A Sense of Place
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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.
“looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,”
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 labelled defunct, an eyesore. They took her out to sea and buried her in one of the deepest crevices.
In the year of our Lord, 1985, 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 increasing humidity. White turning yellow: faded, crinkled and salty. The bridge affixed with the permanent scent of diesel, rust and engine oil coercing over the cabin’s façade and seeping into the very composition of the lacquered plywood and hard vinyl changing its instruction, its nature.
“Sinking Ship” (2010)
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 emblematic surge of the sea. Ravenous; they scoured lands putting roots down; they occupied the minutiae 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.
My father transmitting.
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 timeline 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.
Pattree. 1980
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.