Caribbean Child: A Biographical Snapshot

My family has been here for many generations.

We were the colonisers, as well as the colonised. We were slaveholders, as well as slaves. Some of us came to the islands alone on big ships from mainland Europe, and some came in little canoes up from South America with our families and animals. Others were stolen, bought and sold, and still others were tricked with promises. We spoke French in Martinique, Dutch in Suriname, English in Barbados, Canarese and Native Languages in Trinidad, unnamed West African languages across the islands. Hundreds of years of cohabitation have led to me, so many stories from all over the world converging into one.

I was born by the seaside and I came of age with salt on my skin.

Every weekend my mother would take us to the sea, which in Barbados is no more than 15 minutes away in any direction by car. Playing on the white sand of Accra, snorkeling with turtles in the shallow clear waters of Sandy Beach, body surfing among the bigger boys and being pushed to the sea floor by what were then, to me, humongous waves! Fishing from Eastern cliffs with my father, spotting great big barracudas and sharks in the rough Atlantic, catching "sea cockroaches" along the shoreline for bait.

Technology is always a little behind out here. I remember when we got a computer in the house. It was Windows 95, and I had a little floppy disk which came from a cousin that had a few PC games on it. I remember when we got MultiChoice TV, and I could watch Cartoon Network for the first time, and then MTV. I watched Woodstock 1999 live and uncensored on MTV in the summer break from school — changed my life!

Before those days, we went outside to play.

There was a group of banana trees at the side of the apartment my mother rented and worked from, and my grandmother had this old walking stick with a hidden blade on the inside. As a boy, I thoroughly enjoyed stealing the blade (which I wasn't supposed to play with) and attacking the banana trees like a ninja. The juice from the banana trees ended up staining the blade, which I still have.

I used to ride my bike down the gap to A.'s house, where I saw my first pornographic image — a page ripped from a magazine. So old school! He found it under his older brother's mattress. It was confusing to me.

In another neighbourhood my friend J. and I explored abandoned buildings. One house still had cutlery in the drawers in the kitchen, family albums and old photos strewn across the bedroom floor. Piles of clothes. Dusty, cobwebbed. Obviously nobody lived there. Not anybody that was supposed to be living there, anyway. Shortly after the place was demolished and is still just an empty lot of overgrown grass. We scored another pornographic magazine, which we hid for later but quickly forgot about. By this time we were well versed in the internet, scouring IRC for all kinds of smut and trouble. He was from an expat family, wealthy to our standards, and they lived on the edge of what would become a golf course.

On the pre-golf course we teased a bull staked out in a field. The chain was long, and the bull ran in circles around us as we stood at the stake in the centre. Not a great idea but we survived.