What is belonging
and do children of Empire ever feel they belong anywhere?
It’s October and it is cold. We haven’t given in to the central heating yet but we have had the fire on for a treat and that was delightful. Heating as a treat, welcome to England in the year 2022, not to be confused with 1822 when taxes rose to compensate for the nations over borrowing and to pay off the national debt leading to widespread disturbance….
My little chicken has got a slipped disc issue going so life is very full of looking after her. She’s seen a specialist and is on crate rest for the next four weeks. Hopefully she’ll make good healing progress in that time or she’ll need an operation which I’m not sure I’m emotionally ready for. These little furry friends suck you in with their puppy dog eyes and rule your emotions till the end of time.
Being cold and emotional reminded me of short story, as a monologue, I wrote after visiting Jamaica. Here’s a snippet of Nearly There.
Nearly There
I know this is why she brought me here.
To sit and eat with my ancestors, to shop with their descendants, to travel on buses with my bredrin and to walk with a million people who look like me.
Who don’t look like me.
Who care what I look like.
Who don’t care what I look like.
A million people like me.
Why do you hate yourself? is what the driver wanted to know, thinking he can find the answer in my eyes.
Why are you trying to blend into a people that you don’t belong to?
Wherever you go your home is always here, for you are a child of the sunshine, warm seas, atrocities, allspice, open spaces, hummingbirds and ackee trees.
You are a child of the Empire and you walk in the footsteps of those who trod a path for you to walk wherever you choose. Be that the mountains of Morocco or the sidewalks of Manhattan you have been gifted the freedom of the world, you were not born to blend in.
Your brightness tells a history and a herstory, your brightness tells, ‘out of many one people. Your brightness screams, I am all my ancestors’ wildest dreams.
She is holding my hand as we drive the Chinese road scorched into the forest, back to the holiday house on an old plantation where the sugar used to grow.
Funny place to have a house to create happy memories on a land soaked in blood – but maybe I should just get over it, slavery, the legacy of it and all that. I want to go back to Jamaica, there is so much to explore, see, learn and eat. I’ve been learning about the Caribbean Artist Movement which was founded in 1966 in London by artists from the Caribbean, aiming to celebrate the new sense of shared Caribbean ‘nationhood’. Andrew Salkey, one of the founders of the Caribbean Artists Movement, won the Thomas Helmore Poetry Prize in 1955 for his poem ‘Jamaica Symphony’, later reworked as Jamaica (1973). Of its conception he said, 'for the first time I began to realise myself as a colonial and us as a colony, and our history and the way that we were forever at somebody else’s beck and call'. In the poem he talks of not belonging. In my short story I talk of belonging, what is belonging and do children of Empire ever feel they belong anywhere?
Salkey’s archive is held at the British Library in Kings Cross maybe I’ll make do with visiting that, at least they’ll have the heating on.