| Summary: | "What's a mother?" is the first and most significant question I remember asking as a
child. It led to another: "Who is my mother?" Particular events, people, and landscapes
of my past in Jamaica beckoned me to return to the land of my birth to search for the
answers to these two questions. Once begun, the investigation raised more questions:
Without a mother to give me a sense of self, then 'Who am I?' - 'Who have I become?' -
'What forces have shaped my character and my outlook on life?'.
I use my body as a living archive from which to retrieve fragmentary details from
inestimable amounts of data, stored in the conscious and the unconscious. I construct life
stories that blend fictional and non-fictional elements. Conversations with Caribbean
friends and acquaintances both prompt my memory and elaborate details. Caribbean
fiction writers provide models for representing the human condition of Caribbean
peoples. Diaries of slavers and plantation owners, primary documents obtained from the
National Archives of Jamaica, and the libraries of the University of the West Indies
provide further data. I include observations and informed accounts of my travels along
the colonial trails. These life stories are about my motherlust, my family, my church, my
schooling and political moments in the history of the island we call Jamaica. History and
politics explain the social phenomena that emerge.
In composing these narratives, I speak in three embodied voices: the subject,
researcher, and author. I bring in the voices of significant family members, teachers,
preachers, friends and the folk in the Jamaican patois.
These stories attest to the truth-value of genetic, autobiographical, topographical,
and archival memory as matrices within which to conduct narrative inquiry into one's
origin. Embedded within these stories are lessons about identity formation, curricular
policy, schooling and the content of a colonial education, the subjugation of the history of
African people in New World slavery, and critiques of multiculturalism and globalization.
It is my aim that in reading these stories, students, teachers, educational and
community leaders will appreciate the generative potential of repressed memories. === Education, Faculty of === Educational Studies (EDST), Department of === Graduate
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