Navel String
A poem about about my year in Trinidad and a longing to belong
To the land that is my own but feels as far away as space;
It is I, your abandoned child, crash landed on your shores.
As I crawl back towards you like an infant, I find myself calling upon you because it has become clear that I no longer recognise you. This despite the fact that without you, I would not exist. This despite the repetitive anthem chanted by my parents;
“Yuh navel string bury under ah mango tree.”
Like you, those words have always passed through me like water. Never acknowledging its significance, never understanding why I should care. My navel string; my connection to you, has long disintegrated into the dusty earth of another land. But that is not entirely my fault. That’s just what happens when one spends the better part of two decades one ocean and two continents away from you.
My Grandma used to say that if one has nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all. But here I am venting my frustrations of you in the unhealthiest of ways. She wrote me letters every day I was gone from you, expressing her desire for us to become close again one day.
She loved you so I owe her this due diligence.
Unfortunately for me, you have evolved into an obscure, fictional land that only used to exist in the past and on paper. Maybe that is why I feel this guilt bubbling in my gut like bile?
I don’t sound like you.
Were my forefathers and mothers forced out of their homelands for me to not understand you? For me to grow up waist deep in sand, consumed by other boisterous languages? I was embarrassed to listen to your music, old time Calypso on cassette tapes shoved into our red hatchback. They made me listen to it every day, to and from a school that taught me to erase your memory by speaking the Queen’s English.
My body has been thoroughly washed and scrubbed of any trace of your identity within me. The little bit that my parents did to try to save, eventually fell onto deaf ears. Besides, you always represented bad things. Like endings. Like death. At least one per year.
Hearing the throaty hymns sung by Aunties with colourful, wide brim hats, fanning themselves with funeral programmes, always gave me goosebumps. There is a sadness permeating in your air. You made me grieve for my past, for my present and even for my future.
Now there’s a new feeling developing within me, like an ulcer or a tumour. A macajuel is wrapping itself around my torso, slowly suffocating me, slowly holding me down. No matter how much I trash around, trying to release myself from its grasps. No matter how much I scream a piercingly silent scream that no one hears, the further I am pushed deeper into its course, clammy skin.
It doesn’t bite to kill, merely squeezing me enough to leave me in a semi vegetative state. Aware but not in control. Alive but as good as dead. I am now stuck within you, foreseeably, in your unwelcoming embrace.
“Remember yuh navel string bury here.”
There’s that word again, but I resist. As much as I can, I will resist. This is not my home. My home is a land of two seas, not the land of the hummingbirds, why can’t anyone, most of all you understand this? Why can’t you listen? Apparently, the hummingbirds have. They visit my window now. Other birds too, all different colours that I’ve never known a bird could be. Chirping, almost as if to get my attention.
Paraquets have been the most persistent. I tried to entertain them once, considering their chirps to be a message from you but could not figure it out. So, I’ve resigned myself to observing the hummingbirds and it’s quick movements, greedily sucking at anything sweet. I envy them. They aren’t restricted by anything.
Not even you.
Every day the hummingbird visits. It’s the same one, I am pretty sure of this. I like them because they are the only things that truly show off your beauty. It makes you real. It makes you beautiful.
“Come pick some mangoes from d tree.”
Mum tells me this almost every day but I can’t seem to take her up on her offer. Going outside makes me and you permanent and I cannot let that happen, I cannot let you get into my bloodstream.
I hear the sound of your children on the street. Their laughter sounds like my own when I was your child. Unburdened, unrestricted. They know their place within you, they are permanently bonded with you, they see you. Perhaps I am like those douen to you, unwanted and abandoned. No identity. Something not quite right. A lost soul.
Something to be afraid of.
I will only go outside unless you’re going to bury me. Once and for all, kill me. The macajuel can have me, leave me under the mango tree that already has a part of me. I always knew that you would probably be the thing that ended me; it’s almost Shakespearean.
Instead, I’ll stay inside where I can pretend I’m still breathing.
Places have auras. Those auras change. Sometimes they don’t; it depends on length of time lived there and I have lived in many places. Your aura has changed. But there are pockets of the original in your crevices, in the once shiny terrazzo of my childhood home. Perhaps, like the terrazzo, all my feelings for you need to be revived to make pure and new again? But I doubt that it will make it the same again, whatever that same was.
It’s a blur, a distant fuzzy, unfamiliar, fever dream that I am unsure even truly happened. My life within you feels like looking at someone else’s through a crystal ball. The only proof I have that you were ever mine are the spoken words of relatives and the glossy pictures that smell like you from the past.
I want my familiar past back, the one that I don’t have to squint to remember. The one that made me the person I am now. What is the point of you, of being here with you again? I have a story to tell but nothing tangible to hold in my hands, to mould, to develop? My body, my brain, will gradually be destroyed by the large scaly reptile. Why don’t you get it to insert it’s venom and let me die instead? Easy way out.
I am forcing myself to relearn how to speak to you. My mother tongue. To undo what I lost. Drop the white man speak. “Our accent sweet boy.” I used to speak like this right? “Ent?” No, that definitely does not sound right coming from my lips. Not anymore; it’s been too long.
I am too broken for the broken language.
“Where yuh from?”
A heavy open-ended question with multiple responses. Here, there, everywhere. When I was there, I was from here. When I am here, I’m from there. A question that would never be asked if I knew you. If I accepted you. If I was you.
Maybe I should respond “d mango tree”? Maybe that’s the only way they will accept me? The lines between where you begin and where I end have been becoming blurred. There’s a young girl that visits me at deepest depths of night when everyone is asleep. She tries to tell me something but it’s a whisper. I cannot hear her, no matter how hard I try.
I try to recognise her but her face disappears before I can see she’s me.
Everything I know about you I’ve had to be taught. And I almost failed, almost gave up. But then I opened up a book and I couldn’t stop reading; you intrigue me. I am becoming drawn to you and it’s terrifying.
The library down town is my new favourite place. Shelves lined with endless books about your history. I love books. Each book feels like one step closer to freedom. One step closer towards you. It’s helping me understand you more. Maybe even love you? It’s too soon to say.
“She feel she better than us?”
The whispers, the glares, the confusion. They think I hate you, think I’m ashamed of you. They are the people I always believed were my own but I’m starting to realise are as distant from me as you. Allyuh’s modest operandi does not resonate with me. How scary it is to think that it almost could have? Would that have even been a bad thing?
Oh look, here comes the scrap iron man with his loud speaker, followed swiftly by the water man. Your national sound perhaps? The deafening rain and boom of the thunder beg to differ. Are you always this loud? Or are you just trying to drown out my weeping?
There’s a red striped maxi going right, another yellow going left. I’ve seen a green and black one before, though I forgot which direction they go. People bustling to “get ah drop”, bustling because they have somewhere to be, a purpose with you. For me, the days have melded into nights and nights into further darkness.
I think you’re a death sentence.
I remembered something, some memories of us together. Long forgotten but something has ignited it again. Now I remember the joy that you once held, the community you represented. Maybe it wasn’t a dream.
I remember a time, when I was barely a foot tall, with a face still fresh with milk, still innocent, untouched and beautiful. Not yet removed from you. Crammed into Gramps’ old rickety Cressida, spluttering up a steep, pothole laden road like turbulence or d bocas. Wondering whether it’ll make it up and cheering when it does. It always does.
I remember, driving to a beach with sand darker than in the magazines, trunk open facing the Atlantic Ocean or Caribbean Sea, plenty pelau and ice-cold drinks to go around. Memories of the dead who were once so alive. I’m reminded of how you used to represent life.
I remember my hands and knees would be covered in chalk as I furiously created my own version of your world on the garage floor. The arts always came natural to me, that could be why I find myself more able to communicate with you when I capture your essence on a canvas.
“Give she ah bush bath.”
An attempt at marinating you into me? Drenching me in salt so that I cannot leave like Gang Gang Sarah? I don’t belong to you, but I want to belong to someone. And that’s the problem, I don’t belong to anyone.
Just me against the world, against you, against me.
Too many girls get lost in you, too many meet tragic ends in you. What makes me any different? I can escape your grasp, escape being haunted by the past, escape the snakes grip, just watch me!
“Because I from foreign?”
That will not save me from disappearing within you. It will not save me from being destroyed by you. You are not all bad. There is a light that still exists at your core, aching to be released, aching to be realised once more. Free your people from the shackles of being blindly in love with you when you do not deliver their needs.
I see you for who you really are.
You are as transparent as a window but you have a potential that is bubbling just below the surface. I see it in the hummingbirds, in the poui trees, in the densely forested majestic mountains, even in the ugliest parts of you. You need to be delivered from an evil that even God cannot make sense of. Now I know that you’re not scary but flawed, that you’re not a black hole but a bright light; I feel more obliged to open my heart to you.
“Where is my navel string?”
I find myself under the mango tree, finally. It’s smaller than I remembered. Older too. There are termites attempting to eat away at it, black, nasty things that make me itchy. It refuses to be defeated though. Still standing strong, still baring it’s sweet fruit. The birds like it, especially the hummingbirds who have managed to peck huge chunks into the fallen ones.
I half expected the macajuel to jump out at me, fangs out, ready to pounce. It’s far too beautiful of a day for that to happen. The sun beats down but it’s not hot, it’s cool, it’s refreshing. That’s the thing; your sun is the same sun I’ve known all my life. The same sun that pricked me, made my already dark skin just a shade darker, for all those years we were apart.
You are the same as anywhere else I’ve been and anywhere else I’ll find myself. And I’ve come to the realisation that I cannot force myself to be you. I am a product of my environment. Whilst my navel string remained, my body and soul left you long ago. I cannot possibly force it back into you. It’s unfair on us both.
There’s that girl again.
Me. She’s telling me that you’ve changed too. The calm breeze that used to blow through you no longer exists. It’s heavy and relentless. You are hollow, crying out for help. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought?
“Time to cut the cord.”
My wisdom teeth have recently erupted and with it, a new acumen. I’m on my hands and knees now, much like how I came to you. With two palms on the grass and tears clouding my vision, I’ve decided. I will learn to love you in my own way, one day, eventually. I will learn to love you.
Because in the process of trying to find you again, I found myself instead.
