Cynthia James

April 15 2014, 9.30 am. Your I-phone alerts you that you have mail. You tap the screen and log in to your g-mail. And even before you open up you can glean some of the inner details of your new mail. Great! One from myAncestralyne.com. You can log in and get the results of your DNA swabs.

You click, but while the blue bubble circles, your eye catches a spam mail from some electronic news website. In spite of your tight security filters, this happens from time to time.

About some kidnapped school girls in a place called Chibok, Nigeria. Where is that? But just as you are gleaning the first words showing in your inbox lineup, your screen goes white for a mini-second and myAncestralyne opens up.

You’ll get back to Chibok – you used to be a teacher – anything about students still draws your eye.

Your results page shows two columns, two profiles. Medical, you’ll visit later. But your heart is thrumming as you click on the element that really made you send for the genealogy kit, your ancestral profile.

When you click, you see to the left, a list of colour coded percentages, and to the right, a world map.

The list strung down the side of the page has a tally at the top – 100%. And beneath you read:

68.4%

Sub-Saharan African

48.1%

West African

0.7%

Central & South African

0.0%

East African

19.6%

Nonspecific Sub-Saharan African

20.2%

The list also gives your percentages for European, Asian, Native American, and Oceanian. It even has a Neanderthal percentage. Yours is 1.5%.

But a little addition tells you that the figures for the first two categories account for 88.8%. All the rest add up to 11.2%, and in that  figure, most of the breakdown numbers are less than .5%. So although you know that small figures can be just as big factors or sometimes bigger factors in how things play out in life, for the time being, you are focused on the large figures.

As you pass your cursor over each of your percentages, the world map lights up. Your DNA percentages have been colour coded to show the regions of your major ancestral line. You linger over these largest percentages, and what these are coded to, is just a large swathe of land from the middle of a heel of yam down to the coastline.

You keep rolling your cursor over the colours, right-clicking, left-clicking, to see if a hand will appear to open up the large land mass.

But nothing happens, just this large swathe of land. Is there anything here that you don’t already know? Your ancestors might have travelled through here, but you could not have been born in all these places. Or could you?

All you know about Africa is what you’ve read in books. You once were invited to a two-week IBBY conference in South Africa and were so ‘too-tool–bay’ at the mere thought of touching the motherland, that except for the tour to Mandela’s prison and Soweto’s rust-red tin-covered roofs and the looming Table Mountain, all you really have remained with are periodical memory gasps.

You sign out. You were expecting something more precise.

One by one you close the open pages of your browser, and then as you are about to shut down, you remember the spam about the school children of Chibok, kidnapped.

You know that Oprah has a school for girls in Africa, and that Angelina who had a double mastectomy (and probably got the information she acted upon from a database with features similar to the one you got your genealogy kit from) has African kids and lives somewhere in Africa … sometimes.

Where is Chibok? In Nigeria, North-East, the article says. Are you originally from there?

You sign back into myAncestralyne and let your cursor walk around what you know to be Nigeria, following your largest percentiles, gazing at the huge borderless regions of the map.

Where are you in this mass of land? Days have passed. Where are you? How far is the Cameroon? Why is no one coming? You started off in a coffle of 300, but when you passed out and woke up with a crusted blood-scale caked down your leg, there were less of you. You are disoriented.  Is anyone looking for you? In the first place do they know where to look?

The politics are different these days 500 years on.

Still, The People Who Came, The Arrivants, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land – remembered staples of your youth and independence, texts that arose from questions similar to your questions, raise more questions. Your fault if you looked to those narratives based on life and lived experience, born of a need to know similar to your own, for answers. Segu, The Book of Negroes  –  put them all together and it is either that this is happening again, or it has been going on in different waves all the time.

© Cynthia James, May 2014

Truth is stranger than fiction, they say.

And this is what crossed my mind after reading Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise, a novel that factionalizes Jonestown and the events leading up to the massacre at the Peoples Temple in Guyana in November 1978.

As a Caribbean person who lived during the period on the island of Trinidad, next door, I came to the novel partly to reflect and, of course, partly to follow the Guyanese-American author D’Aguiar’s handling of that unimaginable horror that so challenges any kind of fictive re-creation.

And as I ticked off the stitching of the fabula with documented affidavits and testimony of witnesses, I found myself still searching for adequate plot, for motive.

Of course there is a storyline: a love thread, a chief villain, a maze of evil and many many victims, but still …

Why the almost race-less characters? Why had the virile, the halt, the lame, the old, the young, the gay guards Kevin and Eric, voyaged so far from their birth-land in the US, following Father, bringing their families into this false Eden, the central minotaur of this labyrinth, the caged gorilla, Adam?

This last week of April 2014, the basketball furore in America over alleged racist statements and the thrown banana picked up, peeled and eaten by a player in a European soccer match before the said player took his corner kick, revived in good measure the missing link: People still dreaming of an anti-discrimination world almost 40 years after, still.

So O Captain! My Captain!

Can the ascension of the innocents at the end of D’Aguiar’s novel, or the Pied Piper trail down to the escape pier, suffice as a fair enough Anansi story ending? Trina’s flute, is it an effective lullaby for the children?

Perhaps the shortcomings of this novel lie neither with the storyteller nor the art of fiction. Perhaps all storylines for this massacre belong to the victims.

For Children of Paradise is told from beginning to end in the present tense, a stylistic device which evokes a kind of memorializing that warns against recurrence.

In this instance, add the historical fact that the Caribbean is a place to which many have been brought unwillingly, and many have come voluntarily with a medley of widely contrasting motives, binding irresistibly the possessor to the dispossessed. 

And though this may seem unrelated, a similar massacre of innocents played out itself five years later, in the last weeks of October 1983, on an island not too distant up the Caribbean, a massacre which no truth and reconciliation has been able to assuage.

Ideology, and leadership woven into a religion for the dispossessed – similar outcome – betrayal – disbelief – silence – another bad dream for which no Anansi story is adequate.

For me, there are some patches of ground and events that greatly challenge the art of fiction. For our memorials, we have affidavits and accounts of witnesses. But it is difficult to pry satisfactory Anansi stories out of these. In my opinion, Jonestown Guyana is one such patch of ground and event.

©Cynthia James – April 2014

The Goldfinch Donna Tartt

There’s a Smucker’s ad that shows a youngster cramming to the brim with strawberries a glass jar he’s been long and ardently working at packing.

“Think I got it in,” he says in a whisper and raises the jar to see if he’s accomplished the task of making the brand of jam for which his family name has become famous.

But there is so much empty space around the fruit that he pours the individual strawberries out, and as he begins again, makes a mental check.

“Ow, I lost count!” 

“What you’re doing, Richard?” the approaching elder brother asks.

“How does Grandpa do it?” Richard muses.

“Do what, Richard?”

“How does he get so many strawberries in a jar?”

“You’ll figure it out,” the elder brother says, walking off about his own business.

Like Richard – that’s how I feel after reading, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

How does Tartt (no pun intended) bring to table an oeuvre so piquant, locking in chunks of juicy fruit with no air and no spaces?

Here is my list of the strawberries I see packed tightly in The Goldfinch:

• a review of very graphic 9/11 film

• a consummate appreciation for art history down the ages, with a concentration on select masterpieces

• genuine socialite benevolence and generosity and an equal measure of love, loss, loneliness and second chances

• the luxuries, vices and schizophrenic despair of the NYC wealthy and privileged

• a flaming kaleidoscope of the drug underworld with its mix-and-match no-holds-barred experimentation

• the preying on body and soul that magnetizes the gambler, the trafficker, and the blackmailer – rich material for detective sleuthing, spawned in a quagmire of murderous moods, infidelity, rage, talent and disappointment.

• the dark corridors of chicanery on the perimeter of the art dealer’s world, corridors slick with pretentiousness and exploitation wrought on a veneer of prestige that can burnish any artifact for use as collateral

• the perils of parenting in this unstable milieu of chameleon changeability and opportunism

• bohemianism (immigrant and home-grown), living by its wits on the edges of this world

•  the flawed loyalty and the sustaining, intuitive camaraderie of uptown private-school kids, a resurfacing network that flourishes on weaknesses known and exploited since childhood

Have I left anything out? Add a generous splash of these savor-brightening umamis:

• the unforgettable taste of childhood love, permanently on the tongue of those who are lucky to have been gifted with the good of it, carrying this glow un-smudged into adulthood

• sparkling humor, that piquant sprinkling of kosher salt to bring juices popping  on the tongue, a startling reminder that we should not take ourselves too seriously, considering the outlandish fabric of myths that we use to anchor us – myths that any other inter-planetarian (Boris) would rearrange into more sensible narratives to deal with our befuddling mores and codes.

• and too, 10 years of sweat and a cadre of persons worthy of acknowledgment who sustained all along as the compote thickened.

Here’s the rub. Like Richard, I can check and recheck the ingredients time and time again, but I know I’ll always miss something. Furthermore, à la Picasso, and as Tartt’s narrative intimates of the original Fabritius Goldfinch, it is difficult enough to copy, much more to steal this composition.

The final product, which is there for all to delight in, gives a clue.

Nevertheless, devouring it is only a beginning, since deep down, I know I have to go find my own jar, choose my own fruit and then set about making my own mouth-watering concoction.

© Cynthia James, February 2014

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun. (Pablo Picasso)

In fact, the progress of Lahiri’s introspective ‘lowland’
brings to mind that we of the generations born after
World War II and its ensuing colonial Independence
wave sometimes do as if we invented Immigration
with a capital ‘I’. But indeed, barring the draconian
border strictures of our age, the fuel of migration
has ever been much the same.  Cynthia James 

I’ve just finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland – A Novel. This is the fourth book of hers that I’ve read, and again I am fascinated by her handling of the migrant narrative.

For where very many migrant narratives highlight cultural strangeness and external differences, The Lowland highlights the stranger within – the inner adjustment the newcomer makes to the circumstances that have pushed him or her to becoming a migrant, and also the coming into being of his or her new self.

And so Providence Rhode Island is new climate and new ground, but for Gauri and Subhash, bound by a past of filial indebtedness the focus is on their new life, both individually and as a couple.

This is not to diminish the foreignness of their American experiences, but any hue and cry about their contact with the outer American world that surrounds them, is muted in comparison with their management of the page turning of their own individual and intruding extended foreignness.

I was also struck by the echoes in The Lowland of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

Any comparison with that Forster’s novel so deeply embedded in British colonial politics may sound out of place.

But Tollygunge the old English club, the Naxalites, the vast internal migration ensuing from India’s pre- and post- Independence socio-politics, form a sweltering chain of events that have determined the lives of the main characters. In a way, too, the geography of the vast West Bengal lowland delta depicted in Lahiri’s novel reminds of the uncovered secrets and the power to transform of the Marabar Caves. Then on the human plane, Gauri, the disoriented, dishevelled mentor of student disciples, is very much a Mrs. Moore of A Passage to India. On Gauri’s revisit to her hometown, she finds the various tablets she has come to memorialize covered over by people and landfill – no longer where she last saw them. And so at the end of her life she leaves again, chastened.

Even the introspective tone and style of Lahiri’s and Forster’s narration I find to be comparable. Actually, it’s the opening of The Lowland that brought A Passage to India to mind – the two books open similarly laid back, each under the pall of the English club and each against the backdrop of looming, enigmatic sky and terrain.

Yet The Lowland upends Foster’s clash between East and West, and upends as well the mantra much applied to his work – that of “only connect”.

In fact, the progress of Lahiri’s introspective ‘lowland’ brings to mind that we of the generations born after World War II and its ensuing colonial Independence wave sometimes do as if we invented Immigration with a capital ‘I’. But indeed, barring the draconian border strictures of our age, the fuel of migration has ever been much the same.

Whether it’s a mother fleeing her homeland to protect her unborn from Herod or from the ravages of the DRC; whether it’s a family in search of an illusory better economic existence; whether it’s the restless adventurer; or whether migration comes in the form of population displacement and redistribution in search of better hunting grounds up and down the Siberian or Andean chain – the inner coming to terms with self-in-foreignness of the migrant lies on a continuum of parallels.

And in this respect, for me, the philosophical core of Lahiri’s The Lowland (a novel that underscores its links with the ancient discipline of philosophy) lies with Subhash and Elise, the elderly couple who have found reliability in each other’s companionship, but who at the same time maintain their separate selves. (He and Gauri are divorced.) Subhash and Elise walk across the Irish marshes trying to fathom the circumstances surrounding the cryptic artifacts and skyline before going back to their adopted Rhode Island.

They go hand in hand studying the ancients.

As for their relationship, and in fact, the relationships of couples in The Lowland, it seems to me the book pays scant homage to conventional depictions of love – even when young people are presented, even when Gauri and Udayan are depicted.

This is neither Hollywood nor Bollywood.

The stark inner aloneness of Lahiri’s characters is punishing. For The lowland contains yearning, and angst, and loss, and yes, love, but much more inscribed into characters is the brutality of their aloneness. The legacy for Bela, Gauri’s daughter and perhaps even for Meghna, the granddaughter are the same.

And in this regard, The Lowland is more generous to its male characters and more poignantly unforgiving of its females.

For me, myself a migrant Gauri woman, what is the take-away? That whatever piece of sky arcs over me, I am joined, unawares to powerful determinants in an age-old migration, forced and unforced, of peoples.

So, as relentlessly discomforting, alone and troubling as Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland is, for me as a reader, it is a relief not to buck up against old cultural battles of newcomer adjustment or to have to suffer through the clichéd migrant fairy tale.

©Cynthia James – December 2013

There’s a slim line between essentializing and claiming your own. Take aerobics, for instance: The bigger and bolder the signage for Zumba, Bollywood, and Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot Calypso, the bigger and bolder the draw for the instructor of a crowd.

No doubt, this kind of pump-up has its monetary and physical rewards.

But go past these visible externals: The underlying stereotyping that transfers from a genre to its populations to stigmatize and limit remains. And, of course, this tendency to limit and stigmatize based on genre and population is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nonetheless to hear “America saved …Tessanne Chin” last night on The Voice was pure joy.

Like Dancehall or not, class it raunchy or not, like Lady Saw’s repertoire or like it not, underneath it all, there’s nothing like losing yourself in your own lyrics, in your own song. Your body claims it, the windpipe claims it. It is yours.

Let’s acknowledge fusions and hybrid forms, but at the base this is not your everyday clone.

Is the term “world music” still around? – that category coined to designate “ethnic” and non-Western? And whatever happened to the World Music Awards where the winners have been conventional and unconventional? From the origin of these awards, perhaps the tag and tie to the poor and underdeveloped, carried an unwitting message. Whatever has happened there, for the past two years, World Music Awards has been on hold.

However, to get back to Tessanne Chin’s choice and performance … it takes guts to choose against all odds, in an arena dominated by Western genres, to come out from left field and inhabit your body, your space, your throat, your own voice.

That is what making music is about.  It needs no tag … but sorry for the contradiction, I’m glad that it does have one – Reggae, Dancehall.

Because it’s nice to play dress up, try on different styles of voice, but sometimes the way the body hug, the size, the shape, you just have it put it on. This goes way past essentializing. It’s a call.

So A Big-Up to Tessanne Chin!

Now for some Trinidad Chutney on The Voice.

Very early in this year, 2013, I awoke with a song in my ear from across a distant lifetime: “Come back to Erin, to Erin, to Erin.” It is a song that begins in a major key, plummets to a minor key in the first phrase, recovers, and then goes cloyingly along. Erin is a village deep in the south of Trinidad, the land of my birth, so I got up thinking that something might not be right at home.

Some will understand this sort of inexplicable reflex visitation that age and displacement conspire to bring about. In this instance, the Come Back to Erin was also being sung in my father’s baritone, and you didn’t take a last shut-eye when the old schoolmaster called.

Songs like Come Back to Erin were an a capella treat in tonic sol-fa my father taught to soften the inquisition of Panel Inspection when officials from the Ministry of Education descended on our school for annual student testing, not only of the 3 Rs, but of Hygiene and Geography as well, the latter, mainly on capitals of the world. So from tomes like Hymns Ancient and Modern and British and American folk songs: That’s how I learnt The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended, Old Swanee River, The Ash Grove, Tavern in the Town and yes, Come Back to Erin, an Irish folk song.

By the way Erin, Trinidad, has nothing to do with the Father Hennessys and Doughertys, that bastion of Irish Catholicism that plagued my guilt-ridden childhood. According to NALIS, the Trinidad National Library, Erin derives from a Native Indian word, corrupted by the  Spanish in the naming of a settlement, “Herine” in the same general location on early maps..

Whatever! The name could as well have been from a medley of other origins in an island with overlapping ownerships, synchronizing Venezuelan parang, cassareep lore, Francophone patois, and at one time even a French newspaper in a territory where the official language was English. Trinidad is a conglomeration of fanciful place names from every tribe that came – from Champs Fleurs to Chaguaramas to Chandernagore.  

Later in the day of my Erin awakening, however, another place name also came to me from the past – Timbuktu. For it was January 28, 2013, the day that awoke to the burning of the books.

Timbuktu was not one of the capitals I had to learn for Panel Inspection referred to earlier. I only knew of Timbuktu as Trinidadian‘ fatigue,’ aka ‘picong’ or joke. Instead of saying someone lived Quite-o-Quite’ or ‘Behind God back,’ you could also silence the country-bookie by asking him if he was from Timbuktu. Just as you could silence the blackest boy in the class by rechristening him Lumumba, and the boy who came to college in Port-of-Spain with blue food in a three-tiered aluminium pail, sans pocket-change to go down Frederick Street with the coloured boys to buy Stauble’s pies, Kassavubu. Except as nicknames, the only other place you would find words like Timbuktu in the years of my growing were in the middle-class taboos – Better Village and the bachannalian current affairs calypso.

These stumps of displaced memory coming out of nowhere seemed to me important collectibles. For not only were they fragments of a Caribbean of the not too distant past, but also they framed the void around a mosaic of artfully scored pieces like fillers locking in stained glass.

For in the Caribbean education I know (and here I can only speak of Trinidad), History leaped in the space of five to ten years from Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington to The People Who Came, Books 1, 2, and 3. No Blame. But in the patchwork of that education, it was as if nothing came between.

Soweto, the massacres and the undaunted resistance of the Mandelas were not part of school; they were over-the-head, big people conversation; current news. In the Caribbean itself, Walter Rodney was taboo; he was banned from speaking on a campus. It is doubtful that even today many school children know who he was and what he wrote. In Trinidad, apart from North American media and popular culture information about the Afro (hairstyle) and the Black Panthers and Civil Rights, Blackness was left to fringe organizations like The National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) that were tainted with (and still are) with radical extremism and fanaticism. So much so, that I remember in the eighties, as a big woman with three children of my own, rushing home at lunch time to catch the 12:45 radio program of Aiegoro Ome – a series that recalled, Imoteph and Aesop and Tutankhamun – and reaching back late to work.

Needless to say, Come Back to Erin vanished from my repertoire after I left primary school. After all, my independence on many levels had come. And the Carnival Big Truck ran over it and much between. No blame! We occupied ourselves with our nationalistic selves, writing and rewriting our arts, our scholarship and our values.

No Blame. History was being urgently remade in carved-up independent Africa, too, but that was not part of our curriculum. Apart from scholars and writers who sought it out, we children didn’t know about ‘the dark continent’ and it did not know about us. At the same time, though, people were scampering about, migrating like mad and meeting brothers and sisters they did not know, for the first time on foreign ground.

In Caribbean syllabi, is History different today?  In fact, is it important for children to know this kind of history in a formal way? Or in the new dispensation is it called something else, perhaps Communication Studies in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) syllabi?

To me as a child in elementary school, Africa was the prettiest continent of them all. You spun the globe and the  mosaic multi-colored quilt took off in a whitening whirr, slowly revealing its patchwork of hues again when it slowed. Africa had the shape of a familiar staple – a yam, a soursop, a zaboca hanging upside down. I had no clue that fourscore years before, that very quilt of colours was designed by 14 men in a room in 2 months. Fragmented collectibles – some periwinkle pink, some marigold yellow, some bachelor-button purple.

In 2013 they are independent, but still collectibles for cocoa and conflict minerals like diamond and coltan that enrich the world. The Conference of Berlin, hacked hands, wild rubber, King Leopold are a history not much spoken of. Instead onetime owners are in an impatient, irritable quandary about how much aid will ever be enough. And where is Kony, and should he be made famous? This is the current media history most descendents of Africa on this side of the world know.

In retrospect, I ponder these days on the leap that Caribbean education took from other people’s diversions to diversions of its own. Necessary without doubt, but in hindsight far too myopic and narcissistic. No blame. Or worse yet, blame me, for the teacher I became fell into the mould – nation-building, collecting my own small collectibles, drawing a circle around ‘the people who came.’

Came from where? I went with what I was told.

There were punctuations in this seclusion, of course. The off-curriculum tidbit of NJAC referred to is one. Also most became dependent for information on those who managed to go to visit their roots, those who visited Elmina Castle and wept. There were rites of passage and native returns. So for Social Studies a child might build a matchstick-box, packed slaver and analyse “Colonial Girls School.”

I don’t mean to belittle the nationhoods that were achieved, but in hindsight drawing a box around one’s own collectibles was neither sufficient nor the only way to go. Because one’s identity is as much shaped by oneself, as by others who decide who and what one is. Being proud of one’s self-made identity and not acknowledging the composite nature of one’s identity does not absolve. With the world condensing on so many fronts, one no longer has to leave home to meet the rest of one’s composite self, both at home and abroad.

Important pieces of the African mosaic are scattered around the world, some hidden in the basements of vast continental powers. Are they uncollectible? What really is a heritage site?

Which brings me back to Come Back to Erin that awoke this reflection, back to Timbuktu, and in a way ironically to Jean Rhys’ short story “The Day They Burned the Books.” All three about heritage and identity.  In acknowledging a short-sightedness on my part in building the past fifty years, I must say it is glaring that the work formally and informally still remains to be done.  I don’t know what songs will haunt my children, but as they get older I hope they will know a freedom that is stronger than a collection of waving flags.

© Cynthia James – October 2013