Caribbean peoples have been roaming, what I refer to as “contemporary Middles Passages,” for several generations. Many of us continue to live in suspension between our island homes and metropolitan cities of the North seeking education, greener pastures, employment, and adventure. My own journeying from the South to the North has largely been relegated to my education in Canada, the United States and Europe. I spent ten years abroad and had not been permanently living back in the Caribbean for the greater part of ten years.
Although I visited and worked in several of the Spanish, Dutch and English territories in the Caribbean, I have never lived on another island in the region. My intraregional relocation from Barbados to Trinidad seemed as though it should be a simpler move than my travels north. My journey was a mere thirty-five minute airplane ride from one English-speaking island to another.
The week before moving to Trinidad, my husband’s uncle died, and he became involved with the burial according to Hindu rites–a series of events lasting thirteen days, including cremation of the body on the third day. After being in Trinidad for less than a week, I unexpectedly became witness to this very traditional experience that harks back thousands of years to India from where a majority of Trinidad’s population originated. On the final day of the ceremonies, my husband’s aunt invited me to witness my husband, four other male relatives, and three pundits prepare Uncle Krishna for his last and more important journey home.
Although I was aware of my outsider status in North America, nothing had prepared me for this experience. For several generations, my family has been practicing the Anglican traditions of High Mass. Christian burial traditions are much simpler than Hindu customs.
I sat there looking at my husband whom I have known for the past twelve years, dressed in a dhoti, charcoal on his forehead, exchanging flowers and sprinkling rice in the middle of the pundit’s living room floor. How could he now look so unfamiliar? How could I feel so foreign in this island geographically so close to my home? This meeting of many worlds has resulted from a complex layering of historical circumstances that have, over the past several hundred years, become the Caribbean. I felt that I had in fact moved to a very foreign territory, which was at the same time my newly adopted home.
When the ceremony was complete, we ate a vegetarian meal on banana leaves with the rest of the family, and the occasion began to seem more familiar even though the ritual was quite different to what I had experienced before. Relations coming together to celebrate births and to mourn deaths is something people do everywhere. Observing my husband’s extended family, as well as facing the challenge of making Trinidad our new home, forced me to think about that complicated word ‘home’.
John Donnohue, Irish poet and writer, says that the modern world has lost the value of silence, quiet, and solitude and that we have become so accustomed to parallel monologues that we may no longer hear ourselves. Having left a hectic commercial and teaching schedule in Barbados, complete with a large extended family, I was forced into a slower pace in Trinidad, a serious paring down. There has been a welcome silence that has inspired a different focus in my life here.
For the last four years, I have been making work that explores notions of home, longings and belonging, and “(up)rootedness”. These reproductions of my small works are part of an evolving labyrinthine-like journey into the self. Although my relocation from Barbados to Trinidad has been geographically short, for me the transition resonates with intensity. Increasingly, we are all forced to reckon with the fact that “home” may no longer be a real physical space but a notion we carry deep within ourselves. The ultimate journey is within.
