Lola Shannon Finding Zion
I have never lived in a household with both my parents. The most obvious part of their relationship was that they were apart . . . far apart. My mother raised me by herself. Even when given the chance to care for me during visits, my father never struck me as a parent. To my mind, his presence during my childhood was blurred into a general sense of mystique about his position in our lives. There was a large contrast between everyday life with my mother and the times I spent with my father, when elegant meals out and shopping sprees at his expense were the norm. When I was small, however, I couldn’t see that he was leading a comparably privileged life, and that being without him added to my mother’s financial struggle.
My maturation and the progression of poverty in my home eventually caused me to resent my father’s lack of support. A few years before he died, a complex war began between me and my father that shaped my adolescence. This was very different from the friction I experienced with my mother. We were close, sometimes too close to work out our problems, while my father was a mythical and, at best, a magical figure. He was capable of appearing and transforming parts of my life (at least by providing material souvenirs of our relationship and puzzling words of wisdom) and then disappearing for extended periods of time. This fluctuation made me feel only half visible, so that by the age of thirteen, I had pretty much given up on getting to know him.
Sometimes I felt pushed and pulled by my mother, too. Because of our closeness—to the point of sharing dreams and telepathy—my mother’s problems often spilled over onto me. It is important to say that through all the bad times, what has kept us, and will keep us, able to understand each other deeply is my mother’s persistence in a world of obstacles. Ingenuity with scarce resources and taking pride in my voice are things I learned from my mother. A key part of her determination to be herself was refusing to depend on a man in any way. Another part was working hard to accommodate her desire to be a writer. But my mother also struggles with the scars of mistreatment stemming from times far before she had me. Ironically, the strength I admired often put a strain on our household. She was a practicing alcoholic until I was eight years old. Although I am thankful that she drank only when I was in bed at night, I do remember terrifying experiences like not being able to wake my mum at noon on weekends.
For the most part, the earlier years of my life passed by with ease. I remember living with my mum and my grandmother, whom we call Pedey, in a tiny apartment when I was three. I knew that Pedey thought I was special, and I loved her very much. My mum moved in with Pedey because she was having financial problems. My dad had left her pregnant in Toronto, forcing her to move back east to New Brunswick. When my dad left to return to Jamaica, every month for a year he promised he’d be back and then we would all live together again. During the next seventeen years, he never came to Canada for more than a week. My cousin Sophie also lived in the same city. We were like sisters since I was born only three months after her. We used to take off our clothes and dance for an admiring audience of three: her mum, my mum, and Pedey. There I was, a little brown body, dancing among all the white bodies. I never imagined I was different.
When I was three, Mum and I went to Jamaica to visit my dad. We had been once before when I was one, but what I mostly remember from that trip is more the feeling of Jamaica than my father. I remember sitting in the backseat of the car, my eyes softened to the somehow familiar air. I saw the white face of my mother and the dark brown face of my father side by side. They were smiling as my mother fed me little bits of spicy Jamaican patties. I remember slowly grasping the little pieces and enjoying them both for their taste and for the way in which my mum carefully handled them. My eyes watered from the spice, and I reached for more. The sound of my mother and father laughing together made the car seem an insufficient container for our happiness.
My second trip to Jamaica at three years old was quite different. I really recognized my dad. The smell of sugar cane in the heat and the black leather of his car were signals for me of his identity. But these elements didn’t make me feel very much a part of this man. I still didn’t see him as my father. I was living in a temperate world where fatherhood was defined by bedtime stories and next-door neighbors. My mum reminds me of periods of time I would spend, when I could just barely speak, saying over and over “Ted?…Ted? Dad, Ted?” My pronunciation was not so precise, but she would desperately explain that, no, my daddy was not dead but in Jamaica, and she would take me to the map and show me where it was.
For a long time my father would retain a tenuous connection to a part of me which was hard to articulate. This connection was not yet a negative thing. My mum encouraged me to accept my Jamaican as well as my Canadian blood. Some days she would set me up finger painting to reggae, other days to Beethoven. As I grew from toddler to child, I’m sure I tasted the soil of another land on my tongue and I perspired the salt water of the “likkle rock” when I ran. These sensations were home to me, as were wintry air on my cheek, and dandelions. But because they were so familiar, I didn’t differentiate between the two. My world as a child was comfortable, home-oriented, and private. I could play out the extent of either culture without interference. What triggered the sense of separation was the awareness and comprehension that my father was not around.
Starting school was for me the entrance into a period of malaise about my home life. I used to print “I don’t have one” on personal information forms for school when asked about my father’s name or occupation. I figured that a daddy must be something like a dog. I didn’t have one, and whether it got hit by a car or ran away didn’t matter because it happened before I was born. Friends started asking me where he was from. “Jamaica,” I replied. I could point it out on the map for them. I didn’t get offended when they asked if it was like Hawaii.
One girl at school used to think it was just the best joke to ask me, “Are you black or did you just take a bath in really dirty water?” I was honestly perplexed by this at first, thinking how could dirt be compared with having darker-than-white skin? Then it hit me that each time kids looked at me, they saw my difference as negative. When a girl befriended me, I began to feel that it was only because she felt pity for me. When the boys locked me in their playhouse or pushed me off the swing, I felt that they were trying somehow to modify me. I began to feel too exposed. I didn’t like to be where everybody could see me.
I got into biking everywhere, so that no one could look at me for a very long time. I would even have my mother stuff my bicycle into the trunk of her car each day so I could bike around at lunch and to after-school care. I was beginning to be embarrassed by my faraway father because he represented a large part of why I didn’t fit in where I lived, and he wasn’t even around to help me with it. There were numerous times when my parents would talk about living together again, which would make me ecstatic. Not only would I be part of a “normal” family, but also I would have some clout behind my skin color. My community would recognize us as a unit and be less likely to mess with me.
There were limits to how much my mother could help me deal with racism as a child. Primarily this was because I hadn’t yet learned concepts like discrimination. But another reason was my sense that my mum had never had to endure what was making me feel so out of sorts. I was around four years old when I began to notice the differences between Mum and me. She didn’t have as much trouble as I did combing her hair in the morning. One day in the sun would turn me a deep brown, whereas she would redden. And there were other things I couldn’t quite pinpoint until I was older. She seemed very much at ease with other people, and would often invite women over for tea. An acquired mistrust of white people caused me to skulk in corners during these visits. My mum would have to urge me to “come and say ‘Hi,’ Lola.”
I changed schools in second grade because I was so unhappy. In my new school I finally found a group of real friends. But gradually, throughout elementary school, they lost interest in me as they learned what was “cool” and what was not. To deal with the cues that I was not quite right, I gravitated toward the other outcasts: an Indian girl who bought me a bag of chips every day to guarantee my companionship, an Egyptian boy, a Jewish boy, and a girl with a learning disability. I did get on the good side of one “regular” girl, however. Her name was Penny. She was tormented by boys because of her daring nature. She was small and fast enough to carry out any stunt she could dream up. I admired Penny and took the chance with her to express my naturally outgoing personality. We were the leaders in kissing tag or Chinese skipping, and we managed to be the loudest girls without being considered “conceited” in the judgmental eyes of the other school kids. We were among the few girls who could adeptly play rebound with the boys—no matter how hard the ball was whipped at the brick building.
The only thing was, Penny was pretty and I wasn’t. She had straight, fine hair, and when all the boys called her “fountain head,” I knew it was a compliment. She was shorter than the guys, so they took her seriously when she asked them to the dance. Whenever I “asked out” a boy, he would answer, “Why would I go out with you, you’re just another boy. You play with the boys, you have short hair—it would be like me going out with Jeff. Hey, Jeff, come here! Will you go out with me, Jeff?” I tried to blend in by adding to the laughter, but every comment like that took chunks out of my ego. These white guys were telling me that I had no beauty. If I had beauty, it wasn’t decipherable to them, and therefore I wasn’t recognizable as a female. I was generally seen as a tomboy.
At that point I would have given anything for a friend who cherished me as much as I did her. I began to spend more time with my best friend, Jan, whom I had met when I was six. I was devoted to her for years. I didn’t branch out at all in junior high. I wasn’t provided with very many opportunities to make new friends. I certainly couldn’t fit into any of the many cliques that formed at my new school. The kids would gather in the parking lot at lunch hour, forming tight circles according to who belonged to what group. These groups didn’t budge unless someone passing by was recognized as a member and allowed to shuffle in. There was a sense of urgency about their huddle. If I ever tried to talk to anyone in a circle, I was physically elbowed out without a word. No explanation, just rejection. My cousin Sophie, the one I used to dance with, participated in this. Alone she was great. Thinking back, I find it ironic that this experience in the parking lot which I found so shocking was going on inside the building in more subtle ways.
I think in my attempt to mask my insecurities, I probably came across as a confident adolescent. That’s how I got through junior high. In class, when I practically whispered, “J’ai dix ans,” everybody chimed in with “You’re only ten?!” I didn’t look like the other girls at all because I couldn’t afford their clothes and makeup, and because I didn’t know how to make myself appear like the others. They were all white, except the one Indian girl with whom I had been friends in elementary school, but she had given up on talking by this time. In fact, I could count on one hand the number of people in my junior high school who weren’t white. Out of nine hundred, there was one Egyptian girl who was very popular and looked white, one well-liked black and one delinquent black, one East Indian, and a handful of Aboriginals.
The alienation was too much to cope with. I began to suffer periods of depression. Probably the one thing, besides Jan, that kept me going was my ability to write, paint, play violin, and dance. My mum encouraged me to work hard at my extracurricular activities because she knew how unhappy I was at school. Thinking it was simply due to boredom, she fought hard to add enrichment to my school life, which is why I ended up skipping the last grade of elementary school. Nonetheless, for half a year I spent many of my school days in the health room with the lights out. I felt like my intestines were being eaten away. When I was in class, I’d daydream constantly. My marks stayed slightly above average, which I suppose gave the teachers reason not to worry too much about my state. I survived by fantasizing. I’d think about where I would go if I wasn’t stuck in New Brunswick, if one of my mum’s frequent plans for starting a new life would really occur. What would happen if we actually had enough money to act like a normal family, or even what I’d do if any guy saw me as attractive.
But I was a nerd. And because my sexuality was becoming a stronger and stronger force inside me, it was a particularly terrible time for me to feel disliked. Not one guy took me seriously. I couldn’t always connect it consciously with racism, but I often could. I heard a lot of “psss-sss . . . that nigger” when I walked the halls. One day I was walking home when I heard a shout from above—“Hey, Oreo!”—which was engulfed by laughter as the window slammed shut. I looked around and didn’t see any walking cookies, so I continued on. I was enraged when a guy who claimed he was my friend called me a nigger.
“Don’t call me a nigger, Jamie. Don’t call me that!”
“Nigger! Nigger! Nigger-nigger-nigger.” His laughter made me dizzy.
“Don’t call me a nigger, JAMIE! Please, don’t call me that! “I was almost crying by now. “If you call me a nigger, Jamie . . . I’ll kick you in the balls! I’ll kick you in the balls. I’m not even black, don’t you know . . . ”
“Nigger! Nigger! Ha-ha. Nigger!”
He thought it was a game to dodge my swinging book bag and laughed all the way out of the building. He wouldn’t stop even when the teacher passed by us numerous times, seemingly oblivious to the savage attack. No matter how often this ritual occurred, I could never bring myself to kick him in the balls. I thought it would be too painful; I could empathize with pain all too easily. Because he was my friend every other minute of the day, I thought my anger and humiliation were irrational. Not only was I dumbfounded by the behavior of my peers, but also I couldn’t justify my own feelings.
In grade nine I really wanted to visit my dad again. It had been five years since I’d been to Jamaica, and I was becoming increasingly geared toward that part of my heritage. I was hooked on the reggae albums my dad had sent me when I was little, but I needed to hear living Jamaicans talk to me. As my marginalization in school became unbearable, my instinct was to explore what made me different. I hoped to find sameness, or at least a nicer kind of different. I wanted to be part of a culture so that I had something to defend myself with, a base from which to grow. I feared losing my authenticity if I didn’t know anything about Jamaica.
My father didn’t spend very much time with me when I arrived in Jamaica, because, as usual, he was working frantically on a project, so I hastily took advantage of alternative welcoming arms. I met two guys on the beach in Ocho Rios, and we arranged to meet later. We walked through the streets of the city and talked into the night. The flood of attention unglued my strong grip on my behavior. In fact, I initiated sneaking onto the beach. I abruptly hopped up and scaled the fence, ending up suspended on the barbed wire, anxious to get down before the trotting security guard arrived from down the path. Rowan gracefully unhooked me and we decided to call it a night.
Later on that night my boldness grew even greater. “I was aiming for your mouth,” I said, when he turned his cheek to my kiss. “Oh! In that case, come over here,” he replied. We moved behind a bush for a real kiss. This was my first taste of what would become my drug of choice, sexual affection. As we kissed, I wondered what that hard thing digging into my pelvis was. It must be his belt, I thought.
I literally stumbled back to the hotel room, arriving forty-five minutes before curfew, and feeling satisfied. I felt so female! I slept like a baby and woke up the next morning to find blood on the crotch of my bathing suit. I assumed it was a hormonal reaction to getting my first kiss. I didn’t understand that I had gotten my first period until I reached home and Mum explained. I was relieved she didn’t slap my cheeks so they would be forever rosy like I’d seen in a foreign film. That trip was very important. I began to see myself as attractive. After all the guys who had yelled out “Cris chile! Can I talk?” how could I feel undesirable anymore? I categorized my beauty, though, as measurable solely in Jamaican terms. Only Jamaican guys stared at me like that. When I arrived back in New Brunswick, nothing much had changed. With a bit more gusto, I shook my braids around in gym class and gave presentations and speeches on Jamaica. Some students did react to me, but they seemed both annoyed and surprised that I dared to insist on a foreign identity.
I was beginning to see my relationship with Jamaica as separate from my relationship with my father. I had a physical, genetic, and psychic connection with this island, and I wanted to consider myself Jamaican. I started listening to reggae a lot more. With every drumbeat and every touch of a guitar string, my soul ached to go back. I was a wailer, just like Bob Marley, whose songs of being separated from his motherland were always on my tongue. I could allow myself to detach from my father when he hadn’t written in months, yet to stay in love with a culture that I thought I could count on.
This perspective would become even more useful through my years in high school. I adopted Jamaica as my sexual medallion, relying on my color and appearance to attract guys’ attention. I went for the ones I knew I could snag. To Jan and me, the next-best thing to Jamaicans were Africans, and we started seeing two university students from southern Africa. Hardly a weekend went by when we weren’t attending some international student function at the university campus.
Johnson was my boyfriend, a skinny, decrepit-looking guy with an apologetic smile. In retrospect, I view the nine months I spent as Johnson’s girlfriend as a period of time when I was most openly degraded because of my skin color. At first Jan and I didn’t take any of it too seriously. One day at Johnson and Oliver’s apartment, as we sat draped over their furniture lazily peeling oranges, Jan rolled her eyes to signal she was bored. I twisted my face in empathy. We stuffed the oranges in our mouths whole and had a fit of muffled hysteria while the two guys looked on in perplexity and eventually left the room. To us, they were regular sex, headaches, and free tickets to meet real men. Jan and I were only putting up with them in hopes of finding more fulfilling relationships. In the end, my position in that community would backfire.
By fifteen, my life seemed to be opening up. I was hanging around a crowd of people who were mature enough to talk to and also had apartments and cars. Being surrounded by so many black people made me delirious. At Caribbean Night, I would become a different person. But sometimes a woman’s voice or a hand gesture would make me homesick and I would look at Jan and realize she was still white. If I behaved the right way, I could be at best inconspicuous. It had never occurred to me before that the person I was closest to rarely had to deal with what plagued me daily. To socialize with these people she didn’t diminish her differences, as I did. She had a more casual attitude toward it, and was probably drawn to these activities out of a thirst for exoticism. Her friendship, however, and our new pastime were making life exciting for the time being.
After a couple of months my relationship with Johnson was doomed. I couldn’t put up with his possessiveness any longer. When Johnson sensed I was losing interest, he did everything he could to gain control. He let loose a temper I had never seen in him before. Even though I risked being cut off from the community I had joined through my relationship with Johnson, I decided to break up with him. A while later I went to a party on my own, but he was living close by, and when he heard where I was, he tracked me down and chased after me. I pleaded with the host of the party, a guy from Kenya, for some help. I was scared. He told me with a smirk to go hide in the tree outside. Suddenly it hit me that I couldn’t count on any of these people. After I found a dark room to lock myself up in, I gave in to the realization that if I wished to have any relationships with these guys, it would be on only a very superficial and unequal basis. I shrank back into the bed as Johnson began to pound ferociously on the door. This time he was threatening to kill me. The wood was cracking, and with the music now turned down, I could hear the splinters land on the linoleum. When he got too disruptive, a group of guys pinned him to the wall, and I escaped home.
From then on I maintained my attachment to that crowd in a less visible way, through almost purely sexual relationships. I wanted to become less of a member of the community by interacting in private. Of course, there is always a system of gossip that makes it hard to maintain privacy in any community. I don’t know how much of a part that played in my denigration, but I was “put in my place” in the most effective and harmful way possible.
Immediately after I broke up with Johnson, I was date-raped by a twenty-seven-year old from Saint Lucia. My denial of having been raped, which lasted for weeks, was proof of how dependent I was on the attention and pseudo-acceptance of my little community. I continued to see the guy and acted as though nothing had happened. I didn’t even tell Jan or my mum. Even now, after counseling sessions and vivid flashbacks, I can rearrange my “No” and his intimidating coercion into an almost normal scenario. It comforts me like a horror movie with a happy ending. That assault marred my sexuality with a tangle of confusion, remorse, and often unmanageable anger. It was easier to follow a path of unhealthy relationships than to allow the powerful emotions around being violated to bleed into my sex.
Around that time, the scene at school didn’t offer many alternatives for socializing. Even more exclusionary than junior high, my new environment offered me one niche: as a member of “the black table” in the cafeteria. We would all gather there at lunchtime to discuss our dance club practices and joke around. When the principal walked by, he would send an unforgiving stare our way as if trying to decipher our next planned action toward the school’s demise. We were all supposed to be failures and troublemakers. Unfortunately, some of the black students bought into this stereotype. After so many years of reinforcement from their teachers and friends, they acted out the expected part of the inarticulate jester. I can think of only a few black students who weren’t either in dance club or on a sports team, and many took more than three years to graduate. The stereotyped characteristics that allowed them to be a part of the school social system were their energy and loud, humorous way of interacting with people. Some were better than others at behaving this way, and they became the most popular black people around. Although I was perceived to be black in this group, I knew I was different from them. Not just because I was a “café au lait”; I didn’t walk the walk or talk the talk very much beyond dancing and laughing. Additionally, I had constant encouragement at home to expand my knowledge and artistic expressiveness. I know I had a better base from which to modify my situation than did the other black students, who came from less-educated, even poorer families.
For example, at one point in grade eleven when I was threatening to leave school, my mother arranged a private course with a Jamaican African man at the local university. By guiding me in my exploration of Caribbean literature, my new mentor taught me how to answer some of the important questions I had about my race. I began to understand why I was often perceived as superior to the darker, full-black Jamaican. Quite a paradox for me to swallow when so often I had been feeling not black enough. The times when Jamaican men ran up to my dad complimenting him on his “beautifully complexioned daughter” now made sense.
My feelings toward Jamaica changed. In light of its sexist, patriarchal organization, my Jamaican identity became less of a mental solace. I was in the middle of defining my feminist beliefs and coping with my anger toward the male culture. Jamaica has such a blatant tradition of degrading women, which is clear in many pieces by its female writers.
The course also triggered a lot of disgust for my father. Since he had never explained himself, I could only assume that his behavior as a father was simply a product of his culture. And how could my mother have been so naïve, I wanted to know. I began to ask her more about the conditions of her relationship with my father. Her responses never satisfied me: it was the seventies, there was a stronger atmosphere of interracial harmony, and they were deeply, deeply in love. Being the living outcome of all this, I was cynical. I felt more independent from my mother because I could understand her less. A violent defiance awoke inside me.
By the time I was in grade twelve, I felt ready to explode—a new emotion for me, as I had generally been in control of my feelings. I had put up with too many abusive relationships, between the racism at school and my unbalanced social life. I was through with feeling like my insides were boiling away; I needed to take care of myself. Without warning, a crisis occurred. I wrote about the experience a little while after it happened: “This morning the grayness of my town rode with me on the school bus up the hill. I thought it was going to be just another day of numbing myself in order not to explode.”
I got my books easily; there wasn’t much of a locker crunch on a Tuesday morning. I made it easily to my homeroom. I didn’t even bother to walk along “Main Street” to see who had made it to school. I knew Jan was probably at home sick again. During the monotonic announcements, I prepared myself for the cold day ahead and then set off for class, excited about getting back a test I thought I had aced.
As the tests were being passed back, people were smiling, so I felt optimistic. When I got my paper back, I stared at my mark—practically a failure. I had studied so much. I could concentrate on only one sentiment: no matter how hard I try to be recognized, commended I never am.
I needed to get out . . .
From the top of the hill I could see the gray water, and my house seemed miles away. It was the longest walk ever down Fern Street. I wished I could just fall and cry and pull my hair and roll and trip all the way down. When I finally reached home, I fumbled with the screen door in a mess of fresh tears, and Mum greeted me through the glass. She opened the door and extended a wing-like arm. She uttered a phrase of receptivity and hung my coat on a hook. “I’m never going back there . . . I refuse to go back there.” She knew me well enough to realize I meant it.
Dropping out of school seemed arrogant and senseless to many people, but even though she didn’t understand all the social turmoil I was experiencing, my mother was always behind me. She sensed that I deeply needed to grant myself a sense of dignity that I had been denied over the years in school. Being expected to shovel in loads of ethnocentric material and to contort myself in a constant effort to be inoffensive had damaged me. The point in my life where I refused to take any more is something I’ll always be proud of. I certainly would not be who or where I am today if I had not done it.
At the time, however, it was unrealistic to think about going anywhere without a diploma. I was lucky enough to be invited to spend a term as an auditor at an American college by a family friend. Taking university classes, where the pace was fast and the material intriguing, proved to be highly therapeutic for me. After taking classes in feminism, science, and moral development, I knew more clearly what I wanted to study. My time off allowed me to learn much. I did myself a lot of good, but I also got into bad situations with alcohol and guys. I was still reeling from an emptiness inside me. By standing up for what I needed, I had distanced myself from others. For instance, things were never really the same again with Jan because of our now divergent life goals. When I did return to New Brunswick, to attend a private high school for a year, it was in a different city.
This school was supposed to be geared toward people who needed more academic challenge and who had faced various social problems in public school. I was awarded a half-tuition scholarship, and my father agreed to pay the rest. Once I adjusted to the new environment (I had gone from the largest high school in Canada to the smallest), I was faced with the extreme measures of control imposed on the students’ lives.
What I will always refer to as “corruption” was ingrained into this institution and could never be explained in a few lines. My friends and I put up with basic injustices on a daily basis. I did make really close friends, which was the only worthwhile part of that year besides my diploma. We helped one another get by. I stuck it out because I so desperately wanted to get away, out of the Maritimes to study at university.
Then something happened that depleted my psyche so immeasurably that I would be changed forever. I was feeling particularly deserted by my father. When would this sense of desertion end? I wanted to put an end to my foreigner status in my father’s world. It was time; I was about to begin taking the steps into an adult lifestyle.
Every step I took on that manicured high school campus reminded me of how I would soon live. I would be so much happier as a university student. At the same time, I was often haunted by images of my mother coming to my classroom to tell me my father was dead. It made each sinew of my body vibrate with tragedy. Any chance of our having a meaningful relationship would be shot. I also think I imagined his death because I resented my dependence on him financially. University would necessitate even greater reliance on him, to which he had agreed, but I didn’t like feeding off of someone who was merely an occasional voice on the phone or a signature on a birthday card.
My father had not been in touch since our last visit. As with my other visits to Jamaica during high school, I went with Jan. Normally we had a lot of fun, and my dad’s preoccupation with work didn’t bother us since we had other things to fill our time with! But in my senior year we spent two mind-boggling weeks on the island. My dad was acting deranged. He would sleep at weird hours and not wake up even when we pounded on his bedroom door. He went to meet people in deserted places and kept thousands of dollars under the mat in his car. He seemed to have lost his appetite and forgotten about ours. He wouldn’t take us to eat for days at a time. Since he didn’t keep much food in the house, we went hungry. After a few days we became delirious and exhausted. One day we even set out to walk to the nearest town, which was at least twenty-five miles away, to go to the market. We didn’t even make it out of his village, and when we returned, we began to panic. But the real conflict started when my dad announced we weren’t acting appropriately in front of guys. We demanded to know what he meant. It turned out that our clothes were too revealing, and that basically a woman was responsible for the way men acted toward her! I had never heard such a derogatory comment from my father. I lost it. The rage was consuming. I screamed that he wasn’t even around to protect me from all the things guys did to me, he didn’t even know what happened. Jan asked him if he thought it was a woman’s fault if she was raped. I tore the banister off the new addition to his house and threw some stuff around. Then we told him to take us to Ocho Rios and leave us alone, which he did for a whole week. In the midst of all this Jan and I both caught a tropical disease, and we wound up in the hospital when we finally returned to Canada.
Needless to say, I was not particularly receptive to my father after that visit. He wrote me a letter expressing a desire to form a more compatible relationship, but his tone was so condescending that I crumpled it up. Anyway, it was too late. I was rude about taking money from him and never spoke to him on the phone. The three thousand miles between us complicated communication at the best of times. Now I used it to distance myself from him emotionally. My love for him was interwoven too tightly with pain. I tried to let myself despise him.
So it was in this frame of mind that I sat in math class seven months after my last encounter with my dad. There was a knock at the door and my teacher sprang to answer it. It sounded like Mum to me, I knew her whisper. But why would she have traveled a hundred kilometers to see me just after I had been home for the long weekend? My teacher beckoned me to the door. I stepped outside into the dark hallway to meet my mother. She spoke, confirming my terror: “It’s your dad.” I walked toward her as she backed weakly away from the classroom. “He’s dead,” she said to me. I was gazing at her face for any sign of reality, and it came crashing toward me. Her skin was as white as smoke except for the deep red rivers where tears had been staining her face all morning. I looked away and knew that this was real. I felt the ground plunge away from me, and my heart seemed to suck in all the energy in my body. I would have to teach myself how to move again.
For days afterward, I was unable to follow a train of thought or even turn on the water faucet. I couldn’t even find a way to recall the deep anger I once had. It all flew away from me the minute he was murdered. What a sickening culture. That distant place that I spent half my youth trying to embrace had killed my father.
I had been aware of the thread of violence in Jamaican society spun by overly aggressive males. It was what left women and their kids alone. Men killed men of their own race. I could explain it through the need of men to hold their expected place in society, which was never met throughout the years of political upheaval. This kind of frustration is easily internalized. You could smell it mingling with ripe fruits in the shady marketplace heat. It was on the face of every man who walked the streets. It had torn through the philosophy of early ska and created a raga of violent musical themes. I listened to it and danced in the island’s roughest clubs, where the glint of steel was almost as noticeable as the scent of rum. It was inconceivable to me that all of that had put an end to my father’s life. The Kingston newspapers called it the death of “the Gentle Giant.” Although I knew another side of him, he was a man who had expressed a need for serenity in life. He didn’t deal well with conflict. As could be expected, the newspaper write-ups concentrated on my father’s career. In one lengthy article, one line was allotted to a mention of his three children. When I read it, I was surprised by the pathetic gesture. I read photocopies of these papers at a table surrounded by relatives who for the most part I had never met. A few hours earlier I had arrived in Jamaica in a trance. When I peered into the dark humidity for the people who were supposed to pick me up, my surroundings were devoid of mystery. Jamaica was banal, unexciting. Even my new relatives were not part of the island; they were mostly guests. In my father’s home, his absence made me feel aloof, as though I had no reference point.
The days I spent in Jamaica to bury my father granted me closure to one thing and one thing only: my father’s living days on earth. Many other things were opened up at that time. My half sister, Shauna, and I met for the first time. At first we were too overwhelmed by it all to talk much, but eventually she spoke a bit about her life and filled me in on my half brother, who hadn’t come to the island. The high point of our bonding was probably the night of my dad’s funeral. A group of family members who were around the same age went out to the bars. When we arrived home drunk to the point of slurring, Shauna and I wrestled with the car key in the ignition until we practically wet ourselves in a hysterical release from the day. I actually felt a closeness to her that I had never had with anyone else; it was subtle, sorrowful, and full of relief. She reminded me of a part of myself that I didn’t consciously know was there. I guess that is because we shared a father. But at times when we had to take care of the business concerning my father’s estate, like sifting through his chaotic house for life insurance policies or any other important belongings, I was struck by how different from me my sister was.
My sister is eight years my senior. My brother is five years older. Their lives intersected with my father’s at a different time than mine did. He was married to their mother, Joan, and was a part of their family until he and Joan separated when Shauna was a toddler. I certainly do not know the whole story of their relationship, but since my mother was involved with my dad just after he separated from Joan, I have heard some of my mum’s perspective. She told me that Joan wanted to continue the marriage and was deeply resentful of my mother. After much turmoil (which included Joan entering my father and mother’s apartment one night, threatening to kill), an agreement was reached: my dad would give Joan a second child, and she would promise to leave them alone. This event is such a part of my heart even though it happened outside my lifetime. On the one hand, I am appalled at these three adults for making that choice. On the other hand, I understand my mother’s consuming love for my father, a Jamaican woman’s claim on the ideal of a Jamaican family, and my father’s fragmented devotion to both. Out of this was born a boy, my half brother, who remains a surreal figure in my life. I have yet to meet him.
Returning to Canada after burying my father brought a sense of relief. I sat in the plane draped over the armrest, watching the red earth plunge deep into the panorama. As the misty vegetation and hints of motion tipped away from me, I blocked out the sounds of Kingston that trickled through my swollen mind. I was becoming set on making my life whole. The hours I spent flying gave me a chance to let go of a lot. The sun was an exquisite reassurance among the clouds, but I felt no sorrow when it was time for it to disappear. Things would eventually be fine, even better than I could have imagined. I no longer had an unattainable life to entice me when I wasn’t fulfilled. It would be impossible for me to be a part of Jamaican culture, both because I now despised it and because my dad was gone.
I haven’t been back to Jamaica since my father’s death. Four years later, the grief over my father’s death is still a factor in deciding what to do with my future. It sometimes determines what kind of day I have and has given me an increased sensitivity to violence in society. I get angry with my dad, mostly when I feel the financial strain of my life closing in on me and realize that a lot of it could have been relieved if he were alive. Whether it would compensate for the pain he added to my life I can’t answer, and I will never know how our relationship would have evolved. I do feel a deep connection to him, sometimes through an almost tangible presence that feels like him, but more often through the work I do and want to continue doing.
Environmental engineering was my dad’s field. He did some very important things for the protection of Jamaica’s nature, and it makes me sad that he can’t continue his work, because it is important. I am comforted by my own interest in environmental protection; I know I will make changes. I am also scared because my passion is often powerful and I don’t want to end up submerged in my career with no room for anything else.
It’s funny because I’m also following my mother’s footsteps through my writing. Encouraging a child to express herself is the best gift a parent can give. My mother is always interested in my creative side, and I in hers. We still fight, but we also share joy and humor that more than make up for it. When I am too hard on myself, she can help me get things in perspective. My mother is a sometimes wildly emotional person, and she has a core that is stronger than iron. She gets things done through thick and thin, and has an amazing capacity for empathy. The pros and cons to this I know well; she gets tired and ill. But I accept the power she has bestowed on me as a great tool for my future.
I am open to the future, and I feel more directed than I have in a long time. I know the way that life can surprise us. I have a lot ahead of me.
Unfortunately, the family I come from is split right now. There are relatives on both sides with whom I have rocky relationships at best. On my father’s side, some have shown no interest in finding out who I am, and others send me cards once in awhile. I haven’t heard anything from my sister in months. I don’t even know for sure where she and my brother are.
By looking at my life as a product of two ethnicities, I have learned about what ethnicity means to many people, and I have learned what it means to me. I know racism; I know how many mixed people choose to be black because it’s easier. I know white people who prefer it that way too. I am reluctant to resign myself to one side or the other, which shows up in many aspects of myself. I am neither black nor white, but I can be both. The strongest ethnic ties I feel are to others with the same heritage.
After Dartmouth, Lola went on to universities in two major Canadian cities, where she fostered a culturally diverse second adult “family” of friends. Her career has often focused on international topics, and her work has brought her to encounters with various cultures, including residencies on three different continents. She lives with her partner and they share a son, who is of a similar mix of Jamaican and Canadian heritage.