Beyond Africa
The little girl three rows down from me is dancing. She watches the people on stage and shakes her bum as they do, turns when they do, watches them from the monitor and raises her arms like them, holding the pretend hem of the African dress of her mind, turns again. They wear long, flowy field dresses, white and bright-colored, contrasting their rich dark skin. The corners of their skirts are held up in their hands as they prance around on stage, flicking gravity with their toes as they jump. Some wear decorative war masks, carved and painted with grotesque faces, their dances low, predatory. Different costumes represent different moments in African history and it's relationship with Tobago. The child in front of me mimics the evolution of a people without the use of props or costumes, just her own imagination and willing suspension of believe in time and space.
She is about three years old, probably, energetically awake late into the night while even the twenty-three-year-old visitor next to me sleeps soundly. We are at the Twentieth Anniversary Heritage Festival in Tobago. The theme: "Beyond." The premise behind the pageant is a 103-year-old man whose dying wish is that future generations tap into their African roots and live on that sweet sap. So in front of me, on stage, are dancers pageanting African cultures with bodies and the way they move them, costumes and the ways they wear them, and music so distant from my own history it sounds like a dream. I am not African. I am not Tobagonian. I am white, Irish American, born from a family who traveled across the Atlantic on their own will, to escape oppression and create a better lives. They were not kidnapped, they were not kidnappers. My grandparents and great grandparents left their homes to escape the English, and still when I watch these dances and reenactments I daydream myself into both oppressed and oppressor. I am not on either side, but my skin color says otherwise, and everyone around me knows what side to put me on.
The beat monitors my tranced heart beat. So quick, I sit levitating, smiling against my two hours sleep, eyes escaping the stage only to collapse upon a three-year-old girl framing herself in a moment not in a parking lot under some tent, too late at night with a crowded field of strangers and extended family, but in a savannah somewhere, an open field, or maybe a cotton field just down the street from her and many years ago. God has materialized Itself in her, as if she is a Spiritual Baptist with reverberating fingertips. Or no, as if she is in another place entirely, some land she's never known. And history rushes into her, so full, if it were not for the density of her youth, the thick resilience that's to be spread thin over her lifetime, she may combust.
She, three years old, is the buffer between a history that is not mine, and my wanting self. This is a culture so distant and mesmerizing, so captivating and intense as this drumming I feel in my stomach, and I want it, but I can't have it, and this pageant is a window I may only look through. To appreciate too much, to take in too much of what I see, to accept too much of what I want to feel, would be a co-opting representative of some of the reasons people of African descent live in Tobago today. It is important and wrong for me to be here.
There is a dance called "The History of Africans in Tobago in Five Minutes" and it is the first time a rendition of history has made me teary-eyed in public. It was such a small display. The songs are sung in a language so unlike any I speak that they may as well not be words at all. The rhythm of the songs are simple, the dances are not the most complex I have seen even at this pageant. And yet, the intensity of the moment, of the women sitting in front of my in African head dresses and the young men dressed like American gangstas and the dancers on stage morose rowing a mimed boat across an ocean of stage, shows history more than any text book or essay. The three-year-old girl in front of me dances to the sway of women picking cotton, of men crushing cacao, of rape, of escape. She dances the anticlimax of emancipation, she dances hope and pride in her culture now, she dances unity. I cannot dance with her, I can only sit three rows away and cry.
Still, it feels wrong for me to feel this emotional wave at a festival not meant for me, like watching the birth of someone else's child. Perhaps this outburst should have come when I was young, when I learned the word "slave" and what it means. Perhaps it should have come when I watched an After School Special in first grade about a girl getting bullied at a water fountain. But here I am, crying at someone else's party. I step out of the tent to find some water and a bathroom. Everyone seems to be looking at me. I stick out, white skin shining like a dumb moon in an otherwise vast night sky.
It is not my duty to feel this tension, the way so many of my African and People of Color friends feel when they walk through a white neighborhood at night, but this is part of the importance for me. If I am going to step into a people's culture and heritage where I have no true right to experience all these generational secrets, then I should absorb wholly. The importance is an understanding. Not just about what happened, or what is happening. Not just the facts, just the distant and unconnected stories. But the visceral understanding of experience.
Here is the beauty and strength and challenge and love of a continent of people. Here is a three-year-old child connected to her roots like a flower to the earth, impregnated with her own history. Here is a five-minute taste of the injustice experienced 100-fold for centuries. And no amount of reparations can truly connect the people of Tobago with their ancestral grounds. So they go beyond, search beyond the realms of the tangible and the actual. This is Tobago, but, if only for tonight at the Heritage Festival, it is an extension, just beyond Africa.
Identity Warfare
I am thinking again about color and nationality. About Jason at the Santa Rosa Carib Center, who knew so much about his culture and heritage, not shyly, showed me tools and materials and weapons and was excited to share. And about how I felt bonded and wanted to take their picture, realizing the heavy and embarrassing reality of my own tourism.
About Jack the American with a British accent at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, trying to hide his own embarrassing Americanness with the language of the local slave owners.
I am thinking about the way I feel when I wear my hair in a bandana and make my empowerment tattoo visible. I think about Tupac Shakur and our belly tattoos and I remember how I felt when I found out he was a rapist. I think about our bandanas and how JoJo, in Salt, tied a bandana around his head similarly to hide his severed ear. And I want to say to the boys at the mall looking at me crooked, "I'm Irish American, second generation, my family had nothing to do with JoJo's ear, my Nana wore her hair like this." But I don't. I look down and identify myself by the color I see. And nobody is just his or her color. And still, we must wear them, and be identified and judged by them.
And it is not the same feeling I have in Big American Cities, the Harlems and Roxburys and West L.A.s of my home country, where my skin color and lifestyle mean even more to the people in those communities, yet I walk wearing it all with the same strength they wear theirs. Or at least I feel that I do. I know so little about these things sometimes.
I am thinking now about the times I have heard People of Color discuss my tattoo, deciding I am probably Hispanic and forgiving the girl whose headphone volume is lower than they realize. I am thinking about the accent I've assumed, the ways I call and respond, feel my lips forming, choose my words. It is the accent that people have called Canadian, Irish, Norwegian, Dutch, French. All the comfortable White skins. It is the indigenous accent of my own wanting to step out of my identity without interpolating anyone else's.
I am thinking about the abandonment I felt in 9th grade when Kara started hanging out with all the new People of Color who went to our High School. How my parents said, "Can you blame her?" And I couldn't, I blamed myself for not sharing and nurturing enough of an identity with her.
Even further back I think about Irish Festivals, my family, tracing my own family history proudly back into its own revolutions and fights for freedom and acts of heroism. The martyred grandfather I never knew. James Connolly who fought in the Rising of 1916 for Ireland and Communism and women's suffrage, who fought gangrenous, who was also martyred. My grandmother, the first female bailiff, my other grandmother the factory worker in WWII. The music, the pride, the love.
I am thinking now about Trinidad. About a people I would like to fall in love with but don't know how to without taking advantage of them. As if I had a right to, I described Trinidad to my partner, Evan, as: a developing nation, a nation in its infancy. He said he thinks the latter term is ridiculous and makes little sense despite how often it's used. I explained to him what I meant but he is right.
I did not come to Trinidad to be a cultural tourist. There is a movement in middle class adventurists to seek out places that still feel a little feral. People want to think them wild. Want to drive through their "dark side" as in a safari, to feel cultured and humanized. If I don't want to fall in love with their "other-ness" what is it I have come to fall in love with? What do I write about if not how estranged I feel in this odd paradise?
I am thinking about Akel, our tour guide in Tobago. How we walked together through the rainforest, a bit ahead of the others, talking about plants and the world as we both know it, differently. In order to not love someone for their otherness, we must recognize their humanness. I keep my humanity hidden in the shallows of my eyes; Akel holds his broadly in his smile. I ask him about where he grew up, his family, how he likes Tobago. He asks me what it will take for me to move to Tobago. He grew up in a bad part of Trinidad called Laventille, and his father asked for Akel to live with him on the quiet island of Tobago to escape the violence – a request Akel was happy to fulfill. It would take a career to move me to Tobago, I tell him, and he offers me his job.
Tim Cahill writes in Hold the Enlightenment about the danger of referring to local people as "natives" and worrying they may be "ruined" by intervention. The passage is more in reference to small communities that have little contact with the western world, not small communities that have cable television and satellite dishes. The sentiment is still a legitimate one, no matter who is local where. The point is that we all come from some place, all dream of other places, of expanding our own horizons. We are all locals to someone, all foreign. The places we are from are not always the places we call home, and the places that resonate in our souls may be places to which we've never been. This is the part of Trinidad and Tobago I love. The new friends with genuine smiles who do not try to pinpoint me into a role of whiteness, and who do not fall prey to self segregation. For a few days, we are not tourist and guide, not white and black, but friend and friend.
Exotica
After grabbing my two drinks, I meander over to the shore of the dancehall, watching the waves of people curtsy into each other, curl and foam, retract, and pull each other back in. The air is salty from the harbor behind me and the partiers in front of me. We are at Sunday School at Bucco Reef, Tobago: a weekly Sunday night party that celebrates the final hours of a day of church and family, and also the exotic that exudes from the small island's inhabitants, including the visitors such as myself.
Old local African men with dreadlocks dance with European women who could be from anywhere. Young men with gold teeth approach my friend like an assembly line, waiting for the chance to dance with her, whose color blends so well with the locals, but whose face and style and mannerisms are all so new and non-Tobagonian.
I am thinking now about the exotic and what makes us as such. The Trinidadians who visit the U.S. and find harems, are asked to "say something Trini," who do things just differently enough to seem distant, romantic as a lost love or a fond memory just now recounted. The tourists who visit Trinidad and get their hair braided like Africans, taking the commonness of the region with them, hoping to capture a bit of that exotic themselves when returning to America or Europe. My own strangeness, seeming not as the threat or flaw it is in the U.S., but as the true exotic in Trinidad and Tobago.
"You are a real woman," says Brian, the quiet and commanding captain of the glass-bottomed boat Soca Queen.
"You are different from the others," says Frankie, our soft-spoken and mischievous older tour guide.
"Such a soft voice from such a strong woman. There's no one like you on these islands," says Akel, my young tour guide friend with a perfect smile, who grew up in Laventille, Trinidad.
"What are you afraid of," asks Damien, the stranger who tried to get my attention three different times before approaching me to call me rude.
And I answer him: "Cunning locals."
The exoticness makes me feel confident, almost intimidated by myself and the presence I command. I am sure of my own strength but unsure of how much I have to use. I describe things to TT locals as if I am from some small, distant place, hard to remember or locate on a map.
"In America we have flowers called Honeysuckles. You can eat the middle parts and they taste sweet." The exotic goes to my head. I am exotic now even to myself.
"You can't be American," Captain Brian says, "You're too foreign. You don't even talk American. Irish?"
"My family's Irish but I was born in New England. I just have a strange accent."
"Not strange. Refreshing."
Living on a small island like Tobago must give one an interesting perception of love and romance. On one side, there is the reality of those few who are actually permanent and not just visitors like myself. About 25,000 women on the island, all not exotic to the other island inhabitants, and probably not so different from each other, having been influenced so much by each other and the same limited media. These are the ones who make Tobagonian wives, and yet it's people like me who are proposed to daily – the perfect stranger, as all strangers are welcomed to be.
There is another side of the matrix. There is a constant influx of "other." We, the visitors, are the squinty, sunburnt newness to Tobago. Some of us are exotically decorated with tattoos, mohawks, and confident loftiness. The Tobagonians, however, are unavoidably still "othered" in our minds. Their exotic presence fumes from us, who name them as such. Just as I come to see myself as exotic, these exotic-thinking men likely see themselves as the reflection in our eyes, while still seeing their female counterparts as only locals, denying them their own exotica.
Captain Brian watches me as I float, pale, tattooed, bare-belled on the clear, cool roof of the Caribbean. He stands against the sky like a captain even when wading in shallow water. Arms laced behind his back, shoulders poised and correct, skin darkened to pure black from the sun with a red glow so warm it must come from his core.
"I'll have to call your boyfriend and tell him you're not returning," he says when I forfeit my buoyancy for stability, communication the ability to at least stare back.
"That would be a sad phone call," I say, allowing both of us to stay exotic, if only for a moment, strangers feeling erotic autonomously but because of each other, awkwardly close, identifying ourselves by how we see each other.
"You can live in Tobago with me, what do you like to do? I bet you like to party."
This last part is what every Trinidadian and Tobagonian man says to me, to us, the exotic foreigner. The love for partying maintains the distancing image of no responsibility. If I love to party as much as The Captain and Damien and the others presume, I ward off the responsibilities of jobs, family, aspirations that the real women in their lives possess. I am as fictional as a porn star and yet as tangible as every other exotic fruit growing here.
The women respond to me in various ways. Vendors at the beach are used to seeing tourists and white women and are interested in me but not allured. They can see the boring and unthreatening humanity I share with them.
"I like your tattoos," says the woman at the roti stand.
"Where are you from," asks the woman sitting by a fan in the cool, dark convenient store.
"Are you African," asks the woman at the ice cream stand.
I look down at my pale, Irish-American body, then look back at her, blinking, waiting for some punch line.
"You have an African haircut, and African tattoos. And isn't that an African tree on your back, African flowers on your shoulders?" She pauses, realizing how confused I am and how wrong she is at the assumption. "I just thought you might be from there," she says quietly, as an afterthought.
"No, I'm from the U.S. The tree is a bodhi tree, and the flowers are buttercups. That's my nickname, Buttercup. I didn't know this was an African hairdo." I am embarrassed. In my originality, I have taken on the form of what I see as exotic, not even realizing that to someone else it is very normal. I twirl the dreadlocks in gape of my neck with my index finger and blush.
"Well, girl, you got good style anyway." She smiles and hands me my coconut cherry cone.
It isn't always so pleasant, though. At the heritage festival, women routinely cut me in line for food and drinks, try staring me down as I saunter past them to the bathroom, and ignore me when I try to ask questions about products in stores. The hostility at the Heritage Festival is understandable. Everyone is drinking and cannot be held as accountable for their behavior towards odd-looking strangers, especially if the hostility is purely in energy given off and shifty moves to cut in line, and is not actually violent or otherwise hurtful. At cultural events there is community pride. Women at the Heritage Festival in Tobago dress in African-styled clothes and headdresses. At the very least, they are there to pay regard to their ancestors. I am not African, despite what the woman at the ice cream parlor suggests. My style could be seen as a co-opting, presenting myself as an African at an African Heritage event. From the color of my skin, I unfortunately represent the horrific ways in which Africans became Tobagonians. The Tobagonian women, however, manifest the spirits of their ancestors, of the queens of Africa, of the sheer beauty of perseverance and strength and pride. In their solidarity, they are exotic. I am just a white stranger.
Otherwise, the general hostility and willingness to ignore can stem from a deep understanding of the role of female visitors to this island. The irresponsibility that steals their husbands and partners for a night, the smiles at the men that last a bit too long and end with their working overtime to feed their children in the absence of their male partners. While the men of Tobago hold more registered jobs, namely in the tourism industry, the women are estimated to hold far more jobs that go under the radar, either through self-employment or payment "under the table." On construction sites, women and men work side-by-side, seemingly equal from my view in the depths of the van as we drive by the numerous work zones.
It is a region of celebration, but the citizens of the islands are responsible for making sure the party endures, especially for the tourists who keep money flowing into the economy. For the citizens who work in the tourism industry, their job is partly to keep the party going, to show an appearance at parties such as Sunday School, to maintain the illusion of Tobago as being a tropical paradise for partying and freedom. Which is true, but only in part. The weather is beautiful, the landscape is breathtaking, even the textile feeling of the island is inviting. The locals do come out to party, there is a comforting easiness in the air. Having lived in a number of major metropolises around the United States and Europe, the small island's easy speed is what feels the most exotic to me. The most aggressive people I encounter here are still speaking the language of a palm breeze, still ask politely if they can take me home and do exotically impolite things with me. To look in people's eyes, whether they are sea captains looking for a first mate for the evening or women frustrated with so many pale, frolicking crew members, that is where the exotic tropical paradise I see is. No one I meet has a hard, New England soul. I have crow's feet at twenty-five years old, and as long as I am Tobago, I can see how sexy those can be.
Traffic Signs
I am eight years old and driving back from the dentist's office with my mom and my older sister, Katie. I am sitting in the back seat, the left side, the side closest to the other cars on the highway. In the next lane is a red hatch-back full of teenage boys. They are goofy, almost grotesque the way smiling gargoyles are grotesque. I smile back. I love strangers and the ways we maneuver the distances between each other. They wave and my eyes explode, throwing me into the back of the seat.
"Carolyne quit flirting with those boys!" Mom says in a sing-song tone that strings through her harsh Boston accent like pearls.
"Mooom, I'm not flirting! They smiled first."
"That's how boys flirt, Carolyne. And you flirted back, you flirt!" She is laughing, joking, because I am still a littler girl and boys still have cooties and I am taking her too seriously.
"They weren't flirting. They're stupid and ugly and that one by the window who waved at me has braces." My sister, who has just gotten braces, turns around in her passenger seat and gives me a dirty look. "I wasn't flirting," I add with finality. I peep out the window one more time to catch their eyes and flash them a too-coy smile before going back to coloring the dinosaur drawings on my lap.
***
I am twenty-five now and giving Sarah the crazy eyes. Her smile grows huge and excitable, twitching off her cheeks.
"Should I? You really think I should?"
"I definitely think you should. It's such a horrible idea and you should definitely do it." There is a royal blue pickup truck driving along-side our maxi as we crawl through the cramped Trinidad highway traffic. Sarah looks over and three boys in the backseat lean to the window, waving and smiling.
"It's for the one in the middle. I'll have to put that on here."
"This is such a bad idea. I'm so stoked you are doing this. I think mistakes and adventure are an important part of a good trip. That includes flirting with strangers and taking things to the next level." My crazy eyes are spiraling in my head as Sarah stares into them and pulls a piece of paper and a pen from her bag. Crystalee giggles in the backseat of the maxi and Lauren turns in the passenger seat to look at us suspiciously.
"I'm an enabler," I admit. "Live the chaos, Sarah!"
***
Traffic has always interested me. On my drives home from work on days it's too hot to ride my bike, I alleviate the pain of congestion by rolling my windows down and blasting my horrible mixtapes. I imagine us all at a party. I am the dj. The other cars with no air conditioner give me dirty looks as I belt along with Billy Idol and Glen Danzig. But a connection is made and we are no longer just cars, we are people all stuck on a highway together, uncomfortable and annoyed and glancing at each other in our mirrors. I may be tacky, but at least I am not grumbling to myself alone in my car, wishing my cell-phone got reception so I had someone to talk to. I am an enabler.
***
Sarah@email.com, she scribbles onto the paper as the maxi trudges along, acknowledging every crack and pothole on the road. From the girl in the maxi….p.s. I think you have a nice smile. She sneaks the piece of paper on my lap, smiling like a child about to swing at a piñata.
"Ooh, great touch, love the last line!"
Sarah folds the paper up like a paper airplane, writing for the guy in the middle, in the backseat of the blue truck on the wings.
"Just in case," she explains, "it doesn't make it to them and someone else picks it up."
"Sarah, if you are concerned about the incredible possibility of the plane not making it to the blue truck, are you also concerned about the dudes selling stuff between the traffic lanes who will get your email address first?"
"It's just an email address. What can they do?" My mind filtered through the possibilities of her email address being tied to her Myspace and Facebook accounts on the internet, some online blog she may have, things that would connect her to a particular place out of traffic, out of Trinidad, a place real planes can take real people to Sarah's real life back home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, a real man is waiting for her to return. Here, imaginary people with real pretty faces leer out truck windows and I encourage her to leer right back.
***
There is a thrill to traffic romance. A division keeping two worlds apart, while maintaining an odd intimacy through coincidence and space. Two vehicles happening to need to go in a certain direction on a certain road at a certain time. Two sets of eyes meeting each other, saying hello with the soundless glances that penetrate the thick and pulpy noise of thousands of mufflers grumbling and tires peeling themselves from tar.
We are in Port Of Spain, Tobago. Traffic is moving, but slowly. I glance out the window opposite me, to find myself eyed up with the driver of a van in the next lane. He stares. I smile. His eyes widen in a flurry and wrap around me like a sticky web. I turn away but can feel him looking still. It means nothing, there is no engagement made, there is no assumption of connection. Just eyes to pass the time. But in traffic there is no escape. In real life, there is the ability to say, I'm just not that into you, but here on the Main Road, communication is enforced by the time-space equilibrium. And here on the Main Road, vehicles are so close we could touch each other if we want to.
People in Trinidad are friendly. There is a general willingness to engage. Traffic can easily be a party. Everyone's windows are down, everyone's stereos are turned up. Maybe it is the difference between a swollen continent and a petite island that makes Americans generally uncomfortable when forced to become aware of other travelers, and Trinidadians more than willing to maintain a connection with any smiling stranger within sight range. The Trinidadian in the van next to me is aggressive in his friendliness, and my American prudeness makes me uncomfortable. I can hear my mother squawking at me about flirting with the boys in traffic again. I sink low in the back of the Maxi and scribble in my notebook.
***
Sarah leans out the window, looking for the blue truck.
"They're all the way up there," she says. The man who might sweep her away to live in Trinidad forever is about nine vehicles ahead of us in traffic, barely within site. She leans out and waves at them, but they must not be able to see her; there's no response.
"We'll catch up to them," I say hopefully. Our lane starts moving again, and Sarah props her arm for a good paper airplane toss once we pass their truck. Right before we make it to them, our lane branches off to head East, and Sarah hands me the note to destroy.
"Oh you should keep it," I say, "as a memento of your spontaneity and daring in Trinidad."
"What happens in Trinidad stays in Trinidad. People in America would never understand." I take the note and lean over the aisle to the passenger-side window. The airplane flies from my fingers like a blown kiss. What happens in Trinidad remains in Trinidad.
