A Mythology of Memory — Photo Essay by Berette Macaulay
By Berette Macaulay
Though I will be a stranger in my land of origin, the importance of this journey is to bridge the gaps in my identity and my parents’ painful sabotage of identity. I want to know them in the historical and current political context of Sierra Leone; I want to know our story stripped of myth.
My understanding of the world is richly influenced by my mixed cultural background — I was born in Sierra Leone to my Sierra Leoneon father and multi-racial mother of Czech-German, Dominican-French-Creole, and Sierra Leoneon heritage. I was raised in Jamaica and the United Kingdom, and I’m now based in the United States. But my creative motivation stems from constant internal and external psychosocial negotiations of identity. It is no exaggeration to state that almost daily when I open my mouth to speak, my non-descript accent creates immediate demands for explanation — whether locally or on my travels.
In my work, I seek to express, however unfamiliar or uncomfortable, the near untenable navigations of class, race, culture, spirituality, language, and secular stratum. I am drawn to investigating Memory and exposing the introspective emotional language of this through conceptual portraiture.
The portraits featured here in A Mythology of Memory* are from a genealogical study rooted in my own multicultural/immigrant experience. My interest in investigating family roots developed when my father died in 2006. I began to confront the Myth of the Man, the stories around how my family ended up in Jamaica, how my parents fled Sierra Leone for their lives, our hero worship of my father, and thus the Myth of Myself.
My father, Berthan Macaulay Q.C. was appointed the first indigenous Attorney-General of Sierra Leone in 1963, shortly after the country’s independence from Britain in 1961. During this time my mother, Margarette May, was a law student and living in London. My parents had a short albeit long distance courtship of love between Britain and Sierra Leone during 1966. They wed in London in February, 1967 and within 24 hours my mother accompanied my father to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Within a short time after their arrival, a series of political events and upheavals occurred. There was an ongoing election, during which an attempt was made to appoint a Prime Minister before the conclusion of the election. My father’s legal opinion was sought by the Governor General as to the constitutionality of such an appointment. His opinion was that it would be unconstitutional. There followed a declaration of martial law, followed by coups and counter coups.
Shortly after the assumption of power by the army government, my father resigned as Attorney General and returned to private practice. In 1968 my father was charged, along with other high officials of the previously elected government, with treason. The case against my father was that he had given a dishonest legal opinion to the Governor General. He was imprisoned for three years and nine months in the Pademba Road Prison in Freetown. He was 39 years old. During his imprisonment, Sierra Leone had become a one party state under the All People’s Congress (APC). After his release (due to pressures from Britain and other commonwealth countries, including Jamaica), my parents endured several death threats and attempts on my father’s life. In February 1974, shortly after I was born, my parents left Sierra Leone for the far and culturally foreign island of Jamaica. Their midlife start in the Caribbean is wholly the staff of how I experience life — in flight, uncommitted, exiled, and in search.
