by Orita | January 15th, 2008
The Christmas and carnival season is often the first exposure to the Federation for children in the Diaspora. One young lady shares her reminiscences of her initiation to her parents homeland.
My first visit to St. Kitts was in 1982 when I was five years old. It was a whirlwind trip through St.Thomas, Montserrat, and St.Kitts with my father, and I think its cyclonic pace spun those memories into the ether.
And so it is that my first memories of St. Kitts are of touching down on the tarmac at Robert L. Bradshaw Airport, just before Christmas in 1985, with tears in my eyes. The pressure in the cabin had finally let up, and though my ears were flooded with relief, discomfort remained. I was eight years old.
I was born and raised in Suburbia, Ontario, Canada, with little exposure to St. Kitts or Kittitians, beyond my parents, on a regular basis. And so, despite my island heritage, I was thoroughly Canadian in everything from my tastes, culinary and musical, to my dancing ability, I could execute ballet positions perfectly, but could never manage to “wind up my waist” successfully. Everything in St. Kitts was foreign to me and, to be frank, nearly everything freaked me out: the cocks crowing in the morning outside of Papa’s windows, the crabs scampering across the sand at Frigate Bay beach, the scarcity of pizza and macaroni and cheese from a box, etc., etc., etc.…
However, I did manage to find something I loved – bottles of Fanta Orange pop. My parents, happy that I had finally found something in St. Kitts that I liked, allowed me the heretofore unheard of pleasure of a bottle of pop each day.
It took me another fifteen years to return; once again, over the holiday season. It was the year 2000, and I was in the throes of that transitory time between finishing university and dipping my toes into the unknown waters of the 'real world'. Again, the trip was made due to my parents’ urgings, but this time, St. Kitts enraptured me. With age, I had cultivated a more open-mind, and a desire to acknowledge and celebrate my culture. I allowed myself to view the island through the eyes of my father, for whom St. Kitts would forever be his first love.
Exhausted from finishing my studies, and the subsequent international move, I spent most of my trip reading and relaxing, but most of all, observing. Driving from the airport to Frigate Bay, windows down, the warm wind pounding my face, I felt the strange sensation of a homecoming. For the first time, I really saw the island – partially because I had allowed myself to proverbially open my eyes. Mostly, however, it was because my father and his best friend allowed me to tag along with them on lengthy drives through the countryside and the Peninsula, amid the lush and luminous landscape; I basked in the sea, the sunlight, and the rainbow-hued foliage.
During my childhood visit, I was often shunted to the side during adult conversation, but now, as an adult myself, my thoughts and opinions were now counted and I was now privy to, and enamored by, tales of family, family friends, and the island's history in general; I was initiated into the joy that is "de lime".
Still, every day I looked forward to retiring to my granddad's house on Taylor's Range, where I was sure there would be some Fanta Orange awaiting me in the fridge. That trip, it tasted even sweeter.
Three years later, I returned again, with the real world weighing heavily upon my heart. My mother and I, in addition to various aunts, uncles and cousins, descended on St. Kitts en masse. The reason for the trip? To bury my father in his chosen resting place: beside his mother, for eternity, in the embrace of the earth, of his first love, St. Kitts. This time, as we made the drive from the airport to Frigate Bay, windows down, the warm wind pounded my face like a slap, shaking me from my shell-shocked reverie. My heart broke then, for I fully realized that I would never again make this or any other drive with my jubilant father, and I dissolved into tears.
At one point, while swimming away from the beach at Friar's Bay, I turned around to survey the horizon. As the sun waned, its reflection spilled, glittering onto the water like diamonds. Perhaps, I thought, this was what my father's journey to the afterlife was like: floating calmly into the gentle unknown, to reach Heaven's brilliant embrace. At that moment, my heart began to mend.
My mother and I returned once again briefly, a year later, to set my father's gravestone. Again, my affection for the island grew despite the sadness of the occasion, and even as the red ants savagely bit at our toes in the cemetery. Though he was gone, now that he was part of the island, it was as though his spirit was everywhere.
Increasingly, St. Kitts felt like home.
The 2005 holiday season marked twenty years since my maternal family's last "reunion" in St. Kitts and my first "real" visit. Ever since my 2000 visit, I'd been dreaming of St. Kitts, literally and metaphorically, and I was happy to return for a joyous occasion. I so incessantly gabbed about the island's beauty, and the great "limes" and lobster that were to be had, that one of my best friends came down from New York, to experience it all for herself at New Year's time.
Over lunch one day, I asked my cousin's thoroughly American, then eight-year-old son, if he was enjoying St. Kitts. "No!" he remarked, sharply. "That's what you think now", I said. "When you get older, you'll love it." He gave no reply, instead fixing me with a look that connoted "stuuuups!"
And then, as we each took a sip from our cups of Fanta Orange, we shared a smile.
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