Recently we viewed A Hand Full of Dirt, a movie written and directed by Russell Watson. I guess one might say that it is a Barbadian film, but the whole time watching I kept thinking that it was exactly the kind of work that we would recognise as Caribbean if we were one nation and not belonging to one or another parochial island part. The accents are not from any one place and the visuals can be from anywhere in the Caribbean really. With relief, I report that the island is not a character in the movie. No iconic shots. No stray black belly sheep about or sea. Not even any cane fields or sunsets.

The usual big themes of race and class are the backdrop but that is for the audience to discern as the film stays away from those pulpits. But other big themes take shape- that of masculinity, power and patriarchy and belonging.

In a nutshell, the movie is about three man-generations of the Redman family, the patriarch, Ben, a first generation black plantation owner, a curmudgeon accustomed to bending the will of others and living for himself. He abuses his wife with his hands and his contempt and pours scorn and disappointment on the head of his son, Archie.

Even striking out on his own, Archie lives in the long and asseted shadow of his father and the viewer cringes with every mendicant interaction between them. Forced to beg bailouts for ventures gone awry, Archie too has little talent for building genuine emotional partnership, re-living in his own marriage his father’s vicious ill-regard for his wife.

As he rejects his father, so too, in the turn of the generations, Archie is dismissed by his son Jay, who is desperate to escape family commitments and make life anew in foreign. But he too is a dependent.

Reading our next book club choice, The Sense of an Ending, the protagonist posits that good literature allows the reader to share in the growth of its characters. And this film does that quite well with Archie (played by Alwyn Bully) who is humbled by economic defeat, the false bonhomie of the vulture bankers, by his sensible wife’s liberation, his son’s emotional distance and betrayal, his father’s bile and the expectations of his staff. One senses  inner struggle as he accommodates himself to life on a reduced scale.

As with all movies, this one has some issues for sure. After all, you try making a full length feature film on a conference budget. For one, I wondered about the casting of Jay. The actor seemed too old and therefore, it was hard to identify with his defiant dependency. If you do not like your father, for crying out loud, stop calling him for money already!

By what standard do we judge Caribbean film? Is it a universal standard, as represented by the  uber-professional, ultra-financed films of Hollywood or the those of Bollywood, cultural products of generations of prodigious film making?

I think that with books, we can judge by the universal standard of what appeals without more. After all, nothing gets in between the author and page quality.  Or between an artist and the canvas or a sculptor and her materials. With film, it is otherwise. Film making is dependent on many moving parts, all of which require resources, financial and technical. We have little collective knowledge of making movies, less money and  least aesthetic interest.

When we look at Caribbean films therefore, it can be hard to see the  stories undistracted by the resource constraints that shape the choices of sound, of visuals, of editing. In A Hand Full of Dirt, there are some distractions. But  the story grips you right to the end.

This film succeeds in its storytelling and spirit. It is Watson’s first film. And you have to wonder at and celebrate  this achievement in the face of our generalised indifference to the lives of artists. Well except for those who make us jump, wave, move to the left and dollar wine.

 Do make a point of seeing this film.

The one most striking for me comes from Tallman Foundation:

 ”The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. And the first to forget is the happiest.” 

Forgiveness is the hardest thing, especially when those who are the recipients are not contrite, do not express remorse and are seemingly unchanged, despite censure and exclusion. But as the  quote infers, there are significant  self-benefits to  moving past old hurts, to the freeing of the soul that comes with walking away from bitterness, on the psychic release deep inside when you reject another’s negative power in your life. Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting but certainly it is a great analgesic. And as you feel less pain, you really also organically start forgetting. There is no reason to hold on to bad memories.

And then this from Alix:

Life has no remote. Get up and change it yourself.

For sure. Unfortunately, there is no magic to be performed to make change in one’s life. It is all about the hard work, discipline, and action whether it is to learn Spanish, or lose weight, or reduce chronic disease likelihood. Or change the world towards something more peaceful, pretty and less inequitable.

Stand up.

Michelle posts:

“It’s not what you do. It’s how you do it. It’s not what you see. It’s how you look at it. It’s not how your life is. It’s how you look at it.”

I have a friend going through life’s greatest challenge at this moment. Something for which no one could be prepared. I have watched him battle the demons, continue to do so, but with such brio and spirit. I wonder if I can muster that. I wonder if his nature’s gift is optimism. Another person would be floored, buried in depression, unable to see forward. But my friend laughs, still. Deeply. Finds humour. He remains curious. Glances only at the absurdity and has put ironclad gates on entry into the abyss. He will triumph. His magic is his insight that his life is how he perceives it.

We need to be able to teach our children that solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone, at times it is positively to be wished for. It is in the interludes between being in company that we talk to ourselves. In the silence we listen to ourselves. That we ask questions of ourselves. We describe ourselves to ourselves, and in the quietude we may even hear the voice of God(desses). (Amina quoting Maya Angelou)

I like this one for the young people in my life. The offspring, the nieces and nephews, cousins, daughters and sons of friends.  Times are real tough. In country after country, tales of the bleakness of the economy and environment can be a dark cloud. To find your place in these tight times young lovelies,  you will need to really know self,  make meaningful connections with people, with thought and with your feelings. Reflect, contemplate, spend some gentle time with self. And READ!!!!!!! 

And ending with Leisa’s post:

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

No!
I will not still my voice!
I have
too much to claim—
if you see me
looking at books
or coming to your house
or walking in the sun
know that I look for fire!

I have learnt
from books dear friend
of men dreaming and living
and hungering in a room without a light
who could not die since death was far too poor
who did not sleep to dream, but dreamed to change
the world.

And so
if you see me
looking at your hands
listening when you speak
marching in your ranks
you must know
I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change
the world.

And what about dealing with aggression, the child that plays just a little too hard, gets just a bit too physically annoyed when the other child takes the ball. How to discipline?  Are time outs effective? What about a good hard slap or constant and patient reasoning. What is the aim of discipline? Communicating value systems, leading the child into reflection and/or just plain expression of consequences of breach of parenting will?

And then the challenges really kick in at puberty. How to encourage empathy and open-mindedness? How much to share about sex? How directive should one be about religion or lack thereof? When to allow the boy and girl child dem to go to the club? What about driving? Should they be allowed to drive unaccompanied so soon after certification?  What to do if you suspect smoking (weed that is)? In all of those matters when children will come up with the all encompassing offence/defence “everybody’s doing it”, parents must be at their rational, authoritative best.

The parents around us have gone through all of this with generally a good bit of intelligent reasoning, even when making mistakes because of the raw reflex to keep seeing our children as new-borns.  We focus on indicators of maturity, balancing  levels of oversight and supervision with assessment of risks, all the while knowing that we cannot helicopter, that children must be protected from harms but must also be allowed to make mistakes, pile on experience for wisdom to grow and for the skills of self-protecting decision-making to develop.

But now we are at another parenting milestone. When do you allow the adult child to sleep with her or his partner under your roof????  When they are not married that is.

And so I have been doing some anecdotal research. And there are identifiable camps. Those who are practical. Better the young people have access to a safe space and not at a  look out or lonely road, prey to criminals.  Then there are the worldly sophisticates, perhaps the same as those without children. “What’s the issue? You mad or what?”

 And those who cannot abide the fracturing of the injunction against pre-marital sex, doh mind that there must be less than ten people in the history of Caribbean humanity who managed to avoid having sex before saying I do. And those who are more likely to accept sexual relationships in their home if the relationship is long-term, with clear expressions of commitment.

And finally my favorite category, like my boy, father of my children. Unreasoning, unapologetic. There is nothing intelligent to be said on this, he asserts, defiantly. The answer is no! as he covers his ears and sings loudly. I know he is being a bit old-man caricaturish, for effect. But the truth is, there is that part of him that is squeamish about evidence that his adult children are also sexual beings.

I am squeamish too, I confess.

So what then are the principles? I would say the first is that we should expect from adult children the same that we expect from any adult coming to our homes. That we must expect that adult children  will be sexually (and hopefully discreetly) expressive. And that parental intrusion  must be minimal except if you see your child getting in harm’s way. Yes, a slippery slope for sure into intrusiveness and constant advise.

But all of that is rational when what we may be dealing with are sex taboos, the inner feeling that of something somewhat tawdry about sex. And to know that our adult children are  active, right in the same house with us, seems……urggggg. No way.

Why then would marriage make that feeling of discomfort disappear? An actual question. Is sex within marriage more sanitised because it is related culturally to reproduction (social and biological) more so than to pleasure? And how are those ideologies relevant to the Caribbean where more children are in fact born outside marital unions than within?

And finally I wonder now if  this close-mindedness is less about taboos than about a certain  visceral reluctance to accept this definitive indicator of adulthood?

What do you think?

Here is an excerpt from a conversation between Richard Hawkins and the now deceased Christopher Hitchens who said:

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian — on the left and on the right.

“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy — the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquize the divine and tell us what to do.”

I have known Jeewan forever and he remains more or less the same. The person who will crack a joke when things get tense. Who will process absurdity with some long view wisdom. He is a buddhist at heart, staying far  from negative states of mind, believing in karmic  consequences of small mindnesses.

He is a generous and open sort and the Clarke family has been a main beneficiary of that. Big time limer, Jeewan makes  friends on the train, playing cricket, drumming in bands. 

And he also believes that slow cooking is the key to a great curry and has spent his whole adult life trying to convince me that his lovingly and long prepared lamb curry (with tomato. Please!)  is better tasting than my 30 minute pressure cooked curry. Well Jeewan I am happy for you to keep on trying to make your case.

Have a great day Mr. G 1.

Anyways, Tuesday was nomination day and here and there groups of  people in green and people in orange. But most others  fastidiously in every other colour. On the TV, nomination day looked carnivalesque, full of partisan joviality, the vuvuzela full blast. People, mostly women, to my eye, chipping along, supporting their party, their candidate. One candidate went to register on a horse (‘a one horse race’ ) another went on a bicycle.  The day looked like high dramatic fun for those politically engaged. Everyone optismistic about their chances.

Taxi drivers can be a reliable sample of public opinion.  In Jamaica, the taxi drivers seem  non-committal or otherwise weary of politics. As one told me, the Lord is the answer.

Bobby, who is my father, turns 80 this week. He still works doing, in his words, not law about which he is contemptuous, but rather justice.  I think that means that he has given up on reading the books. And, in the other theme in his life, he knows that he is as sexy now as at any other sexy stage in his life.

It is  not so straight forward writing about Bobby given the turbulent harshness of his fathering. The question which came up recently at the book club is how to write about a parent in a complete way, in a frame that moves beyond the unblinking child gaze of expectations and disappointments to a nuanced adult consideration of the inherent complexities of human character. That you can be one thing here and something else entirely there and that the multiple personas can be authentic.

Bobby was a reluctant father (not to mention husband). Yet, while he is unable to resist that judgment, he does chafe at it because he himself was terribly fathered. And no, he was not his father whom still he did not forsake or reject, taking care of him right down to the end, honouring his son duties. “So what’s your problem?” he silently impugns me for continuous judgment of him.

And now in my conversations with Caribbean people, I see how many others grow up surviving fathership that is strangely indifferent, disengaged, irresponsible, often emotionally oppressive, even violent. Men who prefer the sexual company of multiples of women and of the men in the rum shop over the interior lives of their developing children.

In some ways, then, there was nothing too exceptional about Bobby’s parenting. But he is an exceptional person, an excessive person, a big and disturbing character. Coming from the volatile Miller clan, he is a contrarian by instinct. It is all masculine bravado and braggadocio. His mother was a strong woman, capable even after diabetic comas and surgeries, to go on a roof in her seventies to patch something.

That sense of kiss-me-ass independence is a dominant streak in his character. Despite his fair skin, ‘nice’ hair and ‘pretty’ eyes, he rejected Caribbean colour privilege, an early actor in the black power movement. Power to the People!

Scathing of the negrocrats and bourgeoisie (isn’t that a delicious word?), his circle of daily man friends were rough and tumble sorts- Naga, Crazy Horse, Critch the Bitch, Son. Way out on the left, banned from entering here, there and everywhere for being a communist, starting with his deportation from Dominica, he adores Fidel, is an ardent regionalist, is reflexively anti-Northern, anti-capitalist, his distrusting rule of thumb being that there is always another truth than the one from Reuters, CNN, BCC etc.

He dreamed for the revo which spectacularly, actually happened for a tragically curtailed moment.

And so, his influence on me is undeniable. From him, I was schooled in skepticism, in distaste for class and race inequality, abuse of authority and power. But yes, observing his certain disregard for the completeness of womanity, the dissonance  between his fervently voiced values on social justice in the public sphere and his actions in the private spaces as father and partner, I found my way to feminism, to the injunction that the personal is political.

As a little girl, I remember being in Windsor Park when Dominica got associated statehood status. I was a brownie then, attending Goodwill Junior School (brand new compliments the Canadians). And I sang the national anthem, knowing all the words. The Dominica national anthem is melodious and with a lyrical emphasis on nature.

And I was also in Dominica for its attainment of Independence and again in Windsor Park when the complicated, hard-to-draw flag went up in 1979. Dominica has retained its hold on me, on my sense of who I am even though my mother is the Dominican one and even though I left at 6. When I land at Melville Hall, apart from feeling euphoria to have survived the plane ride between mountains and buffeted by crosswinds, my feeling of connectedness is deep. Home.

We spent a lot of time, my siblings and I, lamenting our exile in Barbados, away from beloved Dominican grandparents and the reeevar. And in the  child-like way of focused loyalty, in my heart there was not room for more than one country love. And Barbados lost out.

But really, as an adult I feel happily Barbadian too.  I am a product of the Barbados education system and my father’s propadandizing. (More on that next week). With the Barbadian propensity to see in black and white, little room for tolerance of the things on the perceived wrong side. A certain self-righteousness. (You can only imagine who much I sputtered incoherently in sweet TnT when I first lived there. How, why…I cannot believe….!)

Barbadians are definite people. And the homogeneity of the place allows for consensus and wholeness. Because of its long history of racial domination Barbadians put a great ethical premium on fairness and meritocracy. And because of the sheer geographical and physical limitations, the people are generally thrifty, conserving and cautious.

If Dominica’s anthem is characterized by nature evocations and Trinidad and Tobago by the idea of unity in diversity (side and side we stand…where every creed and race find an equal place) the Barbadian anthem is serious, serious, reflecting on the efforts of people to build a nation. It is an anthem of some exhorting power, with, I find with few platitudes. And the anthem honours the vision of Barbadians on the independence era to be the “Strict guardians of our heritage, Firm craftsmen of our fate”.

 So whatever my preference for Caribbean citizenship, (I am a wannabe Trini too) wherever I am, Independence Day is a moment for pause, for reflection and affirmation on our collective work for greater freedom, self-determination and self-responsibility.

Independence Day also reminds us that nationhood in the Caribbean, the Independence project was (is) located in a rejection of inequality, domination and oppression. Of all kinds. Listen up homophobes and class elites.

Independence is then both the destination and a way of living. We are all on the journey still.

By the way, the Belizean anthem has the best lines of of rebellion and resistance to oppression: “Drive back the tyrants, let despots flee-Land of the free by the Carib Sea!”

To end by saying that the Alex Jordan morning radio show (FM 101.1) simply and meaningfully profiled Barbadians, from across the proverbial walks of life every day in November. Great job

Happy Independence Day to all.

Because what else are people to do in historic, chronic, mind-numbing crisis? The human instinct surely is for survival. We are hardwired that way, to wake up day by day, to put one foot in front the next, to look for sustenance. And that is what Haitians do. They endure. And they laugh, quarrel, fight, work hard, live, love. So, yes, they are resilient.

Yet evidence of the recent past is everywhere. In the mangled steel, in the rubble that dots the landscape, in the pall of dust that pervades the atmosphere. In the stories that people do not speak about but are there one scratch away from active thought.

We are staying at Horizon Suites which to my unease turned out to be a renamed Hotel Montana. Hotel Montana was the go-to hotel of the international development denizens. It was sophisticated and urbane in, yes, a roughish kind of way. Tiles not quite straight, fixtures not quite plumb. Over-sized rooms that the more efficient capitalist them would understand as an inefficient use of space.

The earthquake struck as if the fault lines were located right under the hotel and at that 1 foot away from the surface. Most of the hotel collapsed and with that many lives were lost.

But near two years later, a much smaller version of the hotel is back in business, disconcertingly, yet poignantly on the same location. The dining room remains intact with the spectacular view of the city below and the denuded mountains across the way.

The world is so small. It turns out that the owner, one of them, went to boarding school in Jamaica with Joan, recognizes her from what must be 50 years ago and we get to talking. She is vivacious, energetic, alive, wiry in that hard working looking way. And as she reminisces, talk turns to the hotel. Yes, they are rebuilding. Yes, many lives were lost, including that of her grandson. Her sister was trapped in the rubble and rescued after 4 days. But, life goes on. There are somethings that we cannot control, she says, bringing an abrupt end to a conversation that can only deliver pain.

Is this faith? Is this life affirming pragmatism? I do not know. But one thing is sure. People make choices about how to live with crisis and it is those who are blessed with optimism and determination that overcome. And perhaps resilience is that capacity to discern the forces that you can control and to focus on those and not the areas of powerlessness.

This propensity to look forward in motion might be the outcome of nurture, but perhaps too the luck of nature.