I spent my days inside a cubicle, tacking digits into a spreadsheet, or sending emails — a bureaucratic ventricle that existed between crisscrossing red tape whose sole job, aside from busywork, was to pass the buck along. It wasn’t bad, especially surrounded by those in the same lot. And there was free water.
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.
Nature’s Wild grew out of the book of the same name and addressed the same tensions: human-animal relations and histories of animalization and race in the Caribbean — how colonists, then postcolonial elites, put the onus on marginalized people to prove themselves human and “not-animal,” for example through dress codes, laws about sexuality, and definitions of citizenship.
Even if partially imagined, the cancellation of the exhibition was still shocking, a kind of summary execution with no warning, and no recourse. My disappointment was overlaid by anger and disbelief — and yes, fear. What was happening in the US had come into my house, into my home here in Canada, in a deeply personal way.
