In this photograph I am not yet 2 years old. My mother’s bicycle is leaned next to the bench where I am sitting.

My mother doesn’t remember the occasion or circumstance under which the photo was taken or where my sister and other siblings were.

I often try to imagine what this little girl, me was thinking.

I am not smiling, rather it seems my attention is focused keenly, else where, rather than at the person taking the photo. Yet, I seem very  intense. I don’t have a memory of myself at this age, but I see myself, much younger in my crib, very self-absorbed and feeling as if I don’t need anyone. My imagination is active and I love being alive in that moment.

I believe I have always honoured  my child self, perhaps sometimes to the determent of  missing opportunities, but I love this child that is me.  All the stories my mother and other relatives told me about my child-self indicate that I was happy, loved to laugh and always had a mouth, a rejoiner for everything anyone said to me.  Perhaps I knew I would become a a writer.

I do see myself as a little girl being very curious about the environment, and wanting to know everything.  I was called a Tom-boy because I enjoyed the outdoors and doing things that supposedly boys did –go off on my own in the woods, climbing tree, scrambling through barbed-wire fences, shooting birds with my sling shot, and lighting and tossing fire-crackers even after a few times they busted in my palm, swelling  and staining them with the sulphurous gun-powder.

This little girl is still alive, still curious, still planning adventures and still looking intently at life… I love and celebrate her

I am not new to growing.  As far back as I can remember to my childhood all the people around me grew things.

My mother comes from Flemstead a rural village in St James, and her people were farmers.  Although my mother left there and was reared in Kingston from the age of 10, she also grew things.  It was not unusual for people of my mother’s generation to grow things.

I tend a garden of flowers and herbs and vegetables from watching my mother. I have introduced my children to growing, and am happy to say my daughters have taken this on even though they don’t have a yard. I am always thrilled when I go to my garden and see what I have produced.  I am even more thrilled when I eat it as I know it is free from pesticide and it is healthy. Here I have Bak Choy that I have grown.  Red callalloo, yes red the first for me; I’ve also planted green, and kale, herbs, beans and peas, pineapples, cane and banana…each day I learn more and expand for myself and my relatives and friends.

It is said the eyes are the window to the soul, but what is the face?

I love my face. I guess being told I was pretty when I was a child has helped me to feel good about my features. But I also know that I wear different faces depending on how I am feeling and the circumstances in which I find myself. During meetings I try to wear a professional face, meaning I try to not let my emotions show openly on my face.

When I am reading  or performing my work, my face is very expressive and I try to display the specific emotion of the work I am sharing.

When I am with friends, just having a good time, my face is open and I do not try to conceal or project anything but myself and what I am feeling at the moment.

I try to imagine what my face looks like  during labor and child-birth.  I think  about how my face feels when I am making love.  Does it emit a different smell when I am cooking?  When I take a shower and soap my face or my eyes sting from the salt of the sea or the chlorine in the pool, how do these elements change my face? What is my sad face, when my mother died and I was flying from Jamaica to California to see her before she issued her last breath.  I did not want to see my mother’s death face.

This is my COVID 19 face.  I don’t think it shows that there is a pandemic? It is a selfie and I only wanted to capture part of my face, and the words reflect who I am and who I always want to show up as — I want my face to announce this creative resilience.

What does someone mean when they declare, “Say it to my face.” ? Often it is when something negative is said behind one’s back, and the person saying whatever they are saying  is being called out as a coward. “Say it to my face, damn it!”

Maybe it is akin to what Eleanor Roosevelt means in this quotes: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”  How does one look fear in the face?  What does that mean really? To be brave? To push through?

I like face-to-face events. I love the intimacy that these opportunities afford us. This way I get to hear and see, and therefore feel more apt to evaluate the merit of what’s being said. I suppose face-to-face is like eye-ball to eye-ball, although this latter term seems more aggressive as id a dual is taking place — who can out stare whom?

Some people refer to their face as their  mug, this usually suggests a criminal element.

This is my profile indicates a pose, a decided presentation. What about your features? Here again, it tends to be an assessment of supposedly one’s best `side.’

“Keep your face always towards the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you,” says the poet Walt Whitman.  Do we really know what he means seeing that the quotes is lifted out of context. This is what I think happens when the sun is out, and one faces the sun, but I suspect Whitman is speaking in poetic terms, metaphorically.

J.D. Salinger’s quote is clear, and we don’t have to second guess what he means  when he says, “She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ” Here is a woman who does not attempt to hide what she is feeling –joy or contempt or anger or livid disdain. But look at how the writer puts it, `emptying’…can one also say filling up?

The Roman orator, statesman and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, offers a quote which I find to be profound and accurate to a point;  he says “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” Let’s ponder this for a moment — the face reflecting the mind and the eyes interpreting.  How accurate is this?  What about a seeing impaired or blind person?

How about this, “Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned–in search of what? It is the same with books…”
from Virginia Woolf.  What is it that you face is seeking?  Where is it looking?  What is it telling others?  What is it concealing? How open or close is your face?  When is it most vulnerable?

Finally, think about this term, “Blackface” popularised  in the United States as a form  of theatrical make-up used predominantly by mostly white performers to represent a caricature of a black person. Imagine that, to blacken the face to poke fun or misinterpret that actions and/or mannerism of a Black person. A racist act.

Side Bar 1: Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892), a humanist,  and an American poet, essayist, and journalist work incorporates transcendentalism and realism; Leaves of Grass, his major work, he self-published in 1855

Side bar 2: J. D. Salinger is best known for  his novel, The Catcher in the Rye.  He ended up being a recluse after this success, and published very little upon till his death, novel The Catcher in the Rye

Side Bar 3: Did you know that Virginia Woolf is considered to be “one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device?”

There is something to be said about a people who have nationalized a poisonous fruit —our resourcefulness at transformation.

Brought from West Africa, Ackee also known as Akan, if eaten before it ripens and opens its pods naturally  produces toxins– hypoglycin A  and B, that when converted into the body are lethal, and can result in what Jamaicans call vomiting sickness.

How Jamaicans came to figure out when to eat the ackee, to wait until it ripens naturally, and how it came to be made our national dish beats me.  I think it is one of the most beautiful plants, its pear-shaped red colour, shiny black seeds and three pods fruit in each pot, with a menstrual red membrane that must be removed before cooking.

As Jamaica’s national disk, ackee is steamed with salt-fish and eaten with breadfruit, or boiled green banana, fried plantain, or cooked with rice commonly called seasoned rice as a one-pot meal, or now made into patties, or quiche or done in a variety of ways. I recently learned that it can be eaten raw or chopped and tossed into a salad.  Like any fruit, the numerous ways ackee can be prepared is yet to be discovered.

Its pods and seeds are tossed into compose, but the dried ackee pod is elegant, and its decorative abilities  has to be explored; I have long believed its seeds would make beautiful jewelry.

Jamaican are one of the most resourceful and creative people that I know, and I readily admit my bias as a fellow Jamaican.  But truly our creativity and ingenuity are limitless. What we lack is discipline and a spirit of Ujamaa, collective and cooperative economics.

I believe in us.  I believe that African Jamaicans will yet acknowledge and come together in the spirit of fraternity, and create a bright future for the African population. I await all the positives ackee vibes we will unleash as a result of COVID 19.

Stay safe and blessed.  Asè

I’ve long felt there was something innately wrong with praying to someone nailed to a cross. It is a vulgar image, and made more vulgar if I am to believe that the allegedly most powerful person in the world would sacrifice his only son, when the power was in his hand to change the hearts and minds of the persecutors, to whisk away his son, or to eradicate violence all together.

How has this image of “god’s” son nailed to a cross inscribed for us that violence is acceptable? For me it portrays the father as untrustworthy, a man willing to let his son suffer — for the salvation oh mankind? I don’t buy it. Not a pill I am prepared to swallow. As a parent, I find the representation of such as father reprehensible, and certainly no one with whom I have any faith. So where does that lead me?

I read the story with its patriarchal endorsement of violence, and I shift my gaze to the mother going to the grave site and the resurrection — after all it is women who must always weep, and use our tears to wash away man’s violence and transform it into something palatable and hopeful.

Given the global pandemic, Resurrection at this time, is being called for — rising from our slumber into greed, rising from our disregard for the environment, for one another, and for the future we ought to be creating. How do we resurrect our vision? How do we imagine and begin to fashion a new way of existence and development? How do we climb out of the quagmire of mediocrity into which we have stumbled and become community again?

I believe we can. I know we can. I am pronouncing that we will. Our very survival depends on our resurrection from violence and wastefulness.

Let’s begin this new journey and create a cross, not to worship, but to step forth with a vision that is humane and equitable.