A poem on British colonialism, Caribbean identity and the unfinished work of reparatory justice.
by: Raisa Charles
I am the adult child of a narcissistic mother.
Receiving the bare minimum of care
while suffering abuses so severe
the rest of the world covers their ears when I speak.
My mother is a master at dodging accountability.
She is loath to speak of the whips or the chains,
or of how she stripped me of my name and my language,
force-fed me her doctrine until I was wounded and languid –
just the way she liked it.
“There,” she would say.
“Now you’re civilised. Like a proper country.”
Meanwhile her children cried, “The sun never sets on Mother’s cruelty”
Our value to Mother lay in what we could provide.
Every investment in us meant to feed her bottom line.
Needless to say, the relationship was tenuous.
The wheel of her tyranny broke in 1834
And one by one, deciding we could be colonies no more,
we cut contact.
From Jamaica in ’62 to Grenada in ’73
and so on and so forth until 1981
when I and little sister Barbuda broke free.
In Mother’s absence I’ve attracted lustful eyes.
Tourists, investors… a litter of wolves
eager to pick at the wounds she left behind.
From the labour of the plantation
to the performance of hospitality,
my people still pantomime Mother’s so-called “civility.”
The shackles are gone,
yet they swear allegiance to the God that sanctioned them.
policing themselves from hairline to hem.
They scrub the colour from their skin she said made them inferior.
while she built the finest institutions
with their ancestors blood for her mortar.
My mother cannot –
will not –
apologise for her crimes.
Plausible deniability is the name of the game, you see.
Pay no mind to the millions dead or millions more still living in poverty.
Not her problem. Apparently, that’s on me.
Nevertheless, my people and I, we shine
with a resilience forged in the fires of fighting for our liberation
Everything I have was built from ash.
So despite mother’s dismissal,
when I ask for reparation
I come not as a child seeking pocket change
But as master of my own destiny
carving my own lane,
convinced of my worth
and imbued with the knowledge that I deserve recompense
for every lash,
for every stroke
for every body that was dragged from their home and across the sea
this mutiny will last forever.
The sins of my mother will not rest on the generations
For I am her living mirror
And she cannot hide from her reflection.
