Hybrids, Hyphens, and Home

Technically, I’m not an immigrant. Still, my life has been shaped by my parents’ immigrant experiences. I was born in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico and lived there until I was about four or five. My mother was born and raised in Jamaica and immigrated as an adult, first to Antigua, then to Puerto Rico, then to the mainland where she’s remained for the nearly 40 years. My father was born in the Dominican Republic and was brought by his parents to Puerto Rico as an infant. He has lived there all his life.

Like many writers, my work is not simply about intellectual curiosity but has often been a form of therapy. In the beginning of my career, I wanted to learn more about the storytelling traditions that shaped my life.  The truth is that while I was a voracious and indiscriminate reader growing who read everything from Harlequin romances to Danielle Steele and V.C. Andrews, to histories and autobiographies, I did not grow up reading a lot of Caribbean literature.  What I did grow up with was stories and storytelling. Like ancestor Paule Marshall writes about in her essay, “Poets from the Kitchen,” my mother and her friends, immigrants from Jamaica, Grenada, Monserrat, Antigua, Barbuda, Guyana and so on gossiped and told elaborate stories on the phone, at kitchen tables, in cars on road trips to tag sales, and at house parties where kids stayed up well past their bedtimes. I was a nosey kid with my ears always ready to hear about who got knocked up, who didn’t have papers, who obeahed who, and the like. My mother would cut her eyes at me and say, “little pigs have big ears” and quiet her down her boisterous, high-pitched voice so that I could stay out of grown folks’ business. Until encountering Caribbean literature in college, I just didn’t have an idea of how robust the storytelling tradition was. I was also still unlearning the fallacy that my mother and play aunties’ storytelling was fundamentally different than what I encountered in Dickens, Austen, and other “great” pieces of literature.

In the essay “I Am Not a Journalist,” about the life and death of Haitian journalist and intellectual Jean Dominique, Edwidge Danticat recalls her varying feelings of being a dyaspora, a Haitian who lives outside of Haiti, one who is alternately envied, vilified, and misunderstood, one who has left their homeland because often because of violence—the fear of death, the crushing hand of imperialism, or something else. Danticat writes that Jean Dominque had a nuanced view of dyaspora: “The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds…There’s no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You are not all alone.” I was particularly struck by Dominique’s words; it described exactly how I feel. Not that I can’t understand those that have a tortured relationship to their motherland, it’s just not my particular experience. I never feel my identity as a daughter of immigrants as a Duboisan two-ness or a double consciousness. There are no warring selves trying not to tear themselves asunder. I am Jamaican and American. I am both, a wonderful hybrid of callaloo and collard greens. Just probably not at the same time—because that would be a lot of greens, Jesus.

I’ve always been proud of this stalwart sense of self and always clucked sympathetically when others described feeling torn or confused or displaced. (If I have any angsty feelings about my background, it’s about my paternal legacy of Latinidad that I claim only if pressed and only for that moment. But those are thoughts for another day). After leaving the Caribbean, I grew up in Caribbean communities in the northeast and in South Florida. I never felt estranged from my heritage. My very Jamaican mother still speaks with a musical lilt, whether speaking the King’s English or patois. I grew up eating jerk pork, rice and peas, oxtail, brown stew chicken, curry goat, cornmeal porridge, cassava, breadfruit, and star apples. I drank ginger beer and freshly made carrot juice sweetened with condensed milk. We listened to Jamaican gospel on Saturdays when we cleaned—after a morning of cartoons and Soul Train. We danced to reggae and dancehall. We cheered for Jamaica—and the foreign-born Jamaicans that ran for the US, Canada, and Britain—during the Olympics.

That is not to say my Jamericanness is all oxtail gravy. As a queer Jamaican-American, my love for my culture is certainly complicated by the homophobia I’ve experienced. I grew up being told that any deviation from heterosexuality and cisgender identity was simply an abomination.  I am still dealing with the ramifications of what ancestor bell hooks has called soul murder that I experienced as a child. As an adult I have appreciated the healing work of Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Patricia Powell, in addition to admiring and supporting activists and everyday folk on the island and in the larger diaspora who have been slowly changing the narrative of homophobic violence. I am honored to be part of the community of queer Caribbean folk who have always been here.

Ultimately, when I think of myself and the labels I cling to, the terms that fit me besides “morning person” or “book lover,” are queer Black woman. I never feel limited by these designations. They never feel parochial or provincial. Quite the opposite. As ancestor Toni Morrison reminds us, “Being a Black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” I too feel big, bold, and expansive in my queer Black womanhood, despite all the odds stacked against us. My Blackness feels like a diasporic blanket I wrap around myself that is quilted with all of my cultural and ethnic background woven throughout. My womanhood is another one of the threads that binds me together, makes me whole. My queerness is part of the audacious patchwork that makes me, me. I am not fragmented by my multiple identities, and I reject the lie that I have to erase any part of me to be valid or understood. I am at home in all of my complexity.