Nights transformed her. The cold cream smell as she slathered it on her face would draw me to her bedroom. Perched on her bed, I became not a future wife, but a treasured consigliere. She whispered obeah spells, taught me to commune with the dead and to sense evildoers’ vibrations. I learned to brew ancestor-calling potions and plant money-summoning shrubs.
Sometimes, to make Mummy happy, if I home on a Sunday morning I will take her to church in my SUV, so the neighbours could see how well her son did. But if it have a God, I ent feel him in that church. I think about him at thirty-six thousand feet, as if heaven just behind that fluffy white cumulus cloud in front the plane. Sometimes I slip in a little prayer to Olodumare. Though maybe is Shango I should be appeasing, god of thunder and lightning. I know about the Orishas from Granny. Is church all the way for Mummy, but Granny — Daddy’s mother — she make sure I know which power to pour a little libation to, and what signs from them to look out for
In Kenya, most people speak English and Swahili, and each tribe has its own language. My mother tongue is Kidawida. We were forced to speak English in school. If you spoke in vernacular, you had to wear a plug around your neck saying, “I am a vernacular speaker,” and later you would be punished.
In Swahili Sheng, Safari boots are referred to as Saharas. I wonder if this is in reference to the sand coloured colourway that is the most common one produced by Bata Kenya, or if it is somehow connected to the desert related history of the shoe.
Here in Jamaica not everyone lost a roof in the storm; but we all lost the ground beneath our feet. Not one of us – in the west or in the east – was spared the dark, looming feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing what tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow will bring for our little island on the front line of the climate crisis.
ERNA BRODBER
You think Melissa stop here? The lady see herself like some monarch of all she survey, stopping like Queen Elizabeth in any Caribbean country she feel like and stopping for how long she want. She even have outriders. Before she land she send on rain to inform the Natives of her coming.
DIANA MCCAULAY
In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and its impact on the western third – maybe 40% – of the island of Jamaica, my home – the metaphor of a fallen tree, centuries in the growing, is helping me to think through how we may yet live together, how we may use the light let in by a catastrophe.
ROLAND WATSON-GRANT
Get it into your head. It is goin’ to be me, you and Melissa out here. So, when radio and TV say stock up on emergency supplies and batten down roof and window— they just mockin’ people like me and you. Mockin’ you and me like how Facebook can tell people to mark themselves safe. Fuck Facebook.
JIK-REUBEN PRINGLE
In my journeying into the visibly impacted areas of Jamaica, one of the things I was keen to find and document was how people found ways to bring normalcy into their lives through recreational activities that either brought brief windows of joy or a break from the devastation around them.
YASHIKA GRAHAM
I come home and come away
from the dark as much bashed in
as the house I was born in
at once full and empty and still
looking back from the gate
Jamaica collectively held its breath as reports confirmed that Melissa had made landfall. Then a torrent of media: homes washing away in mudslides, death, people clawing at walls, screens from Jamaican, British, American and French news showing floods, people fleeing the sinking homes they had built.
The only memory I had of my mother — the earliest memory I had at all — was a good one. I was 5 years old and must have run out onto the bus route, because I remember being snatched up from the chaos of the road as a Maxi screamed past, and my mother whisking me away to the pavement, where she held me tightly in her arms and comforted me. In the only memory I have of my mother, she saved my life. At least in that moment, she loved me.
