to be rewritten on sargassum

Our grandmother asks us what we want to be when we grow up. In our eyes, she has always been an old rich white woman. Have you ever wondered whether that’s what she wanted to be? Have you ever wondered whether that’s what she wanted us to be?

You tell her, “A garbageman.”

I tell her, “A maid, like Margaret.”

I remember how funnily she took these little dreams of ours. Both were deferred. I did not become a maid and you did not become a garbageman. Instead, I would be an artist and you, a model. For now, that’s where we’re at. I make images and you become images. But this has been the case for much longer than we’ve worked, hasn’t it?

Whenever I’m digging through our family photos, I can’t help but notice how few pictures there are of me compared to you. You’re the firstborn and maybe that’s got something to do with it, though that’s certainly not your fault. But I have to admit. It’s still a little hurtful. And I was jealous of you. Well, not of you but of the attention you received. This attention measured against me through piles and piles of dusty browning analogue pictures, long since condemned to plastic-sleeved photo albums and boxes damned to damp. And now I’ve been wondering whether this difference in attention has fed this concern of mine. This resonance with overlooked lives. Lives that don’t appear as often as others. Lives that don’t appear at all. Lives unfavoured by the hostility of picture frames and curated family narratives. Undesirables living beyond the frame. Whole worlds that evade capture.

We are children born to tourists who never left. Our family photos can attest to this. Scenes of leisure, pleasure and an unsightly kind of ease. Mostly pictures of white people on an endless holiday, alleging innocence in the tropics. And troubling the surface of all this, the deep silky black brown of our mother strikes me with questions. How did she get here? What causeway brought her all the way from Mombasa to Barbados? We already know the answer but the question is still worth asking. Not for the answer itself but for the consequences of what it means to ask such questions. Questions that tangle and flower, browning the cool placid calm of simple white stories. Like sargassum clouding water. Questions to sink into all that has kept girls like us alive. All those brown femininities swimming in the open waters of an underexposed blackness.

Earlier, I mentioned making images for work. But who has done the work of making these images? Scenes that imagine white leisure and pleasure, held together by the elusive labours of black brown women. Behind the scenes and beyond the frame. And like with our mother and Margaret, some are more visible than others. It’s that elusiveness that I’d like to hesitate on, just a little longer. When unbusied from the work of setting white scenes, what images are black brown women making for themselves and one another?

You are floating in the sea. I am not yet born so I must remember this through you. She asks you that question again. It’s enchanting, isn’t it? The white of seafoam. And she’s gauging your response, stirring your future in the water.

And can a child know what she will do if given the room to grow? And would it matter if she cut her tail in two and bled herself out of the water? Now legged on land, where everything touched turns white. Even the black blue sea can’t help but foam, when surrendered to the shore. And would it matter if she chose to swim against it? Out and away from all that fixity? She could tread too much water — tread too far out — and know she was safely out of frame. But she also knew, all too well, that evading capture was never as safe as it sounded. Little could be accounted for beyond the frame. She could die quite silently — out there where no one could hear or see her. Nobody to remember her drowned browned life. But then, did the choice even matter? Efface yourself or let the world do the effacing for you. Hardly a choice worth making. Deferring it entirely, she floundered in the shallows. Rocking back and forth from sand to sea. Coasting. Gliding through. Slipping in and out of things and letting everything else slip off her.

When had she learned to steer clear of them? The white people who never mentioned race, but always seemed to practise it. When had she learned that brown skin was a thing? This knowledge she would use for her survival. She would live like water. Knowing when to foam and knowing when to deepen. Plastic. Persistent. Always finding ways to fit. But she would learn the hard way that water could not last like this. Contorting to belong, each shapeshift left her with a little bit less of herself. Lost in transition and not as unscathed as she would’ve liked to believe. She was more like clay, squeezing herself through tinier and tinier holes. And they sure liked to move the goalposts. It was their favourite thing to do. But as often as they narrowed the frame of belonging, she would just keep changing.

Until it was all too much for her to hold this pace. Bending. Squeezing. Twisting. Bleeding. Evaporating herself in the eyes of others. To be pretty as the air with no room to breathe. Was it worth it — being visible at the price of self-effacement?

Already knowing the answer, her eyes vanished with the horizon. The question, again, rattling at the surface. What do you want to be? She could step into the water and never look back. See her. Don’t see her. Neither way would matter. Brown sargassum girl floating open in the black blue sea. Betraying the question. Leaving the frame. She chose to be everything.

It’s difficult to be honest about you. I’m trying to unbury you from the shame I hold for my family as well as my place in it.

I have a difficult love for you. The kind of love a daughter might have for someone else’s mother. A desire with something between it. Words caught in the throat like volcanic dust. Like seaweed. Histories mouthed in grit. Silences that only get heavier the longer they’re left. Silences that choke the air whenever they get troubled, swept or unsettled. Before there is no breath left in either of our lungs, before each eye waters nothing but ash, I want to speak our places into memory.

It’s difficult to write poetically about lives that are so sticky. Lives sometimes stuck to the material conditions that they live in. And, no, it can’t always be poetry. It can’t always be written with ease and delight. Some of it gums my mouth and stills my fingers and chokes my breath. I want to leave this stable earth that sticks to your life and mine, without forgetting what the shoreline means to us. What it has meant, for better or worse. But if I want to leave the ground, I need to lay it first. Ground which does not feel good to lay. It can sometimes feel like toil. But the more ground I lay, the more ready I am to step off from it and go looking for us. Out there, together in the Sargasso, could we teach each other how to swim?

You are a child. Your grandmother is visiting. She does not live here. She is visiting from England. And from the guest bedroom, she calls out to you, beckoning you over. Margaret is already there, held hostage in conversation with this woman, her employer’s estranged wife. Out of her uniform and dressed in her own clothes, she’s finished for today. She was on her way out. She is wearing a beige button-up shirt with short sleeves. Her shorts are the same shade of beige and fall just above her knee.

You have always been a little curious about the clothes she wears when not confined to her uniform. When she comes and goes, her looks betray glimmers of her style and personality — things that can’t be read from the effacement of an apron. You have seen bright red blouses tucked into long dark floral skirts. You have seen aged leather sandals — shoes that last and breathe. They feel like the clothes of someone who knows how much work she does for a living. Comfortable and airy yet fitting like someone who understands and loves her curves. She feels like someone who knows the effacement of uniforms and how to undermine this. Each step she takes, you hear her before you see her. Shiny metal bangles jingling from her arm. The light catches her ears on the touch of silver dripping from each lobe. Yes, you have always been a little curious about Margaret — how she feels and what she wants — whenever she comes and goes.

“Look at what Margaret’s wearing!”

A smiling crocodile, your grandmother holds her laugh between her teeth, trying to tell you a joke you don’t understand. An inside joke, of course; the black butt of it being Margaret and her clothes. She wants to implicate you. To infect you with her laughter. This uncomfortable snickering of white wine and sarcasm on the breath. She needs an accomplice to absolve her rotten conscience.

You share a look with each woman.

Your grandmother’s eyes are sharp slits cut into her face. The glint of her smile just feels like poison. She can’t see what you see when you look at her. The ugliness. The cruelty. Her shallow drought of emotional depth and all that wine that can’t restore her. The loveless marriage now catching up to her in her old age. All her hidden labour raising sons she could not wife. Surrendering so much of herself to what was expected, you’re sure she must be empty. Just another bereft person who only feels tall when someone else is on their knees.

Margaret has no surprise about her. Whatever this is, her face tells you it’s not uncommon. Her arms are just hanging beside her. She has nothing left to give today. With her lips pressed shut and the corners of her mouth kneading into the soft slant of her dimples, it’s like there’s some kind of bitter pride she’s holding in the tightening grasp of her cheeks. Like she knows there is nothing remarkable about this ugly, voided white woman. Like she knows there is nothing worth saying to whatever this is. No one worth addressing buried in this bag of wrinkled paper skin. That whatever woman lived there died long ago. And that was neither her responsibility nor her concern. She cleaned houses for a living, sweeping up the messes of white women who thought they were still alive.

There is a photograph I can’t seem to find. I am trying to remember it. How we were pictured together. A kitchen sink, where you were washing me. There are many photos like it. My brown baby’s body taking shape in different kinds of vessels. Buckets, baskets, basins and, yes, kitchen sinks. Were we smiling? I can’t remember. Would a smile tell something the picture couldn’t? Something known more clearly by the water between us? Tedious. The trouble with disappearing memories. Where the water runs brown and murky between black brown women and their almost-daughters. Holding fast to the intimacy of bathing, the trust of care. A tenderness worth secreting.

You have held me since birth and bathed me in kitchen sinks. You have fed me with all that your hands could conjure. I am remembering here, through this other photograph. A few months old and staring back at whoever’s picturing us. Whoever’s picture this is. And you’re looking right at me, encouraging me to eat. What do you see when you’re looking at me, wearing your smallest hint of a smile? What are you picturing that can’t be captured here? I’m trying to remember it differently. Imagine it otherwise. This photograph. Submerge it and return us to disappeared pictures, waterlogged memories and deserted kitchen sinks. Return us to a love conspired in water.

You’re in your fifties and I am still a child. We’re both standing in the kitchen where water’s filling the sink. It’s frothing and sparkling with soap bubbles. Today is Monday and I ask you about your weekend. Quieting the tap, you face me to answer. That hot and hearty midday kind of blue is breezing through all over. With cowitch on the air, the moment feels prickly on our bodies. Like soursop pressed into the skin. You’re dabbing your fingers into the belly of your apron. Each pearl of soap water disappears, now sunken in your white cotton waist. Hair tied back with streams of grey and forehead alight with a shimmer of sweat, your face hasn’t changed much to me. Age has touched you softly. Softer than the world. It has touched both of us. But all these recollections bleed into one another. A delicate gathering of memory trickling through my hands. Overflowing and libating the ground with the generosity of a standpipe. All these kitchen sink conversations between one black woman already here and yet another in the making.

Your weekend: you tell me you visited the east coast of the island for the first time in your life. You didn’t know Barbados could look like that.

I’m confused, amazed and excited for you. Confused that someone could live longer than such a small country without ever seeing whole parts of it. Amazed that this tiny island can still finds ways to be elusive, undiscovered and surprising to those who live upon it. Excited that you have experienced a place that means so much to me. This place I keep returning to. This Atlantic-loved handle where more and more pieces wash ashore. Pieces of you and me. Of everything that came before. Of everyone that’s destined to arrive. Pieces we identify with, recognise and feel for. That don’t fit together smoothly and might even be at odds with each other. Pieces that gather, accumulate and coexist when none of these has ever been easy.

The light in your eyes. The face you make when you remember what you saw. The Atlantic burning in the brown of your gaze. The island’s back arching in that light. A last refusal of the ocean carved in ancient reef. Nothing written in the sand ever lasts here. The wind will never die. The waves won’t turn back. What does it mean — all that saltwater in your eyes? When you remember, you take me with you and a kitchen sink isn’t only a kitchen sink. You take me as your witness, to this. Your image foaming in your hands. The one you made for yourself. You didn’t know it could look like that. You don’t tell me what “that” means. I don’t need to know. It’s in your eyes. It slipped through you. And you slipped through unseen. Only the water knows. What you look like, what you look for. When nobody’s looking to take your picture. Only the water knows. This knowledge the sand can’t steal. What you look like, what you look for. When you’re picturing yourself. Confiding in the sea. Did you always know you could look like that?

And did it feel good when the salt graced your face? And did it feel sweet when the sea sprayed you wet? And did it feel right when the sand let you wander, soft-footed, not in a hurry, nowhere to go, to run, only time razed to grains now living in the hallowed worked-to-the-bone crease of your toes, the only time you need to mind, the spilling-over too-too hourglass of your own body, your own body clock, without any need to clock in, clock out, it’s just you here: you, with water in your sights. You don’t need to tell me how you do it. How you hold a whole ocean in your eyes.

How do they do it? And here, of all places. Here, where the hurricanes feed. Yes, here, at the skirts of volcanoes. This is where the ash snows down. And this is where the water rises first. Here, where the seaweed chokes the ocean. Here, where the sun starts fires. This black hole nowhere, where whole islands disappear. Here we are. Making life in it. In this, the nest of calamity. Piecing together coloured, gendered selves from the ruins of great houses, the ashes of canefields, the broken flotsam and living jetsam littered across unstable shores and histories.

Here we are, in the muck of sargassum. Brown women picturing ourselves when words like brown and woman mean too much and too little at the same time. Words that contest our choice to inhabit them. So loaded with histories not written by us. Sometimes, I feel to just cast them on the water. All these thorny words that bleed so much trouble. Hoping they float back to wherever the hell they came from. Messages in bottles, written in poison.

But I don’t know if I can wait forever for better words than this. I want to trust that the meaning is what matters. Neither the bottle nor the vessel of the word, but the meaning. My meaning. Our meaning. And yet, I still don’t know. But what I do know is that cassava is only toxic if you refuse to do the work. And if we soak for long enough, I know that life and love can be worked from the most inhospitable rocks, words and harvests. I know this because here is where I’ve seen it. Here is where brown women draw blood from stone.

But why do I keep coughing up seaweed? There’s too much of it in my lungs. Too much here and everywhere — in our oceans, on our beaches, in our sights — or so I’m told. Sargassum disrupts the image we are told to hold. When there’s too much, it can break the frame and cloud the sea, siphoning life and breath from air, shore and water. Sargassum: a brown that gathers. An accumulation, a fixation, a hiding place, a trap. A floating community of both converts and prisoners. A brown you can hide in. A brown that entombs.

And I keep coughing it up. It’s caught in my throat. I don’t know how to reckon with all this brown and all its complication. The longer you leave it, the greater it stinks. A stranded community rotting in the sun. Algae, bacteria, jellyfish larvae, uprooted urchins, captive fish and bubbled worlds of plankton. All beached and browning in countless seaweed pyres. Sargassum: a grief that gathers.

Like the sea, it is history. Now resurfaced, spit up and festering. No longer redacted by the black blue depths. Neither out of sight, mind nor reach. When a too far out comes too far in. Here, in frame yet painfully illegible. Can’t you feel it, itching at your skin? Not the seaweed but all that lives and dies within it. What do you want? To be seen but not misread. To be felt but not endangered. A last stand. A haunting. Gas-bladdered memories screaming to be let out. Can’t you feel it — the itch of brown skin? Not its colour but what trembles in its bones. No, I don’t know what I mean when I say that. I don’t need to know how to say it. But those who feel it know it. A dysphoria shadowed brown. A brown that is difficult to bear. Mucky, muddy, sticky, swampy, salty, itchy, thick and brown. All you see is brown. And all you feel is the complicated itch of all that can’t be seen. The itch of life accumulated. The itch of grief gathered. The itch of too much to see and nothing to see here. Biting at your eyes. At once, yearning to be felt yet never to be seen. Always an arrival of too much. Too much brown scattered on the shore. Too much brown already here. Too much brown: not an impasse but an opening. In the water. On the beaches. In my throat. Coughing. Coughed up. Brown seaweed in the boat’s propeller. Brown seaweed, snaring the fish’s fins. This brown. Our brown. A brown never to be crossed easily.

Finding shade at the skirt of the manchineel, they stepped into the water. Two brown sargassum girls floating in the sea.

All the trees were ashiver, the chatter of their leaves resounding in the softest kind of hush. Waves poured in gently. They seemed to melt, not crash. Each rolling sound was a deep breath, a tender moment taken out of time as if to sigh at all this beauty. Everything was touched with a clear blue light. The sun still had some mercy left to give. From where they were, they could see it. The whole island nestled in their eyes. A sudden burst of browned manchineel leaves caught by the wind and thrown to the water. Slowly flaking through the air. No need to rush. They would soon reach the surface, these toxic brown leaves landing softly from their flutter. Two brown girls swimming in all that trouble. The trouble of brown poison leaves and brown women’s love. Each can itch the skin. And yet, some itches feel too good to scratch.

Sparkling, sighing, the sea was clear today. The clearest it had been since the ashfall. And underwater, they could see how their bodies pooled and shifted. Legs blending into arms, breasts dissolving, hips melting, dripping into the powdery sand beneath them. Picturing themselves together through the tremble of the surface. They were here right now, holding each other’s thighs. Pinching kisses out of thin air. The scandal — heads turning quickly — the sweetest panic — only to remember nobody was there to see them. Only the sea. And she had been generous. She let them touch everywhere else. The only thing between them, yet holding them together. She was their most trusted accomplice. Sinking, sucking her all in, their bodies were a friction of salt and plankton. Two brown sargassum girls troubling the water. Deep in love and out of sight.