A Letter to the First of Us
Talking across the kala pani to my coolie foremother, who made the crossing, who led to all our arrivals.
If I could show you my face, I’m not so sure you would be proud of it, maa.
I do not think I live according to the design you plotted when you stepped aboard that vessel. Were you coerced, or did you go willingly, even craftily, leveraging your reality in South India for the possibility of what might await you, in Trinidad or British Guiana? Did you leave a man, or another woman behind? Did you act in secret, maa?
Forgive me, but I cannot say I am sorry for all the ways we are unalike. I don’t know you, though I know I could find out. We have meticulous genealogists devoted to this very purpose, to peeling back the tattered, misrecorded rags of archives afforded to subjects of the empire. I could, with enough research and disposable income, discover your name, your village, your circumstances. Forgive me for the fact that more often than not, I am afraid to learn you.
If you live in my head as a nebulous composite of every possible woman, it’s easier to think of you as mythology than what you were: real. Which is not to say mythos isn’t real. I know it is. One day I feel I will be brave enough to know you. For now, I wonder, and I think of you, on days we call auspicious, like this one.
I think of you in the belly of the ship crossing the kala pani, green-gilled with seasickness, hungry and restless, the sounds of quarrelling men around you either wheedling or exhorting but always wanting, wanting, and wanting. Of the bruises around your wrists from being held too tightly in a confined space, the pungent waft of unwashed flesh giving way to brine as you ventured above decks to lean over the side of the barge til your bones creaked, the sleeping giant of your continent long faded in the sea mist. Something new and strange ahead of you. How you felt, surviving each day and night of the journey. How you found moments of unexpected joy in the chatter with the handful of other women in your company, comparing the noserings and bangles, thick necklaces and earrings wrapped in saricloth, lifted from the bottoms of leather trunks for brief display. How you wept in the night or in the morning, travelling alone or with your husband snoring softly at your back.
What the weight of a cutlass in your hand felt like for the first time in a Trinidad canefield. How the Caribbean sun kissed you between the eyes like the backhand of the goddess, reminding you to stay the course. How the first time your bare feet touched the water of the mangrove, this felt like a kind of home. What roti and talkari tasted like when it’s made so far from your mother’s dirt oven, in your father’s compound, where you learned to cook and clean. How the first child drawn out of your womb in a slick tide of blood and fluid heard the call of another nation’s birds.
I imagine your hands, dark and deft and lined with a map of your own making, in the act of counting out coins for the week’s market, in the act of gripping a yard fowl by the neck and snapping it in one swift crack that teems with mercy, in the act of smoothing the oiled black hair back from the forehead of a clandestine lover. Maybe you would curse me for the things I imagine. Maybe you would nod and say there’s more between us that is alike to give comfort. I don’t want comfort. All I want is to show you who I am.
I know I am not what you were expecting, when you cast your net of dreams far, far into the future of your family line. But I hope there is some consolation in the fact that I am one of you who has survived, and I think of you everywhere I go in the world. You are never far from me, maa. When I walk, I sense your iron in my tread. Your copper. Your blood and your gold.
For more information on the colonial exotified images of Felix Morin, read Gaiutra Bahadur’s “Postcards from Empire”, published in Dissent.
💜💜💜 Felt every line. Heart is full. Beautifully expressed.
Breathtakingly vivid read!