ASHAE FORSYTHE
In Jamaica, there’s a stoicism we inherit from our parents and ancestors. A hardness passed down from people who endured the unendurable. A part of what we inherited from that history is silence. Not by accident, but by insidious design. Colonialism taught us to hold our tongues, keep our bodies still and bury our feelings deep. Emotional control was not just encouraged. It was demanded. Discipline became a moral virtue. And respectability was about how well you could control yourself — your voice, your body, your needs. Christianity, imported and enforced by these colonial powers, taught us to find virtue in our silence. Suffering was moral, needing less was godly. Consequently, we inherited not just faith but the idea that to be good was to endure quietly. This became our strength and pride.
Frantz Fanon called this a mask: the forced performance of strength to survive systems that were built to deny us our full humanity. In time, the mask becomes tradition. We teach our children to ‘toughen up’. We pass on our pain through restraint. And in that inheritance, love becomes difficult. Love becomes hard to give and even harder to receive, because it requires something the mask never allowed — vulnerability.
I saw this in my own upbringing. It began with my desire for comfort and attention. At six years of age, I collided head-first with a rock while pushing my blue Barbie truck. It left me with a busted nose and blood dripping down the front of my shirt. It might have started with the confusion I felt when my accident was met with neither interest nor comfort from my parents. Instead, my shaky, infantile voice explaining that I had fallen onto a hard rock in the lane was met with disinterest, dismissal and a curt ‘hush’.
Or perhaps it began that Saturday morning, when I lay in bed with my father, reading the newspaper and stumbling across a word I couldn’t pronounce. Bright-eyed and wondering, I asked my father how to say it, only for him to sternly tell me to break it down. Break it down. Shatter it. Words that would soon become my holy gospel and testament. He watched as my tongue fumbled and bent, as my frustration grew while I willed the word to submit. Eventually, I conquered it. But did I truly have to struggle so hard to earn that victory? Or maybe it began the day my father was murdered. Sitting in his bedroom, I was a deer caught in headlights, watching the adults in my life loom over me with concerned and remorseful stares. They expected me to cry. And I willed the tears to come. But they couldn’t. Or rather, I thought they shouldn’t.
From a young age, I learnt that strength was the absence of need. Being independent, untouchable, and unbothered meant that I was doing something right. It felt like a kind of pride. And living in the Caribbean, pride was an important tool to have in your belt. Strength and pride kept you going; they made it harder for the hardships of life to wear you down. But do they really?
A scraped knee is often brushed off with a ‘yuh nuh dead’. A child who cries too much is ‘too soft’ and ‘too bawly bawly’. If a man attempts to talk about his suffering, it’s met with a simple, ‘So it go’. I learned that to be strong was to be self-contained. To never put your burdens on others’ shoulders. To not tell people too much about your ailments and suffering, because people were ‘badmind’ and would use your vulnerability against you.
And I saw others wearing the mask too. I saw it in the rigid set of women’s necks as they strode through the streets, pulling along a child or two, faces pressed into hard lines, their grief, burdens and disappointments carried with elegance and grace like handbags they couldn’t afford to put down.
In the Caribbean, masking is more than a metaphor. Women learn to mask ambition. And if they don’t, they are expected to. They must make themselves smaller, more palatable, and fold their desires behind domestic competence. Strength is expected, but it must look like sacrifice. For a woman who cries too loudly, wants too much or dares to break down, risks being seen as unstable, ungrateful or mad. She is not allowed to rave if she is the one left behind. No, she must keep it together. Men, on the other hand, are taught to suppress tenderness altogether. From the schoolyard to the pulpit, boys are warned against softness, queerness, and dependence. To express fear or confusion is to betray the rigid codes of hypermasculinity. A code where the only acceptable emotions are anger and indifference.
Cascadura Mech. 11″x8″. Portia Subran.
Caribbean queerness, too, often hides in plain sight. Behind respectable church voices. Behind overcompensating bravado and toxic masculinity. Behind migration. So many people I know have had to leave the region just to fully come into their own, to become themselves. And those who stayed, stayed masked. They live split lives, telling partial truths, surviving on performance. Even mental illness is not spoken of out in the open. No, it’s not depression — it’s laziness. No, it’s not anxiety — it’s a spiritual attack. It becomes increasingly apparent, then, that in a world where survival is prioritized over selfhood, the mask serves as a form of protection. But it also becomes its own kind of prison.
Baldwin says, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” To him, love is not comfort but rather a form of radical growth and resistance. What, then, does it mean to love in a place where survival is deemed the only priority?
Softness found me unexpectedly when I left Jamaica to further my studies. I had met a young Turkish girl who was the exact opposite of me. She was outgoing, lively and engaging. She became my first friend. I found she had the curious ability to make every person she spoke with feel seen. Our conversations would often start with her asking me the simple yet powerful question “How are you?” She would then sit, rapt with attention, her bright eyes fixed on my face as I answered her haltingly. I didn’t know how to speak about myself. At the time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But she was often vulnerable with me, and I felt I owed her my vulnerability in return. Most of all, she made me feel held. She was the first person to hold space for me. Without judgement. Without asking me to shrink. Without rushing to fix what she didn’t understand. Gradually, I felt comfortable laying my emotions bare. I could ask for help, admit that I was scared, and didn’t know the way forward. And she would listen with her whole self.
Admittedly, my stoicism was not well received in those early days. People found me standoffish, brash and aggressive. I found myself having to filter who I was in order to be more palatable. But that is a story for another day. I began to realize that my hyper independence was my own mask. In that small town of Ithaca, I unknowingly began to engage in my own form of resistance. Encountering cultural shock, homesickness and seasonal depression forced me to take my mask off. In a place where there is nothing to anchor you, you cling to anything that can keep you afloat for fear of drowning. But it simultaneously allowed me to embrace my vulnerability. My struggles with my mental health and the openness and ease with which it was discussed in that environment allowed me to regard myself and others with tenderness and compassion. But most of all, I opened my heart to the idea of community.
In Jamaica, tenderness felt like something we weren’t permitted or afforded. We learned strength as a kind of posture. We inherited it from our parents, who inherited it from theirs. It wasn’t until I left that I understood how much of myself I had kept hidden. And it wasn’t until someone else made space for all of me — messy, uncertain, scared — that I realized strength could be synonymous with softness. Survival doesn’t always mean silence. And love, real love, allows you to be fully seen and safe.
Around the same time, I grew close to the only other Jamaican student in my year. We had grown up in different parishes — I in Kingston, he in Clarendon. But we instantly clicked over our shared journey. He was funny, magnetic and charming. He was a poster child of what you’d consider a Jamaican to be. We spent hours talking about home, about Jamaica’s sharp edges and contrasting sweetness. About the ways America surprised and underwhelmed us. But even as we bonded, there was a quiet space between us that I couldn’t name. Until months later, he told me he was queer.
He confessed it carelessly — it seemed — in a group conversation as we headed back to our dorms one evening after dinner with friends. Even as the words left his mouth, his eyes never left my face, watching, waiting, gauging my reaction. Later, he would explain to me why I was the last to know in our little group. And I was stunned. Not because he was queer, but because he thought he had to protect me from the knowledge of it. Or rather, protect himself from my censure. As a fellow Jamaican, he assumed that I, someone raised under the same sun and stringent conditions, would judge him for it. That I might not love him still. And I wonder how he must have felt in that moment, making the careful decision that he would live in his truth, no matter what it cost him. I think about how long he must have rehearsed that quiet reveal. I think about how many years he spent folding himself up small, policing his softness, performing a kind of masculinity that made room for survival, but not for joy.
In Jamaica, queerness is something whispered, disbelieved and punished. Being a certain type of man — straight, stoic, womanizing and emotionally distant — wasn’t simply encouraged, it was downright required. And stepping outside of that mould was dangerous. For many, it cost them their loved ones, their jobs, their friendships, and their lives.
But in that small town, 640 miles from the Canadian border, I watched him as he began to unfold. Of course, it came gradually, haltingly. But I watched as he began to wear what he wanted. To speak with tenderness. To flirt, to cry, to laugh loudly and gaily. To feel openly. To exist openly. I still remember the day he told me with a quiet uncertainty, but with relief that he had come out to his family. I recall the fear in his eyes, the hard set of his shoulders in preparation for what might have come in the aftermath, and the assurance in his smile that he had, ultimately, made the right decision.
He was, like me, figuring out what it meant to be free. And he showed me, without ever saying it, that becoming yourself is truly an act of courage. That there is power in soft strength and tenderness, in queerness, in choosing to love yourself out loud. That sometimes, resistance looks like joy.
What Baldwin called, “a daring, self-aware quest” felt exactly like what we were on. We were two young Jamaicans, in a strange place, shedding the layers we had been told we needed to survive. Baldwin’s words remind me that love, truth and liberation are not passive inheritances but rather, a conscious decision to rewrite the scripts we’ve been given.
Colonialism did not just pillage our land and our labour. It forced us to perform. It taught us to worship control, to mistrust tenderness, to conflate masculinity with power and femininity with shame. It separated love from freedom. It told us that to be strong, we must swallow the bitter pills life gives us and smile just the same. To be respectable, we must be silent. To be safe, we must remain small.
And so, in our Caribbean context, softness is politicised. Vulnerability becomes radical. To choose community over competition, to speak your truth instead of hiding behind performance, to seek help instead of silently accepting pain — these are viewed as acts of rebellion rather than steps to quiet healing.
If we want to imagine a freer Caribbean, we must begin to value not just resilience, but restoration. Not just surviving, but the ability to be well and thrive. And thriving requires connection. It requires community and the willingness to be vulnerable.
I’ve since returned to Jamaica, and constantly have to listen to comments on my apparent softness. Coworkers. Friends. Industry peers. My mother. They all tell me that I am too soft. They are confused by the change in my disposition. They explain that I feel too much, speak too openly, trust too easily. They tell me my softness is dangerous; it leaves me exposed, and I need to ‘toughen up’.
But I refuse.
I refuse to harden. I refuse to lose the parts of me I spent years unearthing, nurturing, protecting. My tenderness, vulnerability, the ability to ask for help without shame — these were not traits I stumbled into. No, I fought for them. Learned to name them as strengths. The version of survival we inherited was efficient, yes, but costly. It kept us upright, but it also kept us apart. I have begun to live without the mask, and I have no desire to put it back on. I carry a different kind of strength now. One that invites softness. One that values connection over control, vulnerability over perfection and community over individual endurance. But the question remains: Can a place like Jamaica, so shaped by scarcity, violence, and looming shadows of colonialism, make room for tenderness? Can softness exist in a context that demands hardness to survive?
Maybe not easily. Maybe not everywhere. But perhaps that is why we must insist on it. Because building a future that is livable for all of us requires more than just resilience. It requires imagination. Honesty. Mutual Care. It requires us to believe that something else is possible beyond what we’ve inherited.
And perhaps that is the true act of resistance: to keep choosing love, connection and softness in a world that tells us not to. To understand, as Baldwin did, that love — real love — is not a luxury, but the thing that makes survival meaningful. The only thing, perhaps, that makes it worth it at all.
