Teresa White
“… and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.”
From Love After Love, by Derek Walcott
I have heard Barbara Jenkins describe her memoir as “my little book.” It certainly is not that: neither in substance nor stature. It is a love story, starting with herself, “the stranger”, reaching from personal discovery, to fruitful union with another, to tragic parting, and back to personal rediscovery and affirmation.
Barbara’s early perception of her status as an outsider in Trinidad is intriguing. The word stranger originates in the Latin, extraneous, from extra, meaning “outside of.” On the surface, Barbara has all the attributes of the insider. She is from Belmont. With indigenous European and African ancestry, she represents our “rainbow nation.” She is a baptised and confirmed (though not practising) Roman Catholic, a powerful religion in Trinidad. She went to our best schools (Tranquility and St Joseph’s Convent). She taught at our best schools (Bishop Anstey High School and Fatima College). However, Barbara did not meet all the criteria to navigate these spaces confidently.
Barbara’s parents were not married. She did not know her father. This was a source of great shame for her mother, governed by the values of her faith and her parents’ gentility. She was very poor; food was scarce and stretched. Her mother was reliant on the father of her other three children and he was both physically and mentally abusive. He was of East Indian origin, so Barbara’s siblings had straight hair when she did not and that was something that could not pass without casual and brutal comments on the downtown streets of Port-of-Spain. Barbara’s sheer intelligence and industry gained her entry into Tranquility, but she did not have the income privilege of her also brown-skinned classmates. And, when she gained entry to the country’s top Catholic girls’ school by coming first in the country in the Common Entrance exam, this was compounded by not having the hall-passing pigmentocratic privilege of a 1950s St Joseph’s Convent.
Indeed, her memoir is sometimes an angry indictment of those excluding and wounding societal forces. But she is more fulsome in her gratitude. Retrospectively applying adult understanding of her mother’s sacrifices, she often feels guilty for previously taking so much for granted. Her fond memories of named Tranquility teachers are profoundly moving. As the daughter of teachers, I can attest to the weight of student gratitude in enriching that poorly paid profession.
A true outsider, Barbara sets sail on the moment of our Independence (August 31, 1962) for the no-longer Seat of the Empire. The meaning of “stranger” flips; paradoxically, her experience of being a stranger in a foreign place evolves from feelings of isolation at home to consciously learning to belong abroad. In her earlier short stories, Sic Transit Wagon, she describes meeting her husband, Paul, in The Perfect Stranger:
‘You looked into my eyes. I looked into yours for the first time. Green flecked with gold.
“Are you going to be all right now?”
“Yes.”’
By contrast, strangeness reverts to alienation in her memoir’s description of returning home:
‘I’d been away less than two years, yet when I got to the only place I’d known for more than twenty of my twenty-two years, I didn’t feel that home was Home. I was a stranger in that I had changed... I was in a strange land, a new one with a flag, an anthem, national songs and watchwords that I knew nothing of.’
Barbara captures these rituals of belonging (and, by extension, non-belonging) in her Christmas Pasts: Marmie’s shoestring Christmases, carefully packaged Trini Christmas goodies shamefully hidden under her university bed and subsequently joyfully shared, the new joyous traditions of Bristolian Christmases with Paul’s family. In her own words (It is 2020 at the time of her writing and she is anticipating a solitary pandemic Christmas.): ‘It comes to me now, reflecting on that Christmas 1970 how important ritual is in creating space and time for quiet thinking and saying things without words.’
Indeed, the ritual celebrated and shared is a testament to Barbara’s ultimate cultural confidence and syncretism. In Sic Transit Wagon it is a very ill Paul who insists on observing a “Dickensland” Christmas with the making of pastelles. This is not an easy undertaking in London and Barbara is impatient, but the ersatz ingredients, combined alchemically with ingenuity and love, cast their balming spell: ‘We didn’t talk about it, but I think that while we strolled, we were writing our magical end to our own story.’
The most conclusive essence of belonging is presented towards the end of her memoir in the familial bond, what Barbara calls the ‘secret fragments of DNA’: ‘Our children may not talk about childhood memories with their children, but whether they do or they don’t, they’ll be reflecting on our many Christmases past in Cascade with Marmie and Auntie and they’ll remember it, you and I know, as a happy time, as I remember those years with your family, who loved and welcomed me when everything they knew and saw in their world told them that it was fine and normal not to.’
It is now Advent and my mind also turns to Christmas. As I said in the beginning, this is a requited love story, so I shall take a leaf out of Barbara’s book and enjoy the delightful anticipation of reuniting with my own children for a Christmas celebration that will be in equal parts, like myself and my girls, both Trini and English.
