Motion

Grandma Badass

Hildred Balbirsingh is my grandmother.
She is half African and East Indian*.
Her father, it has been told, was a Baboolal.
I shared the same birthday with her mother, Francis Lopez, who was creole (African).
Her parents were born, raised and had worked on a cocoa plantation in Santa Cruz.
Her father, although East Indian, married her mother because in those days, in the crazy dynamics inherent in colonialism, it was considered "marrying up" for an off-the-boat Indian (coolie, a derogatory term used for people of East Indian descent in Trinidad) to marry a Black local.

(I want to take Colonialism and choke it ).

My grandmother loves the pope. I don't think she likes the new one much. She grew up during world war ii, you know? She likes jesus and mary.  I always loved that I could tease her about her beliefs.  I always asked her why she wanted so much to be like every one else. Why didn't we both, she and I, just run away? In Trinidad, she always worried what the neighbours thought. Fuck the neighbours, Mummy Hildred, (ok, I didn't say fuck in those days), let's get out of here. Me and you.

My grandmother, Hildred Balbirsingh could cuss like a sailor. Once, when my grandfather, Ewart G. Balbirsingh drove his blue gallant into our modest Diamond Vale abode (I awoke because the house shook. He could have, actually, driven the entire car into the house, right into the bedroom my grandmother and I shared.), my grandmother asked, "Wha da muddah cunt?" Wow. I was impressed.

Another time she asked him which one took it and which one gave it? He, or his drinking partner, Gomez? Oh my. My Uncle Vincent and I, both teenagers, giggled in shock and admiration. She good for she self, eh? My uncle responded.

Yes, yes, my grandmother has a temper. Don't get on her wrong side. She takes it out on her youngest daughter now. Her youngest daughter takes care of her. My grandmother has Alzheimer's. I skyped with her a couple of weeks ago. She donned a scarlet red hat, wore a just as red sweater and had red lipstick trace her thin lips.

While she talked to me, she would ask my mother, "who is this?"
"It's Lesley, your favourite grandchild."
"Yes", I replied, "I'm your favourite grandchild. Don't forget it!"
"Eh heh?" She replied, in authentic Trinidadian style, meaning, truly? peppered with a tinge of mischievous disbelief
"Yes," I reply, "I even have the same birthday as your mother." I say, boasting.
"Where you living now?" She asks. I can see that she is ducking her head and leaning close into the computer. It's akin to how loudly she would speak when she was on an overseas call. I teased her about this as a child.
"Why don't you come visit me? In Denmark?" She has already visited me. Years ago. 2007 perhaps. She was in her mid-80s. Back then the Alzheimer's had not truly set in. Back then we stayed up late, talking. She wore her nightgown and I filmed her. Every now and then she would say, "Oh gosh, Lesley! You like to ask questions eh? Yuh too miserable!" But she loved it. I know she does.

I want to drop everything and take my grandmother away. I really do. I don't like that a stranger who speaks no English is taking care of her in my Aunt's apartment in Brooklyn.  I don't like that she was the women who raised me, and I feel so powerless right now. I don't like how much faith my family gives the medical industry. I suggest marijuana. My mother laughs.  "Think of how funny that would be," my mother says, "she hated that your father smoked. Imagine if in the end, she smokes!" And my mother cackles in that way that only Trinidadian country girls do.  I wasn't joking.

I want to kidnap my grandmother and make her marijuana tea.
I want to kidnap my grandmother and take her to the sea
together we will hold hands
together we will dream
together together my grandmother and me.

thanks for reading.
the lab

*Her biological father is in fact, Corsican. Something not spoken about in my family.