Controlling the Silver

Making Life

70 Making Life Jah never run no wire fence —Bob Marley The cherry afterglow of Negril spring break, sunset rays knit into his tam from the gold ball dropped behind Rick’s cafe, my student oversteps a gray snowbank on Liberty to ask me “Lorna, how can you live in exile?” Because it would take too long to tell how I left because my Jamaica was like a faceman lover with too many other women he was seeing on the side and I might have just died waiting for him to finally get round to doing right by me. But that is too long a story, so I wander and wonder instead: is it because we came from a continent why we can’t settle on our islands? Did our recrossing begin with deportation of maroons to Liberia via Nova Scotia? Are we all trying to work our way back to Africa? For soon as we fought free 71 we the West Indians picked up foot and set out over wide waters, to Cuba and Panama, anywhere in the Americas. And we never call ourselves exiles. We see our sojournings as “making life.” So after world wars when they wanted souls to bury dead and raise near-dead, they called us in as duppy conquerors. But when the job was done, they then tried to exorcise our task force, but we remained, took their brickbats and became Blackbrits and Jamericans. I first came north to paint pictures, but maybe I wanted firsthand acquaintance with the fanciful places named in songs. Isle of Joy, the song said Manhattan was. I’m from island in the sun, I had to come and my sweetheart poetry joined me. Not really exiled you see; just making life. ...