It is 5:40 a.m. on Tamil Thai Pongal 2024. My insomnia is in full swing, and my brain is working overtime. For some reason, a preoccupation with my own identity has overcome me this morning. My primary suspicion is that the talks of removing Colonial statues and of deporting immigrants triggered it, so I am sticking to that theory. My identity is not in crisis because of colonialism, and immigrants are not the devil. I feel grateful. I am happy that biology, war, culture, time, luck, technology, love, and hate if I am being completely honest, conspired to bring me into existence, just so that I could want for sleep in this very moment and tell the world about it as if it is some profound thing. Isn’t that funny?
Generations ago, my Tamil great great grandfather took a trip from Ceylon to the much smaller island of Barbados for some business of which I have not been apprised. There, he met the love of his life. Emily Alleyne was a mulatto chick with an adventurous spirit, who clearly couldn’t get enough of him. After their long honeymoon back in Ceylon, they settled in San Juan, Trinidad, of all places. My great granny, Nora, and her siblings, eventually came along. That was how I would come to be a Trinidadian a century later.
Nora would marry, too. He was of Chinese, Indian, and African heritage with a Muslim dad. He somehow turned out to be an Anglican and a Roman Catholic at the same time. Their marriage would last, though not their relationship, and Nora would eventually tell me of how much his name—Lionel—suited him because truth was his mortal enemy.
Before their permanent separation, they would make their first-born, Victor, and their identical twins, Rodney and Senley, the former of which would turn out to be the little man who funded my university studies, despite barely being able to read.
Rodney would leave home at a young age because of verbal and physical abuse by various stepfathers who came along. He would move to Arima, where at 22, he would meet Miriam Makeba’s long-lost twin of pure gorgeousness, from whom I inherit the majority of my good looks, Paulina. She was training to be a midwife. He would ask her to stop, promising to take care of her. She would, and he would keep his word until her dying day in December 2017.
Paulina’s dad, Clifford Meyers (pronounced Mares), was an English, Spanish, and French patois-speaking man of mixed heritage. She was his twin. He would meet Juliana Torres, a Mestizo woman of Venezuelan heritage. With her, he had two boys and two girls. After all that baby-making, he would marry someone else… Because of course he would. 😅
Paulina and Rodney would make my mother Alison, along with the twins, Ashton and Arlene. These people had no idea that they would all come to be some of my most cherished humans, despite our myriad differences.
Meanwhile, in the sleepy, seaside village of Blanchisseuse on Trinidad’s North Coast, some other magic (or madness) was happening.
Maureille Elie, who spoke not a word of English or Spanish, met a mixed Venezuelan woman who spoke English and Spanish by chance. I only know her as Mamita, and I have only seen one photo of her. With her, he would have a relationship (don’t ask me how, but I reckon it was short given the limited communication capabilities) and make his only biological child, my granny Louisa Edith De Leon. The Vene would move to Belmont after they broke up. I presume she learnt English. She would make several more daughters of non-Elie paternity.
Maureille would keep his daughter and would marry an absolute witch by all accounts. The very smart and promising Louisa, who became fluent in English at primary school and spoke French-patois at home, would be withdrawn from school altogether on her stepmother’s orders. Her teachers begged. Her headmaster pleaded. It did not work. As such, she did not even have a primary school certificate, despite being a really smart cookie. The joys of being a girl back in the day!
Louisa would, nevertheless, become skilled in various domestic arts, as well as crochet, which would take her to Tobago and her mother’s Venezuela for competitions. She would make two sons for two men—the older, Herbert, whose father was a lawyer, would win an island scholarship. The other, Courtney, was for some other professional man from Couva, Trinidad. He would become a soldier, then a drug addict after his batch made a drug raid. He would also become my most loved paternal uncle despite this flaw.
Louisa would remain in her father’s house until the unlucky (for her, not me) day that a Vincentian man of French and African roots, Ralph Martineaux, would stumble into her life and marry her. They would make a few children in Blanchisseuse, then move to Arima where they would make the rest of their 9 gremlins together. The unfortunate man I would come to call my father, John Martineaux, was their second-to-last child and favourite boy child.
John and Alison would grow separately in the same little village in Arima. They would go to primary school and secondary school separately, and they would have somewhat separate friends. One day in 1990, his best friend, Derek, and her best friend, Carol, whom I would grow up calling Uncle Derek and Aunty Carol, would get married. John and Alison would meet at that wedding and would later learn that their families had intermarried before while planning their own wedding four years later.
Four years later, they would also be building a house together while I was brewing in Alison’s tummy after what, in hindsight, I consider to be a really bad decision to date below her league. They would marry the December after I was born, in a huge wedding ceremony, planned for almost a year. My dearest brother would come about three years later, looking like Emily Alleyne, who had travelled to Ceylon with her love. More importantly, he would share Emily’s adventurous spirit.
None of the things which I’ve outlined above would have happened if empires were shy about imperialism and if borders were impenetrable fortresses meant to protect against so-called cultural degradation and ethnic replacement. Quite frankly, us racial and cultural mutts have as much of a right to exist freely as anyone else, and we would prefer it if you didn’t try to get in our way. We are not some disease that needs to be contained, lest we contaminate the prized flock. Continents and histories had to join forces just to bring us about, and we intend to not disappoint them for their efforts.
Had colonialism and immigration not happened, some random man from a South Asian island owned by a monarch of two European islands, who also happened to own, among other things, a bunch of smaller islands on a new continent, wouldn’t be able to take a ship, sail to the other side of the globe, meet a woman with slave and planter blood, marry her, move to another island where neither had roots, and make Trini babies. The ship would not exist, and neither would the empire.
Some man by a Trini beach wouldn’t be speaking a derivative of French, and the woman he fell for wouldn’t have been speaking English or Spanish. There would be no school from which little Louisa could be pulled, and she would have no Arima to move to with Ralph. There would be no such thing as a Trini, as the island would still be called Iere. It would be inhabited by a handful of my ancestors who had a proclivity for feathers and cassava-use. And god bless pone and farine!
There would be no Paulina and no Rodney. There would be no Alison or John. There would be no me to write you this long piece of prose about myself, defending the merits of ancient empires in this beautiful English language. There would be no phone on which I could type it from my American-made bed under the cooling breeze of a Chinese-made fan. There would be no you to write it to, and no internet to which I could publish this manner of madness.
As the insomnia that probably kept Emily awake and dreaming of adventure keeps me awake now, and as my yearning to travel across oceans to see what life has to offer continues to arrest me, I am amused that anyone would want to remove statues that commemorate a period in Trini history that had to happen for me to happen.
As the citizens of countries of immigrants pontificate about why their borders should be closed to protect “their culture”, and as they try to justify why us third-world scum should be seen as inferior, I wonder whether they would hold their own ancestors to these newfound standards. Are people willing to be closed to their own existence?
An open world that is honest about and at peace with its past will likely honour it and make a great future. A world where people can move, meet, mix, and mingle is the best world. Sometimes, those opportunities turn into pensive lawyers with asocial sleeping patterns who really understand what it means to be a Westerner. Happy Tamil Thai Pongal! May we reap the fruits of our labour and stare at the sun. Maybe one day, soon again, there will be another empire on whom she never sets!
Her Caribbean Legal Musings 