How to Be Unmothered: A Trini Memoir

I am a Trinidadian woman with a long maternal line. A legacy of mothers who does leave. Women who does conceive and abandon all they child. At 13 years old, after my mother took a one-way flight, I read Annie John say to her mother, 'I wish you were dead'. This to the mother who enmeshed then rejected her, from whom Annie in self-preservation fled. And, in Kincaid's semi-autobiographical novel, I finally found someone who told the truth. My truth. Of my abusive mother. The one relegated to my head. The maltreatment that had to go unsaid. Because Caribbean realities, like Caribbean families, live behind gauzy, white curtains. There is no ugliness. None is allowed to escape. We save face. Our social conduct is hinged on secrecy, on never bringing shame. And too few rent the veil. But I am a storm. I do not comply with the norm of Caribbean writers, sometimes complicit, hiding behind fiction and not apprising the world. Caribbean writers concealing the domestic and societal abusive ills visited upon our girls. Understandably. To an extent. Since, trust me, I get deep trauma isn't easy to face. J. Brooks Bouson argues that Kincaid is still bound to her shame. That her endless repetition evinces her inability to confront and work through the past. And much the same some say of Roxane Gay who, after nearly thirty years, has confessed to her Haitian parents and is writing of her gang rape and defensive weight gain at last. But I pen memoir and reveal our ugly truths. Exposing such is my responsibility. And not since Annie John has a Caribbean work of literature showcased an evil mother as my collection of essays do. I am writing to that 13-year-old little girl who needed someone to say it's not just you. How To Be Unmothered's narrative begins with me at nine years old when, for once, I'm not guarding my mother from my father knocking her out cold. In revenge, my mother sends me down the drugs and rape-laden Covigne Road. Then, deserted at 13 when my mother secretly leaves, I begin tracing my un-mothering lineage across five generations. All the mothers in my maternal family line abandon their children. I link this tendency to my mother, Smiley, who has incestuous affairs. She bites and fights in-laws before running away from Trinidad, leaving me ill and neglected for years. Till I am 19 and execute a dangerous escape from my father who nearly kills my younger sisters and I one night. Desperate for safety and reunion with our mother in Brooklyn, we take flight. But a woman who does abuse is never a refuge. The soucouyant unmother in another country is just the same. Thus, alone, eyes blown wide open, without my mother-loving sisters, I head for JFK. In this text, I reflect on the multi-faceted cruelties of this mother who subjects all her daughters to neglect. And I ponder, what if abandonment is good luck from a mother who turns out to be worse? A mother who can cause more harm than a father using his fists to make it hurt. My memoir charts dawning realisation, without which I would still be my mother's victim. Narrated in poetic prose and the rhythmic patois of Trinidad and Tobago, HOW TO BE UNMOTHERED explores Caribbean history from pre-colonialism to the contemporary. It invokes cinematic scenes of aquamarine seas and the islands' lush greenery. It journeys from Trinidad to Grenada, England and Canada, to New York City. It provokes questions about the chokehold of African spirituality. And reveals the role of choice in determining multi-generational legacy.

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