Home. It is a word heavy with meaning. One definition refers to the place of your belonging, the place that you are from. I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, a former British colony whose peoples have come to or been forcibly brought from many places to mix more or less uneasily on these two small land masses joined together for political expediency. I grew up in my grandmother’s and my mother’s gardens, lush spaces filled with plants brought from many places, with the backdrop of the hills of the Northern Range rising green beyond them both.
As a child, I did not know many of the stories of the people I came from. I still don’t know as much as I would like, but I have learned that, like the plants, they came from many places, places such as Portugal, China, Africa (but where in Africa is still unclear), Scotland, and Ireland, explaining my last name. The stories seemed to come from everywhere except the actual place of my birth, making the notions of home and belonging difficult to take root.
