Maya and I started our routine of traveling to La Saggesse Nature Centre. We travel weekly to this special guest house snuggled into a corner of the island on the north east side. I have been showing my paintings here for the past 3 years and every Sunday I set up two tables to exhibit my prints and notecards that compliment the original pieces that hang throughout the tourist season. Every Sunday we are met with the contrast of our two worlds. We enter a world of vacationers finding peace on the cream colored beaches and the rolling predictable waves and leave a world of people that rarely or never find this sort of escape from the realities of their own lives. I think of Jamaica Kincaid’s powerful words in her book “A Small Place” which states:

For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, and every native would like a tour. But some natives- most natives in the world-cannot go anywhere, they are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go- so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your banality and bordom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.
(19)

I do enjoy our Sundays. I do enjoy meeting new people and sharing my work and escaping briefly my own chosen life here in the village and plunging into lives that are not so hard hit economically, historically, socially. I enjoy temporarily escaping the reminders daily of how hard people’s lives are here in the village and witnessing daily the effects of a tragic history of violence and oppression, that shows itself through the hard slap a small child gets while walking up the road because she is crying too much or the lashing out of words from a young boy frustrated “I go chop you” or hearing that another neighbour fainted in school because the teacher beat her; or remembering the time our friend got so frustrated with one of the village youths he took a large piece of wood and gave the boy a few lash and then pinned him down by the neck until we started yelling to let the boy go. Of course this is just one side of the village and even though the hardness is a constant here there is also a billowing softness that presents itself in watching a young man with a day old baby cradled in the nest of his arms walking in the early morning sunshine; or the kids gathered around an elder while she tells them of days gone by when tamarind was sweeter and breadfruit a daily gift from the nieghbours; or the greetings everyone distributes while pass one another in the road like “guidance sister” or “ blessings from the Most High” or “take your time friend”. There is a great sense of strength, resilience and connectedness here which is radiant at this time of year when christmas is a community affair.