Imagining Community
Millicent A. A. Graham

It is Sunday evening.  The streets of New Kingston[1] are not vibrant with the rush of cars, or the shuffle of high heeled shoes and spit-polished genklemens[2].  There is no interweave of vendors holding make-shift cardboard caddies that brim with socks, talons of neck ties, belts or cellphone accessories. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ have left their bus stop station and the newspaper women have rolled up the day’s opinions and long retreated with the sun.  The streets arelittered and cooledby the florescent of solar lights.  Occasionally a silhouette in transit, breaks the still with movement, or a robot taxi [3]growls to life and headlights startle the shadows on trees.  As I drive, the buildings do not acknowledge me, their eyes only reflect the dark.

I start toward home, glancing in my side-view mirror at the familiar run of fast food windows.  There is the Tao Chinese restaurant, the Juci Patties and Island Grill[4], giving off a lantern-yellow glow.  I stop at the traffic lights at the intersection of Barbados Ave and Knutsford Blvd, just in time to hear a shout erupt from an open taxi door.  “Gweh Bwaay, yuh nuh have nothing and a gwaan like you come from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens.”[5]

For a moment my head floods with the smell of freshly manicured lawns, I see white upstairs -downstairs houses with clay coloured tiles and electric gates, and feel that sense of being on the outside.

To be from Norbrook[6] means more than being from Cassava Peace[7] or Tivoli Gardens[8].   A community says who you are, or at least what people decide to make of you.  It tells on you, an omnipotent tattle tale that you cannot run from. 

Community is in your talk, be it standard English or patois.  You hear Mandeville’s hill and gully salutation, different from Negril’s salty twang, different from the low speaki-spokiness[9]of Kingston.   It is the acrobatics of the tongue that gives you away.

Community is your walk. Uptown[10]is the taut, shoulders back, chest high, glide of a step, Downtown [11]is a sideway skank or the chip-chip shuffle of slippers under grinding hips.   Community could be your joy; the seed of a blackie mango[12]that only grew where you grew, and you brag to everyone who, in a foreign land, could never imagine the sour-sweet of a seed, baldingin the cheek of a ripe-ripe memory.

It is the warner-woman[13], who is not your mother or your auntie, but a stranger who pulls you up and learns you to:-

Tek sleep mark death[14]

Duppy know who fi frighten [15]

Sorry fi mawga dog, im tun round and  bite you[16]

A nuh evry kin-teet a smile[17]

Community could be your shame tree’s[18]bloom, that you try to chop down by learningbook-words and wearing a uniform or new-brand clothes sent in a barrel from anywhere else but there.

To the faceless one assailed by the taxi man, community says what he is entitled to and what he is not.  Adopt a respected brandand you can reinvent yourself. 

He might have used it to imagine a place without zinc fences, without shooters, without checkpoint soldiers, without deadbodies, without the poisoned dogs, without drugs, without drunken aunties, without cheaters and wife-beaters or girl-child-breeders, without shoes on electric wires, without bicycle boys pulling at handbags without gay-bashers, and hood wearers, without rusty old cars and waste in gullies, without green or orange garlands trembling in broad daylight, without water lock offs and power cuts, without empty bowlsor iron chains or voicelessness.

For that faceless one, community is asmall space to face the God of your choosing.   It might have started when no one was looking, astriking thoughtto fight for something other than what you were dealt.  Community could be thecard you cheat with or the family you make for yourself, out of people with different faces who sacrificedsleep and kept vigil so that your hope could endure.

In this universal desire for reincarnation, an immigrant might leave one country to gained another, like those Chineseforbearers that imagined a life in St. Mary[19]in the late 1800’s.  In that darkness, there was only the green fuse of their imagination transforming displacement and scars into a foreshadowing face. Exiled, becomingindentured, becomingshopkeeper,becoming nurse in thesilhouette of shifting banana leaves.

The stoplight has changed from red to green, then red again, but it is late and the invisible traffic will wait while I sit in a car in the middle of Knutsford Blvd and contemplate a lost community and theall but forgotten face of myhalf-Chinese grandfather.

I am 8 years old, taller than my aunt Ruby who they say makes the sweetest char siu.  In her house of colouring books and masked chalkware ballerinas, I hold my mother’s hand and lean in to kiss his face and am confused by the straightcheek hairs that stick out like the back of a kitten.   I do not understand his sleepy lidless eyes.  The shade of his skin, the white straitened hair. I lean back against her nurse’s uniform and look up at her for reassurance but she has never wanted to dig at the root of this family tree.   

To look in my rear view mirror is to see his eyes again and see the shape of his face in a different shade.    That old confusion comes, that feeling of being outside, and suddenly I feel the urgency of home.

“Gweh bwaay you don’t even own a car!” the taxi door gapes, a brazen parenthesis.[20]

I glance up at the traffic light and hasten to catch the green dot.  I drive toward Cassia Park[21], and symbols I know by heart.  The ball ground where I watched my brother fly a bajie[22] kite, the Carisol [23]lot that still holds the ghost of Fatty’s bar with its green chevron doors. The road with no dancers bookended by speaker boxes and loud dancehall music, the fording that floated the shopkeeper’s wife and forgedthe buildingof a new bridge.  The house my father built. My father who said ‘Miami’ with a Yankee accent to impress the ladies. My father,who imagined as family, a nurse that returned fromEngland with her book-words and sophisticated saunter.

Finally, in Cassia Park I feel safe.  The way you feel safe when you are from a place that no one who is not from there could possibly feel safe.    A community of your choosing, that inspires you to create your own story.