triangular road

People think Scorpios are evil, but there’s a lot of nastiness in the world that WE did not create.  After being insulted yesterday, I fumed for a while and then lugged my laundry into the basement and immersed myself in Paule Marshall‘s memoir.  If you love black women’s literature then you’ve likely read Brown Girl, Brownstones.  In Triangular Road, Marshall revisits that moment when she was an emerging author, finding her way forward with her radical 1960s peers and the sage advice of elders like Langston Hughes.  Marshall recalls her beloved father’s dreamy ways and her stern mother’s disappointment in her willful, book-loving daughter.  Yet when it’s time to revise her first novel, Marshall returns to Barbados and tries to uncover the roots that will reveal the secret of her parents’ lives.  Moving from Brooklyn to the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe—Marshall recreates the triangular trade routes that first brought enslaved Africans to the Americas:

All my life, as I saw it, was a thing divided in three…and the colossus of ancestral Africa, [was] the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know.

My friend Mariam has always lived in France, she loves Paris, but now considers having a home in Mali (where her family’s from).  I grew up in Canada, consider Brooklyn home, but would like to have a base in London and somewhere in the global South.  As a child, I looked at this painting every day; it hung at the bottom of the stairs and was one of the few things that belonged to my father, though I don’t recall seeing it in the houses he occupied after my parents divorced.  For most of my life I thought it was Nevis, my father’s tiny island home, but learned later that it was actually a Tahitian landscape painted by Paul Gauguin.  This print now hangs in my foyer, directly across from the wall of ancestor photos; I still look at it every day, and lately I’ve been considering how the Caribbean might figure in my future.  There are stories I want to tell and secrets I want to uncover—what really happened to my paternal grandmother, the woman for whom I am named?  There are the usual push-pull factors, and then there’s the rising controversy over the planned community center in lower Manhattan.  When I hear about so-called Christians in Florida planning to burn copies of the Quran on 9/11…it makes me want to pack my bags.  I’m always conscious of being an immigrant, but in these moments I’m very aware of my passport—which I walk with every day because my father made it clear to me years ago that nothing was guaranteed.  My green card wouldn’t protect me if I attended a rally or otherwise displeased the police.  His fear around his own immigrant status kept him from participating in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, so my father was an adult before he became radicalized.  And even then, he settled into middle age as a Christian Coalition Republican—he watched Pat Robertson and got Xmas cards from Jim and Tammy Faye Baker…my father didn’t maintain close ties with his family in Nevis; he never took his children there, and wrote in his memoir: “You can never go back.”  He was wrong.  You can’t recreate the past, of course, but you *can* uncover and honor your roots, and you can weave strands of the past into your future.  Everyone needs an out, especially those of us on the margins…