Like a Motherless Child // Fiona Raye Clarke

We go around. We are sitting in a circle that’s supposed to be inviting. Everyone is asked to give their ancestry. I can barely open my mouth. The question burns. I don’t belong in this circle. In my head I can trace my parents to Trinidad, their parents, my grandmother born on the boat from Venezuela, their parents to indigenous South Americans, Hunan Province, China, Scotland, Italy, and Barbados. From there we are Bajan on every side, from every angle. My ancestors make that transition from human beings into Jamaica Kincaid’s noble and exalted ones, the only name I accept now for my enslaved ancestors. In the circle, I close my mouth after saying, “I’m not sure,” a mixture of settler and captured. How do you explain intergenerational displacement to Europeans as they express pride in their ancestors? 

Depressing

 I ask my mother who our ancestors were and she says, “What you want to know for? Too depressing.” But seeing my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s emancipation papers, a photocopy of them after my aunt’s trip to Barbados, I don’t see it as depressing. His stamp of freedom never made me happier. 

Louisa Moore

 I got my grandmother on the phone. She rarely leaves the gallery of her house in Tunapuna anymore. Too many cats to take care of, and my step-grandfather died and left her alone. We had never had much in common. I told the one story I knew about her at her funeral: that she rode a motorbike and wore tube tops around town. I was calling from England. I was there for school, complaining to a student club why having a “Slave-for-a-Day auction” was offensive. The Black British students shrugged their shoulders when I started a petition and asked, “What is the point?” The club made a hollow apology and auctioned off the Black executive committee for hundreds of pounds, it was a fundraiser after all. I was calling my grandmother for her birthday. It was a break from my arguing. I asked the question about where we were really from and she gave me a name: Louisa Moore. “She was a mulatto”—a master, or in Kincaid’s naming human rubbish, offspring in St. Michael, Barbados, “rape of course,” she said, “but we don’t talk about it.” I don’t talk about my sexual traumas either. I learn this is a long tradition. Learned.

A Small Place

I read Kincaid’s A Small Place and feel like bawling. Her question: “Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?” is my question. Her anger feels like my own. Though the small island feelings she speaks of belong to my parents. They gifted me transnationalism. They made me Canadian and then decided to go back home. When I go back, people ask why I’m there and not in Foreign. When I’m here people ask me where I’m from.

Astro-Blackness

I had always been afraid of aliens. I can’t even listen to the X-Files theme song. But Octavia Butler made me fall in love with astro-Blackness. She convinced me we belonged to the cosmos. I should be less afraid of space than I am about white people on the road. Space is the place, space is the place, space is the place Afrodiasporic folks can find a home. My mother is a scientist, full-blown, doctoral-level physicist, a Black woman, but she doesn’t use her knowledge to bring us closer to the stars. She had to feed and clothe, house and school me, alone. She finds oil for companies de-terraforming the world. There was never time in her survival to look at the stars or for home.

Like a Motherless Child

Sometimes the fact of my existence leaves me with sadness that I know will never go. The most nostalgic I can get about the past is reflecting on Igbo’s landing. I think about the water. When on ferries, in boats, when I would fly back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean, their act of marching into it shackled calls to me. Space or water, anything but this land is home. Sometimes, no matter how much I believe in my descendants’ thriving—that they are reaching back and I am reaching forward in bidirectional Afrofuturism—I wonder if they will ever escape what happened to us. I tell myself to be hopeful.

Apathy

When I read Kincaid’s not caring about what we were before colonization, I feel like I will continue in my anger. That it will just keep exploding.

Fiona Raye Clarke is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her writing has appeared on stage at the InspiraTO and rock.paper.sistahz festival, on screen at the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival and Queer National Arts Festival, in print in Broken Pencil Magazine, alt.theatre, The Peak Magazine, and online at Shameless Magazine and Room Magazine. She was a 2018 Diaspora Dialogues Long-Form Mentorship mentee for her short fiction collection and a Writer in Residence at Firefly Creative Writing. She holds an LLM from Osgoode.