Beulah, full of grace.

My aunt is light on her feet, more of a floating spirit than human. The single thing anchoring her is a dark stone medallion with the Virgin Mary, the one where she is all Chicana in a star studded robe, hands at chest-center looking like she just finished the sun salutation yoga pose. She was in the side room and appeared to me while scanning the last version of the New York times. We end up talking about working, and not working, and employment and what the procedure was like when she first left Trinidad to come here. One had to call in, and apply over the phone. "Now they want to see everything on paper" she says.

She is a number of shades lighter than I am with naturally straight hair, but has a story about 'us black people' having to find work here in the 1970s. She explains in her simple linen white shirt and loose mint green pants that on the trains, white people would not ever sit next to blacks, and she muses on how much she has seen the world change in front of her. By now her eyes are more alive than I have ever seen, but her mouth moves with a certain composure, she is fully engaged in the memory of the thing and tells me that God is leveling the world.

She says that people are intermarrying, living in the same communities together, certain animals are becoming extinct, certain animals are coming into existence, some plants are growing smaller while smaller plants are growing larger. She is explaining that an equilibrium is being established in the world. Not that I had expected  any marxist theology from the meagre bodied woman in a chemotherapy suite, but she says all these things with a collection and wisdom in her voice that I cannot doubt.

She mentions that the name 'Beddoe' that we came from was a well-known family name in Trinidad, that we were all related. She says that now it's like the name has been married out of us. We have enough girl children to show for it all. She used to paint things, beautiful things. She also wants to teach me graphology because she thinks the art is about to die. She says that God is coming soon, and floats back into the file room.

how to spot a socouyant

                               still have dirt under your nails
                                                          from unearthing me,
                                                                     pulled me by arms from the ground,
                                                 told me bear fruit and flame,
                                    that the words will come at night,
                                                              shed her coarse skin on my limbs,
                                      how this might scald me,
                                                                 how to gut the charcoal from the wound
                                                                                             sketch the story down.
                                                              how to bed roots between stones,
                                  look how my feet are soiled now 
                         I have been walking,
             just like you taught me.
                                       branching out and growing
                                         turning leaves over trying to find you below one
                                                                               you and your stubble fingers,
                                                           their silver-black lining 
                                                                                      and the run in your feet.

She will visit you one night.

 burn her language into your chest

 bitemark my name onto your skin,

the forest does not forget the footsteps men have buried in it

you will remember,

but by then I will be ground and gone.

Trans-Atlantic Nomad Part 1

I haven't been back to Brooklyn more than a half day, but this particular post has been months worth of thinking and processing. This year I'd been blessed immensely to do some travelling for the summer and the last three months have been the sum total of the most edifying time period in my growth as a person. As an artist, I've been absolutely obsessed with Geopathology in a much wider understanding of the term as relates to how place and space impacts a person. As a result, I am working on developing a narrative on nomadic women in the 21st century Trans-Atlantic crossing. This will all make sense eventually, it has to. I will now walk through my travels in less detail as I would like.

South Africa
Has to be by far the biggest leap of faith I've taken yet. This trip came together with certain magic, everything fell into place as it needed to. All that was needed was for me to trust my heart and get on the airplane. Getting there meant that everything in my life came to full alignment. Heart, soul and body were finally in the same place. Ryan is by far one of the most remarkable men I have ever come across and we will continue to build on what three years has set down for us. I felt at home in myself. Although he'd been the only person in the entire experience that I'd known in the country before the trip, my heart was full, and I had no desire to leave. This has never happened before. I'm usually one to be ready to be home again within the first week. I will spend some time living there at some point. God alone knows when and for how long.
The young people at the theatre were absolutely welcoming and open to my presence with them. I took away the most valuable lesson in understanding that the theatre is the people in it and the stories they have to offer. It's not always about set and lights and sound cues and pretty things. The theatre is a medium of living and cannot be limited to some inanimate equipment and fanfare.

San Francisco
The Brave New Voices festival in all its annual beauty had trumped my expectations this year by being one of the best since 2008. I felt like it had been arguably more communal, and an interactive safe space with less competitive sentiment floating around. I've certainly gained some more skills in event management and holding space. The Future Corps team got quite a work-out this year and carried much more weight and responsibility this time which is surely more beneficial to my work in arts education and event planning. I'm also appreciative of networking with new folks and being able to learn the internal workings of the organization.

Trinidad
I am absolutely grateful for being able to have spent the three weeks with my parents. I appreciate them even more in adulthood and how they still believe in me. How they are two of the most compassionate and understanding people in my world. For the first time I've bonded with my mom the way I did this time around. She was rolling through shows with me, we went dancing together, she was finally part of a world I was passionate about- arts and culture. Dad is still getting by one day at a time, waiting on funding to start radiotherapy next month God Willing. Looking at him makes me appreciate life more. He aspires to get through every day, but isn't always able to do it. This doesn't stop him from making plans for the next morning.
I've also noticed that people grow with time, and not always in the same direction, and I respect that also. I've experienced a feeling of displacement and unsettling from some relationships and I knew before that this was to be expected. Like I can barely hold conversation with some of my old friends. I felt the opposite of what I had in South Africa. It was now a space of exclusion and it was painful to not feel at home in the homes I had made in other people. It hurt. It still hurts. I remember getting home one night and crying and writing till I eventually fell asleep. How do you become the outsider in your house?

Brooklyn
There is a garden party happening outside my window with 1980s calypso and dance reggae. I've realized the evolution of my vocabulary over the last two years. Trinidad was 'home'. Brooklyn was 'Brooklyn'. Now Trinidad is 'Trinidad' and Brooklyn is 'home'. This has left my mouth a number of times without me thinking about it until now. Labour Day is coming up and West Indians everywhere are having parties and endless silver trays of food. They've just started a bottle and spoon section and dancing. I feel at home here. I missed a poetry show tonight, only because I was too tired, not because I didn't have money or transport. I do not have any tuition money for school that starts in a week from tomorrow, but I know that it will come because I strongly believe that here is where God has appointed for me to be at this time in my life. If there are any who are upset with this, there is nothing I can do to help that. Outside they have just put on Black Stalin's music. I hear more calypso and soca in Brooklyn than I do in Trinidad. I have not betrayed any part of myself in being where God has put me. The countdown is on to J'ourvet morning in two weeks.

The triangle goes- Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. In mid-triangle there is the middle passage, the Atlantis, the women who abandoned ship, the people sleeping on the seabed. I am still moving in the current of my ancestors. Where my feet rest, is destiny enough for me to be at peace wherever that is. I will not disinherit anything or any place. I am only gaining. I am only growing. All these places are travelling with me, all of the time as in Coelho's Aleph. I am about to trace my foremother's steps to mine and then to my children's.

Top 11 Moments of 2011

In no preferential order:

1. Labour Day- West Indian Parade.
Carnival for me always needed to have meaningfulness, and for that, the most sensible part of the celebration for me is J'ourvet. This year we had dinner for our Dimanche Gras at a backyard party at my roomate's friend's house. We went back to my apartment and tried to get some school work done...fail. We left home at around 5:30am to meet the bands. The beauty here is in the coming together of all parts of the Caribbean and all our variations of the mas. It was wonderful to play J'ourvet again after so long, the laughing, the people, the colours, the drums, the iron, the after-tiredness. THERE WERE NO ELECTRONIC MUSIC TRUCKS WITH DJ's ON THEM. The ritual was returned, and it was wonderful.



2. Trip Back Home.
This was interesting to me for the most bit. It really helped me to evaluate life and put things into perspective. The things I want to change when I get back, the things I want to do for my parents when I start making the money, the friends who are really friends, the family that does not ever forget you. How much I have changed and been forced to grow over the last year. It was a time for observing, rest and learning.

3. Californication i.e. Vacation in California
I went out to spend time with my uncle and his family. Northern California is a beautiful place. The weather may be a tad chilly for Summer time, but at least it's consistent and less extremes than this end of the continent. They showed me a really good time, Cooked me loads of food, took me shopping, taught me things about my grandmother that I did not know before, they even indulged my laziness. Chillwave music is my west coast discovery. I miss the frozen yoghurt shop too. Low fat and delicieux!




4. Brave New Voices 2011.
What can I say? BNV is always magical. The difference in this year was being able to sit back and see young people confront fear, push through struggle and overcome themselves. It is always an adventure and nurturing experience to be around Youth Speaks. I'm already looking forward to working with them in 2012. BNV is the cause of so many long-lasting friendships and networkingships in my life. The work is work and is sacred.

5. Parents' Vists.
My mom came in August and my dad passed through NY in October. I am overly happy to have had spent one on one time with them. Our relationships have changed, now that we're all adults :) and so my relating to them has changed. They respect me and my decision making and continue to offer guidance when needed. I love and appreciate them both, so much.


6. Relationships.
The people around you will always be shifted to make room for other people. I can say at this point that I am so gracious to God for surrounding me with so many beautiful people. I am thankful for every single one. It seems as though I am one called especially to love over distances. My boyfriend, my parents, my family, Kelby in France, Dej and Ivy back home, even Jar was away for the holidays. The people far away from me are always the ones I am closest to. The earth ain't that big though. Also, I am forming some really meaningful relationships with college faculty, committed to help me in any way they can.

7. Changing majors to read for a BA in Theater and Social Change.
If you know me well enough, you would know how much of a dream is being attained here.

8. Relevant Work
It is the most rewarding feeling to sit in a classroom, and learn about what you are actually interested in learning about. This year I've been able to dabble in Black Theatre and African American music classes. Both very theoretic and academic approaches to the artforms, but very edifying and helped me to rearrange my thoughts on our work and our process. Theater and music is about life. Classes like these have helped me understand why we live how we live.

9. Relevant Work (Part 2)


My teaching assistant job with Brian has progressed through its first year and it has been a wonderful learning experience for me to be on the other side of the class room. It is remarkable how much these classes actually align themselves to what I would like to accomplish professionally when I go back home. Who knows, maybe I might be able to design an entire syllabus on performance poetry in due time. Matter of fact, heh. I will.

10. Making the Brooklyn College Slam Team.
Confession: I hate slamming. It is unnecessarily nerve-wrecking and unsettling. I am however elated to be part of this historical formation of the first ever BC Slam team, and I look forward to raising awareness on campus on the artform, and looking for ways to expand our work beyond the mic and stage and do some innovatively impressive performance ish. I am looking forward to building this team, this club and this campus. P.S. They've started an unoffical cypher club on campus, and this gets me excited. 2012 is also a year for new misogyny-free rap writing and feminist owning of these cyphers. I'm about to challenge myself.



11. Discoveries on art and process.
My Directing and Performance Technique classes in the last semester have done much to raise my level of self discovery and themes that constantly appear in my work. These themes are Ritualism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, use of Language and Music as a subtext. These seem to be influences that I cannot escape from at any given point. I'm chill with them though :)

Re:Placing

Tonight I sat down to have thanksgiving dinner at a table of women. Two generations and dozens of stories apart. The one next to me is Haitian and asks whether I am going to remain in America after school, and I never think about it when people ask me this question. There is no hesitation to my 'No', and she recounts to me that she said she would come here for five years. She is now well beyond forty years of living in New York.

A friend had asked me the same question last night, told him I didn't see the point in having to exert myself for survival here when I could live comfortably with house and land on a quiet-enough island where the ocean doesn't freeze over in the loaf-end months. I can see the enticement of the opportunity here, but if you step back far enough, it's always a carrot-bait type of situation, and I'm just not that kind of horse. I understand it though. I understand the West Indian obsession with Brooklyn, we always move, waves at a time.

Two of my sisters (God bless the hearts of these women) tonight asked where I wanted to live eventually, and whether I would stay in New York. At this point I feel like the universe is asking me to shape a clearer definition of myself and prodding me in the direction of a work I started this week. In creating a performance for a class project, I am beginning to form my first one-woman show, on the questions of destiny and identity and trusting dreams.

More doors have been opening than I had keys to. God has been remarkably gracious to me in the last few months, and this year has been one of so much growth for me as a person. I am trying to expand beyond the US as of next year, I need to get hold of some scholarships and grants, but these things have already been surfacing. I have some key people at this point in my life that I am drawing experience from, and this is definitely a time of growth for me. I have been more grateful for life in this last week than I have ever been in my life.

Building.

To: Turning Tides in Concrete.

Because of how academic school can actually get, I've had less time to make contributions into this blog and I decided to just get it done tonight, without planning to in advance. At this point, I'm taking a number of courses that have absolutely no eventual bearing on my theatre BA, because quite frankly, I'm over the idea of getting a theatre BA. I'm taking courses that will help my in my career goals in working with youth and community, a feminism course here, an African American music course there, a performance technique course in another corner. I am satisfied and comfortable with my decision to study what I want to study contrary to department advisory. certification is not skill.

I'm transitioning to a Master's program hopefully next year around this time I will be in Grad School getting my hands dirty with actual community theatre as opposed to the broadway factory. Speaking of which, we have another great community of students that we're building with this year in the College Now class. You can see some of our work at: www.bcintrototheater.wordpress.com . It's always super exciting for me because American youth have such a non-shy willingness to engage in the classroom, and have a confident, fearless way about voicing issues affecting them, something I'm not sure I and my friends were doing when I was their age. It's refreshing, all the time.

I feel like I've also been transitioning into the world of bilingualism. Or at least, some version of Spanglish. I'm not sure where it came from, I blame my latino class two semesters ago, I blame California and la casa de Erika Cespedes in Oakland, I blame the burritos. I blame my heightened awareness of Hispanic culture in my neighborhood. Yarminiah and the stories of her family in Miami, the misa in Spanish after ours on Sundays at church, the conversations over my head in packed trains, I blame buena vista social club and how they all seem so perfectly grandfatherly. I blame Cuba and how it appears to me everywhere in my consciousness. I do not know where it came from. But I know that God had me do it for seven years and promised that I would have use for it in the future. Maybe part of the plan is that the language is revived in me somehow. It's weird though. One morning I wake up and I start thinking in Spanish.

With all of the #occupy events taking place throughout New York, the arrests, marches all over the world, the curfew back home being extended, troy davis, tuition hikes, poverty spreading, war, I sense like the whole world is breathing heavily in some kind of syncopated sighing. It is heavy, it is heated, it is heaving. I see and hear it with my young people. The world is frustrated. It isn't even deniable anymore. Everybody is fed up of the way things are. There is some kind of uneasiness happening in the air, and that is public knowledge. Everybody seems to be at their ends. These are tense times.

Finally, I'm about to get around to doing what I really came to New York to do, i.e. building my career as a writer and performance artist. I'm about to slam in this upcoming week, so I've just been trying to prepare myself for it, and trusting that the dry spell of the last year performing-wise had a purpose to it in terms of my growth creatively.I feel like the time has gotten here, and I'm about to put my best foot forward into this. I feel like I've been given enough space in my schedule this semester for concentrated writing and crafting my work, and I am all about making it happen. Ready. Tell the tide time to turn.



"I keep silent, till he would order me to speak, and lift the spell over the world so I could wake dem from dey sleep"

To: The West Indian Day Parade and the Question of Culture.

Photo taken from: Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/west-indian-day-parade-2011_n_950135.html#s350250

It's clearly been a while since I've written here, I told a friend this week that I would, and I strive to keep things I give, like promises and such. In that way it becomes half theirs, half mine.

Last weekend was the Labour (yes, that's a 'u' in there, get an English dictionary) Day weekend, and as is customary out here in New York, they had a number of festivities and events all culminating in the street parade on the Monday's holiday. I had missed it all last year, so that this year I sought to do all things West Indian.

On the holiday, two friends crashed at my apartment for our quiet version of Dimanche Gras, and we left home around 5:50am to look for the bands. When we found them, we pretty much just stood along the sides, watching the parade, when one of my friends fell under a strain of culture shock. Her argument was that "this is why feminism is pointless" RE: the behavior of some of the women in the street and their widespread demoralization that seemed to be spilling every which way on the street. I'm thinking that this was why I had distanced myself from Carnival in the first place back at home. It was just the sense of defeat that came from seeing women act a particular way in response to men, not just in dancing, mere behavior, even as an isolated factor, and thinking to myself...so...these are the sisters I'm fighting for...right?

but so goes the story of liberal feminism. here is where the ideology and I meet in the middle of the highway and I refuse to stop and let her in my car. matter of fact, I start speeding. This is my own conviction, and I'm allowed to have one of those. That said,

I really wished I had a camera though (Thank God I didn't), there were so many moments that could have been captured, the sunrise, the masqueraders, the music in the bodies of people, it was beautiful. One thing I am most appreciative over is the traditional music they use for J'ourvet. There are no speaker boxes on music trucks. There are riddim sections, pan-sides, iron-men/women and drums. It was the most organic expression of J'ourvet I've ever been part of.

In the afternoon we spontaneously decided to go to the Parkway for the 'last lappe' which closes off at 6pm, and jumped on a train around 4:40ish to get to President street at around 5pm. We walked out to the corner of Nostrand and Eastern Parkway, after crawling through the most tense, congested crowd I think I've ever been in. 'Tense' because there was some heaviness beyond the humid, beyond the bodies, something was just off. We get to the barricade at the end of the street, and 3 seconds after a woman behind pushes against me and when I turn around, there is a tide of scampering people running towards us and then a shot, sounding like hot ice exploding in a plastic bottle. No echo. Contained. Like a body had absorbed the shock of it.

About 3mins later we were on the train platform, waiting to jump on to the next thing that would take us away from there. My hands were shaking, I could barely text my other friend to tell him to turn his car around and head back home. I got back to my neighbood with an off-beat breathing and a quiet panic in my step. First time for everything, maybe.

After having a week to reflect, I started to think of the 24shootings in 24hrs phenomenon that happened throughout NY state on the Labor Day weekend. Why is it specifically this weekend, when everything is dedicated to "West India" that all these acts of violence happen and at such a rate? I started to question whether it was an issue of us having imported so much of our culture to New York and whether it reflects the increasing violence in our own island home societies. I'm not sure how much of the integrative process of young Caribbean men coming into the New York setting involves some kind of introduction or even re-introduction to criminal activity or behavior, but I'm at a loss for words over the hint of the idea that there may be some cultural connection to the violence. I hope not, but I don't want to dismiss it entirely just yet.

All in all, the day had been mostly enjoyable one for me, but punctuated by few mins that could have cost me my life. I think there can be some more substantial evaluation to take place here.