for love of writing
My (great) grandmother was a storyteller. I didn't know it at the time but she was carrying on the oral tradition of Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean for centuries. If I understood the significance of her stories, I would have recorded and preserved them like the treasures that they are.
Listening to her stories when I was a little girl was a treat as special as the coconut drops (diced dry coconut glazed and hardened in melted brown sugar) that she used to make for us in her small kitchen. My grandmother was what she would call ‘cheeky’ as a child and a bit of a hellion as a young woman in colonial Jamaica.
She described working for British families when the island was still a British colony and also seeing the political activist and later national hero, Marcus Garvey, speaking at Edelweiss Park in Cross Roads, Jamaica in the 1930’s. She didn't know at the time that she was watching history unfold but it was all the more exciting in the retelling. But in addition to telling strange, humorous, and sometimes silly stories, she was doing something else. She was imparting a love of stories and storytelling to her wide-eyed granddaughter.
Even now I remember coming home from elementary school, proudly displaying the little shiny star that I would sometimes get for the compositions that I was assigned. That was the thing I remember being most proud of as a girl. I thought about careers in writing like journalism but although I did every literature course that I could, all the way through high school and college, I never settled on a career in writing.
But I have never lost the love of it.
I’ve dabbled but I have never made the decision to write what I love and what speaks to me. It was always linked to a tangled ball of emotions – fear of failure, fear of people’s expectations, imposter syndrome, and all the other angsty feelings that try to block us from reaching for our dreams.
In the past year, I have had to strip everything down to the brass tacks and ask myself a series of questions meant to uncover what truly brings me joy. Questions like - what would I want to have accomplished if I were to leave this earth tomorrow? And like the little boy with the two loaves and five fishes in the Bible story, what do I have in my hand that can be multiplied?
And as always, writing floats to the surface. So these days I am writing with a bit more structure and discipline and a lot more grace. I have unlinked it from any performance indicators. I’m enjoying the process and I hope others will enjoy the result.
There is a freedom in the act of creation that I had never embraced. And a joy that is as sweet as the coconut drops from way back when. It is everything that I experience even before another set of eyes ever see my work and this has made all the difference.
It is the final link to complete the chain that started when my grandmother opened my eyes and ears to the magic of words strung together with humor and a bit of fantasy. It created a desire in me to imagine, and to be the one to string those words together that I can then fling up to heaven (channeling the great Maya Angelou) and having done that, my joy will be complete. And if all goes well, when the sprinkles come back down, it will bring joy to my readers too.
