“…he should approach the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father…”
Edmund Burke
After studies overseas in a green and pleasant Canadian city,
At a university whose motto is “It is up to you”,
Against my mother’s advice,
But to honour my agreement with my homeland,
I set off on a journey home.
The plane was nearly empty:
After the civil war
No five flights daily in this direction.
No one welcomed me back,
For all saw it as an imprudent decision;
I was on my way to understanding Walcott’s dictum:
There can be homecoming without home.
There had been an election,
But there were still gunshots in the night.
Frequent power cuts made me long for
Kerosene lamps and moonlit nights.
Unscheduled water lock-offs
Shamed the little dripping spring in my district
That no one had ever seen go dry.
Waiting for hours for the disordered arrival of minibuses
Made me remember the control I had felt
Riding my bicycle to school in the hills.
I saw my aunt’s shop,
The main enterprise of her life,
Now in smoke-stained ruins,
After the political arsonists
Had also destroyed its name that I had painted on it
At my godmother’s request,
In my eager schoolboy’s artistic triumph.
I heard an echo of the island’s pain
In the screams of a pig being slaughtered on the ground;
Security guards with giant dogs
—I had not noticed them much before—
Were now everywhere, including in front of ice cream stores
And supermarkets where angry shoppers prowled.
And I heard a man joke loudly
That the island was now a den of thieves,
Including him.
There was a new suspicion in people’s eyes
As they peered at me trying to detect my politics;
And on discovering that I was a returnee
Pressed me for American dollars.
I overheard students exchanging chilling tales
Of their time of terror and dread.
When my used car broke down,
Men sitting in front of a shop refused to help;
I had grown up with the tradition
My father’s cooperative morning works
And corn-shellings at our home,
First urged, the historians say,
By Baptist preachers at the new beginning,
The end of slavery.
So I felt I did not know these new people at all.
I had left hearing reggae gold on the radio;
Returned to the hot bronze of violent
And hedonistic dancehall.
The Big Political Stirring Up
Had brought the dregs of history
Floating to the brim and overflowing;
The bad duppies had been let out of the island’s Pandora’s Box
And could not be put back in.
I soon came to find
That there was no place here
For a scholar of my kind.
And yet against all the logic I was taught
I stayed in the country ranked
The second most fled in the world.
The answers are more varied
Than the light of the sun shining fiercely on the grassy patch
That survives the decayed house in the hills in which I was born;
And could be etched on a bit of Taino pottery,
Carved on a slave’s calabash,
Or written in water on the wattle-and-daub walls
Of a peasant’s hut.
But most of all I stayed hoping for some balm
For the wounds of my parents
And country.