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So here I am in Ghana in the middle of the night with no one to meet me because the London Heathrow to Accra flight is twelve hours late.
“Irie, Rasta man!” says the tallest of the taxi drivers trying to handle my luggage outside the gates of Katoka International Airport.
“We Ghanaians love Jamaicans second only to Reggae,” says another.
“Not surprising,” says his smiling friend - squeezing my hand and snapping fingers. “Our ancestors were taken there many years ago. Assalamu-Alalikum. You are welcome!”
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Where does the original trauma begin? At the memory of one’s first gasp for breath? At the splatter of the midwife’s slap against the earliest consciousness?
He was never one to think of his childhood. He wanted to free himself from the past; to get ride of the hurt; and be born again. Now as he prepared to bury his mother and to start a career of which she would have been proud, floods of emotions from a childhood past came rushing back at him.
He had been operating on automatic-pilot ever since his mother became ill. He was exhausted. He needed a holiday. He had felt a guilty sense of relief when his mother finally went and it pained him to think that she had been any burden to him even in the end. All his life he had blamed her for everything. He blamed her for having him, blamed her for losing him and blamed her for bringing him back.
Now, here he was getting on a plane going back to the scene of the crime. So what, if it was twenty years later? He was going back to see his father’s grave. He was finally going back to confront the old boy. Maybe he would grieve at last.
You see, his father had run off with their housekeeper to Jamaica and took the small boy with them when he was only 3-years old. His mother was left to fend for herself and his baby sister here in England. Living the life of Riley on the island, the boy is chauffeur-driven to and from school in any one of daddy’s classic gas-guzzlers. He spends weekends idling on daddy’s new farm presided over by an evil stepmother. That is, until the father is arrested for possession of marijuana and the boy is shipped off back to England to a mother of whom he has no memory.
“Mum, why’s he crying?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe he just don’t like Airports. Why don’t you ask him? He’s your brother.”
“Do you think he’d like a doughnut, mum?”
“Well, he don’t know doughnuts like we know doughnuts, Jacque. Ask him.”
“Why is he so small and dark?”
“Don’t be mean!”
There it was. In the nine-hour flight from Kingston’s Michael Manley Airport to London’s Heathrow, his social-status had dropped from privileged middle-class to stigmatised under-class. He was now an urban stereotype: a well-defined ‘social problem.’
“How does it feel to be a problem, son?”
No one had warned him that he was neither English nor Jamaican. That he was simply “Black, Wog, Coon, Nigger,” or any one of the other insults children and adults spat out in the 1970s. Like:
“Oi, you! Jungle-Bunny! Why don’t you go back home to the tree-top where you come from?”
But how does a ten-year old boy tell ignorant parents and their children that he was chauffeur-driven to and from school? Why should he have to explain that just for fun, he rode his cousin’s helicopters to water the cash rich crops on their Bodles Banana Breeding Station? Should he have to reveal that his family bred race horses? Nah. They could not conceive of it, and so he kept silent, developing instead a quiet inner confidence.
It should have been obvious back then that the return home to England would involve some acclimatisation and culture shock. He had exchanged permanent glorious all-year sunshine and good health for chest-colds and chilblains. He had become part of an all-female household headed by a mother whom he blamed for all his current woes, most notably, a forced separation from the father whom he adored. He was now even one of two battling siblings where before he had been a contented only child.
Then, to make matters worse, his beloved father died within three months of his arrival at a new school in Peckham. He couldn’t even cry. He had cried throughout the entire plane journey from Kingston to London and almost non-stop for two weeks. There were no more tears left to cry, and no one had made the connection between the death of his father and a sharp rise in his antisocial behaviour.
Teachers labelled him educationally sub-normal and in need of remedial classes. Children laughed and teased him for his small black frame and thick Jamaican accent. And as the young boy sort a way to release his pent-up grief and anger, teachers were pulled off chairs, books flung across classrooms, and no one dared laugh at him any more after he beat the school bully red-raw with a bicycle pump.
The man today has a melancholic weakness for taxi rides, autumn colours, fathers and their sons, the comforting whisper of crickets and frogs, tropical rain against zinc roofs and nights turning to rivers. He has had occasion, finally, to examine his father’s grave deep down among the wild Banana trees on the family plot in the parish of Saint Mary, with the desire not for a sign, but a familiar sensation. But nothing, except for an overwhelming sense of his mother’s love and her ever-lasting presence.
As he thought about it all now, entering through London’s Heathrow Airport from Jamaica, Immigration laid eyes on him:
“Where are you travelling from today, sir?”
“Kingston, Jamaica.”
“Why have you landed at Heathrow?”
“What do you mean?”
“What is the purpose of your visit today?”
“Excuse me; I am carrying a British Passport.”
“Do you live here, sir?”
“Am I speaking English?”
“We get all sorts speaking English these days.”
“Well, I live here, okay? Is that all right by you? Is this your welcome home?”
“You can go through now – sir.”
“Thanks a lot – mate.”
As he glided his bags and thoughts through customs, he thought out aloud to himself – “I must tell that one to mum, she’ll love it,” and that’s when it finally hit him – “but mum is died!” There was no more mum waiting patiently for him to come home to anymore. “Mum was dead! Mum is dead. My God!”
And standing there in the middle of Heathrow Airport he started to cry like a child. How could he ask her forgiveness now? How could he tell her he loved her, finally?
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