Beginning and End
Imagined migration stories from Barbados to Bequia.
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I can barely imagine what it looked like back then: sparsely populated, rolling hills of dry sour grass, small wooden houses with kitchens and tanks as extensions, thatched galvanized roofs, pineapple skirts on mothers, schooner filled harbours, wharf-less shores.
In 1954, my mother donned her red uniform and stood still whilst a proper photographer from St. Vincent visited the family on the hill where they lived at Mount Pleasant. She retells the story to me each time we look through our family album that is coming apart that its edges. The loose plastic clinging to the surface of the photographs trapping air and dust beneath, near the faces, skin and water. I ask her if she remembers the day, she looks at me with disbelief on her face; most of the time my mother can barely remember yesterday. I guess she was nine or ten in the photograph found below.
Grandmothers in pineapple skirts. Mt Pleasant, Bequia 1954
The more I study this photograph the more I find myself in it. Not in any of the faces that litter the steps but in her gesture and being, it is uncanny, at that age I could replace her and no one would be the wiser. She is at the top standing with her hand on her hip, her wild frizzy hair making some Holly expression. They are all gathered together for this important moment, it wasn’t often that photographers came to Bequia and navigated to the top of the island. I can barely imagine what it looked like back then: sparsely populated, rolling hills of dry sour grass, small wooden houses with kitchens and tanks as extensions, thatched galvanized roofs, pineapple skirts on mothers, schooner filled harbours, wharf-less shores.
Inbred (2010)
Yet I am privy to this world, to scenes that would be impossible for me to recall. I can sit years later and talk about that specific moment, and all the moments that spiral out of its center because of the existence of this photograph and numerous others. I can recall the scent of the sea and the wind as it captures me in the moment of positioning myself where that step used to be. The faint scent of rotting mangoes, cashews and plums rising in the air, and the evening turning a piercing warm before the sun drops beyond the horizon line like a heavy globular God. All of these things I envision in a single unchanging moment, time inside me standing still.
I find myself now at the end of the beginning of this unquantifiable thing; the journey has been at times treacherous and enlightening, but I have had a companion, my work. There is an omnipresent advent light protruding forth from the horizon in my dreams, usually it is tangled up in some diluted and deluded fantastical realm or in the arms of a nightmare. I am seeing things that have been hidden from me, hopes and dreams buried by previous encounters with hostility, anger and insecurity the many revelations and Revelations, the alphas and omegas.
Yet I remain at the crux of understanding the freedom of this light, its action, fluxes and waves. In the beginning there was light. I am learning to embrace its life and rays; I am beginning to believe, as an act of generosity and as an active gift of love.