Me (CC1)

I grappled a lot with how best to go about my objective today of sharing something about myself with you. How I see the world is entangled in and shaped by where I was born. Therefore, I decided that to get to know me, you have to take a trip with me to my homeland.

There is a side of Jamaica that is industrious and persistent and loving and ambitious and able to make wine out of water. For me the community of Portmore, where I lived most of my formative years before attending secondary school, exemplified this. Portmore (just 1 hour or so north-east of the Norman Manley airport) was a new lower middle income residential community when my newly divorced mother in the late 1970s rustled up just enough money to make the down-payment on a new 2-bedroom house. It was a bold and scary and challenging move for her, as I’m sure it was for many of those soon to become our neighbors. Firstly, it was challenging because my mom was a teacher, aka “financially broke”. Secondly, Portmore was created by reclaiming land area from the sea (what we refer to in Jamaica as ‘dumped up’ land). This was a first for the island and later my mother would share with me that she felt terribly intimidated as all the males in the family told her with authority that the area would probably sink within 10 years.

You will be surprised to know that Portmore and our little house did not sink. In fact Portmore and the humanity of the connections formed there was the foundation on which my little-girl world found a very merry stability.

Foundation lesson 1 from my Portmore sojourn: Friends are like chocolates without the calories.

Shortly after moving in, my sister and I made the wonderful discovery that a pair of similarly aged sisters was our back-door neighbors.

As luck would have it they believed in grasping the opportunity for mischief with the same unbridled enthusiasm we did. The older of the two – the girly girl of the group - taught us how to put on lipstick, and I – the tomboy – taught our gang how to climb over fences quickly … a skill that came in handy for running from our mothers when they got hopping mad because they had again found us wearing the lipstick out of the house after telling us for the millionth time that this was not allowed.

Foundation lesson 2: Speak up.

The beach was 15 minutes away from where we lived. 15 minutes by car that is. And since we could never get enough of the beach, when our mothers couldn’t take us we decided it made sense to hitch-hike. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Actually our hitch-hiking excursions went smoothly and uneventfully until one Saturday when both our mothers compared notes and realized that we were tanned and neither of them was, and hence deduced that we had gone off to the beach on our-foursome lonesome. I was unconcerned – I was the youngest in the group, the worse case for me was getting a strong and stern talking to and I was ready to counter that with a very convincing, well practiced stream of silent tears flowing from sad downward cast eyes. But I figured my sister – poor thing – was in big trouble. Luckily she had teenage spunk on her side … she and the older of our two friends presented an excellent case of “I’m insulted you don’t think we’re old enough to get to the beach safely” and actually convinced the moms that they had planned things out relatively sanely. Amazingly thereafter – once it was all four of us and we followed certain rules – we got the OK to go to off on our own every now and then.

Foundation lesson 3: No money, no problem.

Because we all came from households where we had heard the phrase “Money doesn’t grow on trees young lady!” way too many times, we sniffed out the best places to go for a little no-cost fun. The hottest ticket in town – the neighborhood churches. Our band of four discovered that church provided the equivalent of free karaoke sessions on praise and worship days, and that communion Sunday was a wonderful opportunity to have a small taste of the closest thing we were going to get to wine (if anyone noticed that we rejoined the line several times, they were too polite to say anything about it).

In closing therefore allow me to introduce myself: I’m Monique French a consistently ambitious and inconsistently loving Jamaican, who tries daily to remember that friends are one of the sweetest parts of life, that it’s important to speak-up even when others do not share my view, and that enjoying life may not always be easy but it is cheap.

(July 2008)

_________________________________