On Memory

What is memory but the sight of your child conjuring the ancestors through every gesture, every breath? What is memory but the blood coursing through your very veins, each minute component handed down from the very beginning, nothing lost, nothing gone, but regenerated and giving new life?

Memory is when the children scorn the sea, because even though they don’t say it, their bodies remember the drowning, the flaying of fatigued muscles against the murderous waves of the Atlantic. Their bodies remember the limp carcasses that once belonged to a brother, a sister or even a mother, thrown overboard to the circling sharks. Their bodies remember the passage from home and the green and the crushed cassava, to this place of deprivation and depression, a depression in the eyes that remembers the life lost.
Their bodies remember a home whose very name, history and humanity has been utterly destroyed by the dismissive, generalized and dubious name of Africa. But their bodies remember the power of inversion, and like taking the name nigger and coolie, have turned Africa on its head and now call it home.
Their bodies remember the heavy shackles that hold your wrists behind your back, the misery so deep you can not remember what you use your hands for in the first place. They remember the whips that split and then numb the flesh. The foul excrement of the dungeon, the warm vomit on your toes, that turn cold, then from the warmth of your own body, warm again. They remember the cut tongue, the raped child , the castrated father.
But it is also memory when they bade in the sea. The ancestors tell about the joy too. The joy upon seeing the glance of your child across a field and knowing yes, he is alive, the joy of coupling with the man that you have chosen, and your body not being discarded by the unhuman. The joy of seeing the okra grow the same way they grow back in your village, on your soil. The joy of learning to read, of being able to say, massah day done gone.
Memory is when children don’t like dogs, because they remember. They remember late night runs through bush, sweat running down hot limbs, dogs after them, as they run for freedom.
Memory can not be buried. No matter how much you try to forget, memory lingers like the sweet seduction of the lady of the night through the evening of our lives. Each tree that spring forth is celebrating the tree before it, every seed that spills forth contains a memory of how things once was and how they will be. Memory is contained within our cells, in the food we buy the food we cook. Breadfruit remembers the strong slaves where we come from, the coconut remembers them that tread this land even before we did. What are we all afterall, but the collective memory of some greater force, insisting not to be forgotten? What are we afterall, but a persistent reminder that long ago, our foremothers and foremothers sweat under the hot sun, breaking their backs for the white man in the cane fields, in the cocoa plantation. What are we anyway, than a living testimony, a memory, that once, the Indian and the African work together, laugh together and love together?
You see, Trinidad is about Memory. It is about not forgetting the possible. When we forget, we die. And that is why the youth must dig. They must dig and dig and find the memories that make them because we have forgotten who we are and the youth? They want to remember.

The only thing to remind us are the names.