Tag Archives: memoir

Archiving, Mas Rhetorica, Petit Memoires

Grampadaddy’s Hands

Everything we do is a placeholder for another work-in-progress.

De other day when ah was in Trinidad, ah take a chance to take some picture ah meh granfather hand. “Grampadaddy.”

Grampadaddy: a name ah make up when ah was a youth. There are no theories about that.

Anyhow, ah dey playing with de camera and end up adding a “magic pen” effect to de picture. And then Boom. Meh fascination with he hand finds its roots where most fascinations do: with things that strike the fancy, stir the imagination, but are hardly ever known. Those mysteries that form the parameters of your life, providing the yard for your consciousness to go and play around in without the risk of getting lost–well maybe a little lost, but not entirely.

Grampadaddy's Hand, with Keys
Grampadaddy’s Hand, with Keys, La Romaine, Trinidad, 2013 (“Magic Pen” Effect, Samsung Galaxy SIII)

It have a poem inside here fuh meh to write, eh, buh it ent come yet. Ah hatuh wait on it. In de meantime, ah thinking. Thinking bout home. Thinking bout which one ah dem vein ah come from. De poem coming. Ah coulda even kinda hear it jumping up inside meh head. Then again, was carnival season. Christmas did just done, and the speakers and them by the bars and them turn up loud.

The rhythms can deceive yuh. Yuh could get lost in them.

But if getting lost in the things that have conspired to make me is at the heart of my fascination, then I suppose Grampadaddy’s hand is as good a place as any to start to find my way. There:

Motive.

For those still left to consider whether there is a rhetoric here, and whether this particular inquiry of digitized/digital archiving aligns in any way with my scholarly interests and ambitions, I say there is discernible motive:

The urgency of finding a way. The implicit contingency of making a way on your grandfather’s veins where there seems to be no other way, at least none you could see on your own.

On top of that will probably come a more carefully crafted consideration of symbols, their actions, and the inherent tensions between their metonymic aspects and their metaphoric ones, the dynamics of composition–de degree to which this or that is embodied or is simply meant to evoke the body, mine or his, or whomever’s, as well as…etc., etc.

That will come because it must. Because that is what I do. It’s kinda my thing.

Fuh now, though, is only this hand, with some keys, digitized to show the veins.

And I good with that.

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Archiving, Mas Rhetorica, Petit Memoires

Us as Kids (1976)

Us as Kids, San Fernando, Trinidad, 1976
Us as Kids, San Fernando, Trinidad, 1976

It is this simple: I want to be remembered. I look at this picture of myself and my cousins–Leonel on my right, Dionne to my left, Rhonda behind me, and Noel behind her–and feel sad that my nostalgia for other things is not as effective here. It shouldn’t be like that, but this is what it has come to.

It’s tempting, of course, to opt for the obvious symbolism as I grasp at straws for a language to explain what I mean. Symbolism, a domain I frequent. The matrix stands out (but, truthfully, it can scarcely receive more of a mention than this, reserved mostly for this or that conclave of skeptics and cynics with whom I tend to keep company from time to time). It’s enough to say that the framing was deliberate–perhaps as deliberate as the steel frame that taught us too well about gravity and texture. But this is how temptation works, I suppose. So it’s best to take it in stride.

The sadness is a trump card, though. A far better frame for my regrets, for things I miss and have missed. Funny how the regrets pile up in proportion to what we have not done, rather than the alterations we think we’ve made to history. No such luck, we find out. Often too late.

What happens then? When, having been put through the ringer, we come face to face with the stark limitations of an “all-too-humanness?” Hard to say conclusively, but (for me, at least) I turn to words. There’s a prophecy embedded somewhere in that: “turning to words.” A possible transformation. A wish. A story coming to pass (because, as the people say, What ent meet yuh ent pass yuh). So here it is: a project on a conception of the self whose beginnings are etched out in public, like an idea that through practice calls itself into account.

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