So Many Islands by Nicholas Laughlin

Author:Nicholas Laughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2018-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Perilous Journey

Tammi Browne-Bannister

Antigua and Barbuda

One only has to peer at the face of an African to recognise blood in those features. Anasha considered this as she sat in the comfort of her TV room watching Roots. The people on the screen resembled the people she saw around Barbados. A few looked as if they could be relatives.

One would only think of family, presumably, after abandonment.

Anasha refused to believe she had materialised out of nowhere. When she was five, she thought a stork swooped over rooftop after rooftop with her in a cloth bundle before landing at the cement doorsteps of the Children’s Lodge, the place she used to call home. She believed this especially after watching cartoons of storks delivering babies like airmail on television, and after reading The Storks by Hans Christian Andersen.

When she was eight and a half, Anasha asked her former guardians at Children’s Lodge where she came from. They seemed as mute as a stork, a bird that, by the way, she discovered years later, was not indigenous to the island like the Scarlet Ibis was to Trinidad.

Even though the raven tone of her skin pointed to Africa, Anasha didn’t know the origins of the blood that ran through her veins. Some time ago, she discovered that most of the enslaved Africans brought to Barbados were from places like Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and from Central Africa. She raked her fingers into her scalp, as there were other bights and tribes to contend with, and she uttered the words, ‘never again,’ before shutting down the computer in frustration.

Who she was and where she came from saturated her mind. Her roots were scattered and pruned ages ago. Given the chance, Anasha would have become a genome donor to determine her genealogy. Maybe history would explain why she wasn’t inclined to the ways of those around her.

While watching television, her eyes wandered and she noticed a jet-black centipede, mammoth in size, on the wall. She gripped the arms of her chair. If it meant the death of an acquaintance, a colleague from the research plant where she worked or one of her virtual friends online, she would be tagged in a thread of the usual S.I.P.s and R.I.P.s that expressed sympathies and condolences on social media. She would receive a phone call. Anasha checked her cell phone. Nothing of the sort. Then could she be with child? This was another old wives’ tale she believed in, but no. She wasn’t pregnant, either – a novice to intercourse – not Agnes of God – for now, celibate by choice. In Anasha’s mind, Maat, the god of purity, had placed an arrangement in the starlit heavens of her existence and this she resolved to fulfil. Since she never knew family, she preferred to have sex after marriage and her children to have both parents present at home. One day.

Earlier that morning, Anasha had gone outside into the yard and dug up a lime tree that had outgrown its pot. The roots needed trimming.

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