would return in bursts and sparks

Like little candles lighting up the dark

She would sometimes run her fingers over her feet

Calloused, from long walks at night in the park

She would caress the blisters on her skin

From days long past from places, she might as well had never been

It was a cold morning in December

She looked at the snow as it fell slowly but her eyes were seeing something else

I often imagine what tropical landscapes full her mind

In her fondest dreams

She probably finds herself down by the streams

With a cookout happening on the shore,

Calypso music dancing on the air connecting her to her core.

Her body may exist over here,

But her soul is in the heart of Trinidad playing in the fields.

“Ma, do you know who I am?”

What kinda stupid question is that boy?

Like I eh go know my own son

Lord Jesus, put a hand on this child, please

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Today seems to be a good day for her

‘Ma, how old am I?”

‘Eh? How old? Must be bout sixteen now, not so?’

Not too good of a day then

She was about four years off, but I was still glad she remembered who I was.

‘Ma, what’s my name?’

She gets a troubled look on her face

She begins to fall back in time at a dramatic pace

Grasping desperately for information she just can’t place

Silhouette bodies that she needs to match to a face

Her eyebrows furrow as she contemplates the case

Her composure begins to crack from the inside, like an already broken vase

‘I’m Anthony’ I say to her

“Yuh eh need to tell me that child, I know meh own child name”

She pauses for a moment as if to regain herself

“It have Julie mango, starch mango, rose mango, calabash mango

Some ah dem big, some ah dem small

Some ah dem so sweet, it go make ur bawl.

Mind when yuh go to pick, yuh don’t fall…

Cause some of dem mango trees over 12 feet tall.”

She sometimes remembers childhood songs so vividly

That they come running out of her mouth

Forcing her to shout

An amalgamation of things that nobody knows what she really talking about

In these moments though, her mind seems clear of all doubt

Her words are sure of themselves

There is life in her eyes again

It inspires me to take up the pen

Every now and then

When those bullets of historical experiences come shooting out

I am prepared to absorb each shot to my chest

To compromise for my lack of understanding, I use my poetry as the bulletproof vest

It softens the blow

For the older, I grow

And the colder side of the world that begins to show

But with each day that passes, a step towards better understanding

How to ask for something and receive it without demanding

How to better learn myself, by better leaning my mother’s mind.

“Mosquito one, Mosquito 2

Mosquito jump in the old man shoe

The shoe too hot, it jump in the pot

The pot too cold, it jump in the hole

The hole too deep, it jump in the jeep.”

Before I even realize it, I’m singing along myself

A silly childhood song from a time when curfew was when the street lights came on

“The jeep too fass, it jump in the grass

The grass too high-

She stops herself midsentence

Is she forgetting this song too?

Out of worry, I jump up and out of the blue I ask

“Ma, where yuh from?”

‘Moruga’ she calmly replies

The animation returns to her eyes and she takes off

“Long time, we used to get red mango and sugar plum for twenty-five cents a bag

Now? They wanna charge yuh a pound and a crown.”

It makes me think of why my mother came here in the first place

Hopping on that plane in the sixty’s hungry to get her first taste

Of first world living and a brand-new base

Except she was met with discrimination in all manner of forms

Be it her gender, her class, and even her race

From the blackness of her skin to the definition of being feminine

Her new identity as a black woman was born

Having had moved to a country where these things mattered.

I often think of the movement of bodies

Across lands and across waters,

We carry our cultures wherever we choose to go

The Caribbean is the first truly diasporic place in the world

Can only reproduce itself wherever it finds its roots planted.

I may never have touched the Trinidadian soil,

But I feel the roots of my mother’s hands reaching towards me

I recoil,

I retreat,

It feels like too much at times,

I can hear the whiplash of a hundred year

I can feel the whip lash for a hundred years

I can feel the earth, damp with the water of all those tears

Of poor mothers and brothers and fathers and sisters

Who suffered being removed from their homes

Where is home?

I, like my mother before I am forced to ask that question.

To the Caribbean individual, where is home really?

My mother forgets more than she can care to remember now

But, the memories that do find their way to the surface

They are so full of life that I only need them to know

That my mother is still fighting for her life, even if she will forget again tomorrow.