creative commess

It’s been five years since I last wrote on here and now feels like a good time for life updates and lowkey flexing. Honestly, I have thought more about updating this blog within the past two months than I have within the last five years, so it feels good to be dusting off the cobwebs, throwing open a window and letting in some air and light on here. I am still writing, still working towards manuscript completion, slowly but surely like Aesop’s tortoise. In the past few years, I attended Tin House, applied to other things I didn’t get into, moved in with a partner, acquired a new tattoo, lost some plants, had some plants thrive (!!!), fell in love with two stray cats that come around regularly for food, went to Writers in Paradise, published another poem, and became a Periplus Fellow. Through all of that, I am still trying to figure out my optimal ways of creating and being.

These days, I am so deeply inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s attention to reviving the voice of black women from historical archives, and I encourage you to engage with her work if you haven’t. It’s such vital, necessary work that I resonate with on a soul level, which might seem weird at first to grasp since I grew up in a black and brown majority place, but there’s a strange and aggravating resonance with the ways in which you see the same kinds of women occupying the subaltern, shoved and boxed into the nether regions of societies in which they live. In considering calypso music, I have been thinking about the way that one black woman in particular, a black woman who lived and breathed, became constricted and filtered through the voice of the calypsonian singing about her, and what gets obscured in a musical archive that remains. I plan to work on a project about that as soon as I can decipher the direction I need to go and uncover some more sources.

Last May, I packed a carry-on sized suitcase, jumped on the I-4 and went to Orlando Carnival with Natalie, whose podcast episode includes soundscapes from our time there—listen to it here. We had a bellyful of delicious at Singh’s Roti Shop, enjoyed Fay-Ann and Bunji’s Back in Time Lime and witnessed Patrice Roberts’ stage presence captivate the crowd. I left Orlando with steelpan and Mical Teja’s “Runaway” (and other chunes) roaming about my head, audibly haunted like Mighty Shadow with his “Bassman.” I listened to “Runaway” repeatedly when I returned to my area of Florida and the chorus taunted me: “She need a lil’ runaway.” It’s a beautifully done song: the drums and the melodic guitars wrapped up in Teja’s storytelling of a woman determined to live life on her own terms.

Lorraine’s need to escape away from the cold to Carnival, to home, is the heartbeat refrain. As a Trini away in foreign years now, it’s a refrain I knew from long time—if you were exposed to kaiso, who didn’t grow up hearing Explainer’s “Lorraine?” But now I live that refrain and embody it; I am amplified by the reminder of Explainer’s Lorraine who is left behind while he is gone off to enjoy his life. During Carnival seasons as I scroll through footage, local and throughout the diaspora, I sometimes feel a yearning move through my bones. I love Carnival and grew up in a house with a father who played with Minshall, a mother who use to play Monday night mas, and had my foundation set in Kiddies Carnival for years, so whenever I cannot experience Carnival now, it’s mainly due to lack of funds or ability to get time off to do so (or both), not for lack of love or want. So it does go sometimes. Like Assata Shakur wrote, “people get used to anything.” Le sigh.