X NUEVA YORK X ROTTERDAM X PARÍS X BARCELONA X VENECIA X BRIDGETOWN
RHIZOMATIC FRUITS2021
by KAYLA ARCHER
| spanish version︎︎︎|
Dear Adri, Dear Lú,
When we spoke last week I said that it’s no accident that each one of us originate from islands. I was attracted to the open and collaborative objective of Allélon because I think that the desire, or maybe the necessity, to facilitate spontaneous correspondence and communication between places, to make connections possible (whether they be between people, between ideas, between feelings), is something strongly linked to the conditions of growing up islanders. This isn’t to say that it’s something exclusively innate to islanders, but rather something more urgent, intuitive, almost impulsive, since being an islander is to be deeply aware of how relationships and relativity define and determine not only identity, but also lived experiences and the material conditions of living.
What is it to be an islander? I can only speak of what my life has been from Barbados, and I’m very curious to know of yours from the Mediterranean. I think that to speak of one’s childhood can be a simple story, or a complicated one, depending on the purpose of telling it. I’ll paint mine simply here, recognising that I was fortunate to spend most of my days enjoying the richness of nature in these latitudes. I spent my early years growing up by the seaside in the North, and in my teenage years I lived surrounded by mango trees in the central countryside - but with a view of the whole South coast with the ocean spread out in the background. So I always faced the limits and definition of the island (or what I perceived as definition). The shores remind us constantly of the “here” and the “there”, of the “me/we” and the “them”.
Overtime, I acquired the acute sensation that both history and the future belonged to the realm of “outside” or “out there”. Throughout secondary school we were taught many northern-centered works of literature, besides some Caribbean works that my favourite English teacher shared (which I’m revisiting almost a decade later). But I was a typical restless and complaining teenager, too exasperated by the squeezing school tie and the disciplinary atmosphere of the institution to pay much mind to these pieces of regional culture. In addition, when we were taught history it was presented as something flat, dead and distant, and I couldn’t root myself in what I learned. I understood that “out there” is where they were rich enough to invest in the future, adequately equipped to create in the present. The idea that the best way to achieve a future was to leave and gain opportunities and experience overseas became very prevalent, for me at least.
Bit by bit, I realised that I also lived on an island within the island - a white island. It’s strange and disturbing at the same time how one can pass years socialising according to unspoken norms without even knowing it. I suppose it's the momentum of those who were here before you, the inheritance of pre-made ways of life. It’s problematic because one can pass many years if not a lifetime oblivious, voluntarily or not, to the racist logic of this inheritance and the privileges accumulated as a result. At fifteen years old I felt desperate to leave, for the sensation of suffocating, of being trapped by spiritual shadows, and destined to repeat wearisome habits and private attacks of madness. I’ll also admit that I had romantic ideas about the North, where nobody knew me and where I thought I could live free of any categories. And I had the privilege to be able to go, with a voracious eagerness.
I love to introduce myself over and over again to new people and new places. I’ve moved to five countries in the past eight years and I couldn’t want anything more than to be perpetually transforming and adapting according to constantly novel encounters, languages and surroundings. In this way I didn’t really have to think of my roots nor routes. A perpetual present. I took a video from a train traveling from Valencia to Alicante - it makes me laugh because the rhythm mimics how I felt and thought during this period: frenetic like a hummingbird busy with trying all that I could for the purpose of trying.
Roots and routes became somewhat more meaningful topics when I moved to The Hague, I started my study, I started my twenties and the questions “who are you?” and “what do you want to do?” acquired a bit more weight. Searching for clear answers to these questions left me feeling disoriented, trying to locate myself in between a cloudy and neglected past and future. A series of questions have helped me to relocate myself while I was living overseas, and I’ll name them for you as my guides back home.
First, a question that quickly emerged as a pattern from the moment I left Barbados: I meet people, I tell them I’m from Barbados (usually needing to explain where Barbados is located) and immediately they look confused, asking me “but why are you white?”. At first I didn’t pay mind, laughing and explaining that yes, a minority of white people live in the Caribbean. However, overtime I noted the difficulty of accepting this, which some people showed by interrogating my roots, that is, my lineage until a satisfactory answer was given, made up of a collage of European countries I had never known. This exercise of justifying, defending or explaining my origin became so tedious that, if I didn’t really want to know the person asking, I told them lies: “I’m from England” and this was accepted without challenge. The weird and seemingly empty question “but why are you white?” pestered me with such frequency that I started to wonder where this question came from, and what was the answer they really expected, and if I was giving them the answer they expected or giving them the actual answer. What at first seemed like a personal, self-centred and maybe existential preoccupation transformed into a much more macro perspective.
So we arrive at the second question: one weekend one of my best friends came to visit me from London. We went about shopping, eating in cafes and travelling in trains - a white Bajan and a Black Bajan - both with an ambiguous accent that provoked the question “where are you guys from?”. To our response that we were from the same Caribbean island, the uniform and unhesitating response was “I believe you” (pointing to my friend), “but I don’t believe you” (pointing to me). It’s taken me three years to explicitly recognise why it is impossible for Europeans to believe that my friend and I could come from the same place, despite speaking the same way. “Why can’t they believe me?” I wondered. What I found then, hardly knowing I found it, was an exercise of forgetting. This exercise of believing my Black friend is from Barbados, but not me, is the mental gymnastics necessary to erase the role of Europe in bringing white people and Black people to live together in a place very very far from their original point of origin. In the same way that it is necessary for them to interrogate and identify me by my “original” point of origin in order to evade the knowledge of everything that happened between my “original” European ancestors from three hundred years ago and now; just as questioning nothing of my friend’s lineage evades the reason that this very same interrogation is literally impossible for them.
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This exercise of questioning and not questioning is the mechanism that maintains the deception that the Caribbean is a place without history. But what does it serve to strip hundreds of years of history from the region? The truth is that it serves highly material ends. In denying the Caribbean a past the most obvious result is that the debt that exists between colonizers and colonized can be ignored. It’s clear that this amnesia is tremendously convenient and intentional. Further, what runs the Caribbean economy today is no longer sugar and dehumanising labour, but tourism; and what attracts tourists is the desire for an Eden - a place free of past and future where you can forget reality and all the comforts one needs to live briefly in paradise are made available thanks to the locals who have nothing to do but to satisfy this desire. The lack of accountability and the existence of paradise hence depends on deceptions, and through my studies I started to recognise my life rooted in the economy and history of the region and I could not make truce with these deceptions.
This exercise of questioning and not questioning is the mechanism that maintains the deception that the Caribbean is a place without history. But what does it serve to strip hundreds of years of history from the region? The truth is that it serves highly material ends. In denying the Caribbean a past the most obvious result is that the debt that exists between colonizers and colonized can be ignored. It’s clear that this amnesia is tremendously convenient and intentional. Further, what runs the Caribbean economy today is no longer sugar and dehumanising labour, but tourism; and what attracts tourists is the desire for an Eden - a place free of past and future where you can forget reality and all the comforts one needs to live briefly in paradise are made available thanks to the locals who have nothing to do but to satisfy this desire. The lack of accountability and the existence of paradise hence depends on deceptions, and through my studies I started to recognise my life rooted in the economy and history of the region and I could not make truce with these deceptions.
Graduation approached and I had to consider my route yet again: it prompted the question “can I carry on in Europe?”. Despite having made a very very very dear family of friends in Europe, I harboured a growing frustration, with points of rage and disillusionment for all the comfort, structure and opportunity that this relatively small region maintains and which so many seek to acquire, suffering and sometimes dying in the attempt. I no longer felt stable nor at peace in this sturdy and old world. On the one hand, I wanted to fire back the question at Europe and challenge them the way they challenged me: “Where do I come from? You don’t believe me? Well you tell me, where did all of this come from?” (*gestures at everything*). But on the other hand, to accept responsibility for the truth and for justice would result in an instability and identity crisis of which Europe is not accustomed to as a centre of power - and it will refuse it like a mule or a narcissist. I wondered if accountability freely given from Europe is even possible. I was chewing on bitterness. At this point I felt clearly that I could no longer carry on in Europe.
The Caribbean is a web of small places, but small like the eye of a needle in which innumerable threads have passed through, connecting worlds and worlds and worlds. Contrary to being an Eden, it is the epicentre of modern history. What we face is how to reclaim this history on the global stage, to demand to be recognised (to be respected). I understand that white Bajans are protected by this amnesia up until a certain point - avoiding instability and identity crisis just like Europeans - but unlike Europeans, this amnesia has a significantly more impactful cost. In addition to private attacks of madness and wearisome habits, the way of life as an isolated and estranged community generates a riptide of memory and ghosts which keeps us from trusting in our own belonging. Or maybe doubting the idea itself of belonging in a place where nobody is native and our presence is made up of so many contradictions that the concept of a nation cannot even contain. It’s confusing terrain, I think of what my dad taught me about riptides: “to survive, you have to let it carry you, don't struggle against the current even if you end up very far out - wait. Eventually you’ll be able to swim back to shore.”
I believe it’s because of this amnesia that we are such a conservative society, hostile to meaningful progress - also for this reason the island exists as a diaspora just as much as a physical country. Islanders pursue a broader horizon or, for much of the LGBTQ+ community for example, they flee in order to simply exist. For those that stay in the island, the riptide of memory is part of an undercurrent of daily life, and we don’t let it carry us out, we struggle because we are taught not to look back (or we’re afraid to look back) and so we end up so worn out that the idea of belonging no longers matters or means anything.
Being European with hundreds of years of history in the Caribbean, I owe my questions to this place. Like I mentioned already, my questions about roots and routes became very macro on my journey back home, but in the last few months my focus has shifted to my micro world. At the beginning of the year I read “All About Love'' by bell hooks, each page moved through me like the breath of air I didn’t know I was lacking. One of the many fragments I highlighted said “Whenever we heal family wounds, we strengthen community. Doing this, we engage in loving practice. That love lays the foundation for the constructive building of community with strangers''. And with this I realised that family is a fundamental site of inheritance, and there is where our most direct power is located, power to transform the norms of our surroundings. Having my two bare feet planted on this ground here positions me to find and salt my most intimate wounds, to let the riptide carry me out so that I may be able to swim back to shore, maybe a little stronger, and with eyes a little clearer.
And now I ask you about your roots and routes from the Mediterranean, those islands situated at the border between so many contrasting and old cultures and of which the main things I can see from my corner of the world are waters as blue as ours here, the refugee crisis, ancient history, maybe catholicism, citrus and olives.
X NUEVA YORK X ROTTERDAM X PARÍS X BARCELONA X VENECIA X BRIDGETOWN