Jenkins The Stranger Who Was Myself

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-84523-571-0
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 290 Seiten

Barbara Jenkins writes about the experiences of a personal and family-centred life in Trinidad with great psychological acuteness, expanding on the personal with a deep awareness of the economic, social and cultural contexts of that experience. She writes about a childhood and youth located in the colonial era and an adult life that began at the very point of Trinidad's independent nationhood, a life begun in poverty in a colonial city going through rapid change. It is about a life that expanded in possibility through an access to an education not usually available to girls from such an economic background. This schooling gave the young Barbara Jenkins the intense experience of being an outsider to Trinidad's hierarchies of race and class. She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women. As for so many Caribbean people, opportunity appeared to exist only via migration, in her case to Wales in the 1960s. But there was a catch in the arrangement that the years in Wales had put to the back of her mind: the legally enforceable promise to the Trinidadian government that in return for their scholarship, she had to return. She did, and has lived the rest of her life to date in Trinidad, an experience that gives her writing an insider/outsider sharpness of perception. 'From her childhood in colonial Port of Spain, to becoming a migrant student and young mother in Wales and then returning to Trinidad post-Independence, Jenkins tells her own life story with the emotional sensitivity of a natural storyteller, the insight of a philosopher, the scope of a historian and the good humour of a Trini. This beautifully written and moving memoir will feel achingly familiar to anyone who knows what it is like to navigate race, class and girlhood while growing up in the West Indies, anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.' Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds.

Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She began writing in her seventies, and is the author of a novel and a collection of short stories. She has won awards including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region), the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Canute Brodhurst Prize, the Small Axe short story competition, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest and a Guyana Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jenkins, Barbara

Leseproben

DOOR Pappy asked my aunt’s husband to tell me that he was going to sell the house. So what about Marmie? I asked. He replied that Pappy said that since it didn’t look like she was coming back, he had to make a decision. What if she does come back? Where would she live? She could decide for herself, he said. Pappy would give her half of what he got for the house to do with whatever she wanted. It was the second week of my return home, July 1971. My husband’s work permit hadn’t yet come through and he was under threat of deportation, even though he had a government job on a three-year contract. I was due to take up teaching in a matter of weeks, a requirement of my scholarship contract. We were staying with my aunt, my mother’s sister, at her home, with six of her seven children and her husband, Pappy’s go-between. We were looking for a place of our own to rent while still searching for suitable day-care for our two-year old. We had no car since the Hillman Hunter we’d bought new with our slender UK savings and a local loan was stolen a couple of days after we’d visited the house in that first week of our arrival. That’s how things were with us, with me, when Pappy dropped on me, not in person, but through an intermediary, the news of his intention. I hadn’t seen my old home for the decade of my life away. It held the memories of my growing years, and now, before I could even properly reconnect with it, Pappy was going to sell it. At the time I didn’t question why he’d waited for my return to do this. I had been away for so long that I was out of touch with family and with people’s ways of thinking and doing things, so much so that I was effectively a stranger. I suppose I may have taken it for granted that Pappy wanted us all, all four of our mother’s children, to be present and in agreement with his plan before he acted. It was a quick and naïve assumption, and it was only later that I saw how much I had erred. I mean how present were we as a collective called Marmie’s children, as collaboratively concerned with seeking our mother’s interest, anyway? I asked them, my siblings, how they felt about Pappy wanting to sell the house? Well, it’s his. He can do what he wants. That seemed to be their position and how could it be anything else? I’d left Marmie with her children as a unit, but I had come back to find her gone and her children scattered. Annette and Carol were married with husbands and children of their own, both living in Diego Martin, some distance from Belmont, and Tony, now twenty-one, lived nearby in Belmont with family friends, and there was I, newly arrived and not alone, staying with family until we found a place of our own. I didn’t rally them, my two sisters and brother, to look more closely at the implications of our easy dismissal of interest in Pappy’s intention. They had their own lives to get on with and it could be that they felt some relief in imagining that this house sale would sever their last link to him. After the house was sold, it became clear to me that I had walked into a trap, a set-up, contrived and carefully laid by Pappy himself, very likely with my uncle-in-law’s connivance, and that I had, by my quick and easy agreement to the sale of the house, allowed myself and my siblings to be accomplices in defrauding our mother of what was her due by virtue of her many, many years of investment in her home. I was eleven when we moved into 74 Pelham Street. From the road, where the open-tray Ford truck pulled up with us and our belongings, my mother and we children saw a cream, single-storey house with a long narrow-roofed extension over the front path, steps leading up from the path to a wide gallery backed by three sets of double doors, with big clear knobbly-patterned glass panel inserts. 74 Pelham Street also had another address, 10 Reid Lane, for it was a corner house, and the gallery wrapped round to give views over both streets. I wanted to believe, to hope that all of it was ours as we walked through the gate, but Marmie didn’t go up the steps to the gallery to enter the house by either of the double glass doors, or by the solid wooden door to the bay room. We children followed her round a path between the side of the house and a tall galvanize fence that separated the house spot from the next-door house, past the bay room to the backyard. Marmie handed baby Tony to me, and we children stood in the yard while she climbed four plain concrete steps to a closed door. At the top step she unbolted the door, which turned out to be only the top half of the door. She swung it open and latched it against the outside wall. She then reached in to unbolt the lower half. She swung it back and walked in. This was our future home. Two rooms at the back, behind the bay room. Those two rooms were to be our everywhere space, for sleeping, sitting, eating. Everything else we needed was shared with the other occupants of the house. How it was worked out that ours was the right-hand part of the kitchen shed behind and separate from the house, and the right-hand stall of a two-compartment, single-pit latrine outhouse further behind, I don’t know; perhaps we simply inherited those arrangements from the former occupants of our part of the house. There was just one kitchen sink, shared by all the tenants. This was a deep concrete structure built on the outside wall of the left side of the kitchen shed and reached from the inside through an opening in that wall. There was one brass tap, and a hole at the base of the sink for the wastewater to fall directly into the concrete drain that ran out into the street gutter. Vivid green algae flourished in that drain. I would watch its long lush strands like mermaids’ hair waving in an underwater world as water from the sink rippled through. The open-to-the-sky shower, which was everybody’s, was a simple affair of three walls of galvanised sheeting leaning against the wall of our side of the kitchen shed. One sheet, fastened to the others by hinges, swung as a door. A galvanised pipe, bent overhead, was intended as the water supply, but as water was always scarce, bathing was often simply dipping from a metal bucket the water fetched from the standpipe on Reid Lane. There, against the law, grown men, barely recognisable through the thick white suds covering them from head to toe, naked but for drawers, stood on mornings rubbing extravagant handfuls of foaminess under arms, over bodies and reaching down their hands massaging clean the unseeable bits, and, sloshing whole bucketsful over themselves, emerged clean and gleaming. As years went by, a carelessly dropped zaboca seed germinated, grew and flourished just outside the shower, giving it a shape-shifting, living roof of branches, leaves and fruit. Our half of the kitchen and our compartment of the latrine was also used by Miss Cobus, the occupant of the bay bedroom at the front of our two rooms. That first day, she told my mother she had one child, a son, living in America. She showed us his picture – a sepia print of a young man in a military uniform. In the other half of the house, in the original living and dining rooms and the gallery, lived a family of mother, father, and three children. We didn’t see them on the first day. They had the left latrine compartment and the left side of the kitchen shed, the side with the shared sink. Also in the back, next to the latrine shed, was a guava tree that seemed to produce year round such an abundance of fruit that I could never understand why the phrase ‘guava season’ means hard times, because, daily, passers-by would call out, Neighbour, I just picking up some guava here, and a woman would come in with a basin to collect fallen fruit to be made into jam or guava cheese for home use or sale. Marmie, too, would collect fruit and make guava jelly, gifts for family and friends, rows of jars of clear red jelly, as pretty as jewels. When sunlight shone through Marmie’s guava jelly, I thought it more beautiful than a stained-glass window in church. Our proudest furniture was Marmie’s parting gift from her disappointed mother – a handsome three-piece mahogany bedroom set. These were set up in the innermost of our two rooms, the room that had a common wall with Miss Cobus’s bay room. Taking up the most space was a massive bed where Marmie and the younger three children slept. Under the bed was storage – numerous cardboard boxes of clothes that one or other of us had outgrown and were awaiting a younger one to grow into, boxes of rags, a couple of cardboard grips, boxes of old newspapers to wrap things in – and also to be torn to size for the latrine. Also under the bed resided an enamel posie for night-time use, as we children were not allowed to venture out to the latrine in the dark. The second furniture item was a dressing table with three deep drawers on either side where our folding clothes went, and one, longer, shallow one in the middle for our mother’s jewellery. In the space under that middle drawer there was a matching stool. A big round mirror was attached at the back, and over the drawers was a wide surface where our mother placed three embroidered, lace-edged, delicate, fine linen doilies – an oval one in the middle and a smaller round one on each side. These she alternated with ecru crocheted ones as the seasons changed from festive to ordinary. On the doilies she set a tortoiseshell backed hairbrush, a matching hand mirror...