Home is where my heart is - ex-Trinidad citizen describes status among Afro-Americans

HOME IS WHERE MY HEART IS

For more than half my life, all of my adult years since I was 19, I have lived in the United States. When I go back home to Trinidad, they tell me that I speak with an American accent. I've lost my taste for hot, spicy food; just the smell of pepper burns my mouth. They say I have forgotten how to dance to a calypso. The steel-band pans don't talk to me the way they used to; I move to the beat of American soul music. I walk too fast, they say. I don't know how to "lime"--to just sit back and shoot the breeze. I'm always on the move. I think American. And after a week away I want to go back home--to New York.

I've lost more than the accent--worse, I've lost the language. The nuances in the jokes elude me most of the time. The words come too quickly for me to catch them. Idiom has become a secret code against me, locking me out. I find myself taking refuge within my family, going out only when they come with me to protect me from eyes that expose the humiliating truth: I no longer am who I think I am.

Not long ago, an African-American woman whom many claim to be a political activist and a fighter for the liberation of Black people said to me, "You need to be more sensitive to the situation here in America, Elizabeth. You need to understand that it was African-Americans like me and my friends who fought in the 1960's, who made it possible for us to have the rights and opportunities we have now. We didn't do that so that people like you could jump on a boat, come here and take our positions. You can't assert yourself here."

I had heard those words before. Seventeen years ago, one of my students had said the same thing to me. He was young, though older than I, and had no patience with cushioning the truth for the sake of my sensitivities. "You are taking a job here that belongs to a Black American," he said. "We didn't fight this fight to put you in the classroom."

His words triggered guilt. I decided to become a Black American. No clannish gathering of Caribbean friends for me. Collard greens. Black-eyed peas. Candied yams. Soul music. Jazz. Romare Bearden. The Invisible Man. I decided that the problem with West Indians was that they really didn't love their Blackness. When I would visit Trinidad, my feelings seemed confirmed: "The problem is, Elizabeth," my Trinidadian friends would say, "you see things in Black and white. Black people this, white people that. You are obsessed with this racial thing. This is Trinidad, a cosmopolitan country."

So I became a U.S. citizen. I wanted to participate in the political process, to become one of the movers and shakers of this country. It took me a while to get over the shame of using an American passport whenever I went to Trinidad. It still isn't easy to stand in the line for foreigners, watching the nationals smug in the self-confidence that they belong, knowing that I, too, could belong. I always remind myself of how good the reverse will feel when I return to the United States, but it is never enough to assuage the feelings of betrayal nor the sense of loss.

Years ago, when I first became an American, there was a Caribbean man I used to see every day on my way to work who built totems to his island home. His was the first house I'd notice when I exited the parkway. The long brown pole he was erecting in his backyard insinuated itself into my consciousness. I knew before he had put bark on it and stuck wide plastic fronds on the top that he was building a coconut tree. I always tried to avert my eyes when I saw him with his legs wrapped around the tree trunk, planting his coconuts beneath the palm leaves.

Then one day he mounted a paper-feathered macaw on one of the fronds; a few weeks later, a monkey swung by its arm. His nostalgic pining annoyed me, mostly because it wormed itself into the nostalgia that I thought I had suppressed. Assimilate, man! I said to him silently. None of this self-indulgent mewling. You're in America now. (I was in love with being a Black American then.) When he began sculpting a multicolored cobra slithering up the tree trunk. I'd had enough. I sucked my teen and found a new route to work.

Recently I decided to resume my old route. When I approached his house, I fought to keep my eyes on the road, but the sun caught some metal in his backyard and pulled me back to him again. I was shocked by the transformation. The coconut tree was gone. The savannah of wild grass he had planted had disappeared. His garden was now a junkyard full of twisted cars, rubble and rusty scraps of metal. My mind snapped a picture of him: He was sitting on a concrete stoop, a dirty white sleeveless vest exposing sagging arms, a dull, empty stare in his eyes. Mercifully, by the end of the month he had built a high wooden fence around his yard.

So wasn't this what I had wanted? Hadn't I almost been able to smell the peas and rice cooking in his kitchen? Hadn't his public longing for the Caribbean angered me?

But now everything has changed. I understand the disintegration that takes place before fences are built. I, too, had built fences around my own junkyard, fences that would ward off my longing, my anger, and my feelings of alienation. In my yard are relics of the past that I know can never be mine again. No matter what I say or do, no matter whom I blame, I have become a stranger in the country of my birth. I no longer belong. But the longing persists, more so because I now know that the promise of assimilation is simply a bad joke, a figment of my imagination.

No one wants me to assimilate. I fall between the crack that separates the white and Black worlds in America. I serve a purpose. I am a buffer--the culprit when Black America fails to get its fair share of the big pie and the camouflage when white America wants the pretense of giving. I have no home. In the end I know I can be discarded like the useless junk in that man's backyard.

But I am a hard-headed woman. I have decided to tear down the fences I've been building. I have decided to assert myself. We were both on that slave ship. Does it matter that they dragged you off before me? I will have no more guilt. I am, I say, just the way I am: Caribbean and American.

Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, Ph.D., is the author of When Rocks Dance (Putnam, 1986) and is currently completing a second novel.

COPYRIGHT 1990 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group