The final post in the three part series.
Any change in the information about our bodies will have an effect on how we see ourselves. The results of my DNA test were no different. I am still processing how they will affect the balance of the competing claims of African and European influences in my life and work.
Any change in the information about our bodies will have an effect on how we see ourselves. The results of my DNA test were no different. I am still processing how they will affect the balance of the competing claims of African and European influences in my life and work.
From my earliest memories, there has always been this
conflict. I grew up in Mona Heights, a middleclass, multicultural enclave in St
Andrew, where my friends and I were expected to behave like civilized
children—like little English boys and girls. But from the age of five, I also went
to school with my mother at Seaward Primary—a “browning” in a school filled
with Jamaicans of African descent. My mother also made sure that my sister and
I made regular trips to her birthplace in Westmoreland, so we could see for
ourselves what “country life” was all about. All kinds of folk lived, worked,
and died on that postage stamp of Jamaican soil.
We also grew up in a family with a rich religious
background. For although I had grown up as a Seventh Day Adventist (before my
mother became a Jehovah’s Witness), I was thoroughly immersed in Rastafari who
taught me that the worst thing that a light-skinned bredrin could do was to align oneself with Babylon and the downpression of Africans at home and
abroad.
But this was only the start of my education and
balancing. During high school at Jamaica College, I met Dennis Scott and read Tony
McNeill’s Reel from the Life-Movie
and Mervyn Morris’s, The Pond, where
I first saw the phrase, “Afro-Saxon.” By
the time I read Kamau Braithwaite’s The
Arrivants, my literary imagination was Africanized. These poets had
provided models, but it wasn’t until I read Derek Walcott’s Another Life and his anguished poem, “A
Far Cry from Africa” that I began to conceive a synthesis that would balance
Europe and Africa.
Indeed, Benjamin,
my son, was my first attempt in fiction at a sustained synthesis of African
and European influences. Using Dante’s Inferno
as the basis of the narrative, I set the story in Jamaica. However, instead
of Virgil as the psychopomp, I inserted an archetypal Trickster, who appears in
various guises as Èṣù
and Anansi
in West Africa and Eleggua and Papa Legba
in the Caribbean. I chose the name Papa Legba, who was also Rastafari, in order
to link Jamaica and Haiti in the historical struggle for equal rights and
justice in the Caribbean.
Similarly in my latest completed novel, Garvey’s Ghost, the narrative contrasts
the rape culture inherent in the myth of Persephone and the vision of unity in
the marriage of Shango
and Oshun.
The use of these myths and stories and stories from
Europe and Africa is not arbitrary. And it should not be surprising that they
share thematic concerns. What the myths and stories suggest is that humans are
hardwired with certain archetypal patterns that we use through culture to
interpret our response to our environment.
In other words, my fiction, like my DNA, represents the
synthesis of cultures in the Caribbean that acknowledges and celebrates African
roots.
It is this celebration of African roots that prompted
my petition
for the exoneration of Marcus Garvey. As far as I am
concerned, Garvey’s exoneration is part of a larger struggle for the redemption
Africans at home and abroad. It is not about hating white people. If I hated
white people, I would have to hate my white ancestors. And an Akan
proverb states, “Only a fool points at his origins with his left hand.”
However, one big change has occurred. I hear Africa
calling. I must confess that I didn’t always feel like this. When my friends used
to tell me about their trips to Ghana and Nigeria, their travels didn’t spark
anything in my imagination.
Now I feel differently. And especially after rereading
one of my earliest poems, “Neptune,” where I used the phrase “bangles from
Benin” purely from the alliterative value, Benin
has taken on an added dimension. I want to go to Benin. Jah willing, I shall.
In the meantime, whenever someone calls me “Mr. Chin,”
I will continue to smile and go on with my business because I have bigger
things on my mind. If Jamaica, Mali, Benin, and Togo ever make it to the World
Cup quarterfinals, which team will I cheer for?
Part One: How My DNA Set me Free
Part Two: Surprises in my Genealogical Search
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Part One: How My DNA Set me Free
Part Two: Surprises in my Genealogical Search
