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 ...