The Origin of Waves Read Free Page B

where I could go; and it scared John that I was thinking along the same lines.
    Of course, we did not live through those times knowing it was anything like colonialism. We watched the Governor drive through our neighbourhoods, in his black, polished Humber Hawk, on his way to parades; and going to friends to drink rum and soda, and gamble with cards; and when his car stopped within touching distance, we stared at its glamour, and saw our faces in the sparkling bonnet. And once we caught him at a hotel, the Colony Club, where men who governed the island, although they were not governors, but only played polo, and drank whisky and soda, and lived in large houses, met to drink after a game; and we saw our faces again, and our grinning teeth in the bonnet of the glimmering Humber Hawk, while the chauffeur, a man elevated from our village, and dressed like an officer in evening uniform of black, deep black, stood beside the car, rubbing it down with a yellow chamoiscloth, as if he was rubbing down a woman’s thighs, as if he had not rubbed it down for hours, one hour before he left the Governor’s House, making it shine, from any distance, like a dog’s stones on a dark night.
    “You two sons o’ bitches,
no more further!
You hear me? Do
not
touch the kiss-me-arse white man’s motocar! You hear me?”
    John and I did not really live under the yoke of colonialism, as we had read in our library books that Africans did still. We said we were colonials because we were joking; because it was just our young fury and our imitating the words of older men and the book-learning we were getting at Combermere School for Boys that made us see ourselves as colonials, sitting on that sand on that beach, staring at waves that washed assertive and sullen strangers ashore, as if they were born like us, in the island, as if they were born here, to rule over us, here. We knew only what it could mean to be sitting on the sand all day, every day; and dreaming; and pretending we were the brother of that little boy who, in the poem we had to learn by heart, stood in his shoes and wondered, he stood in his shoes and he wondered; and we wondered why. We did not remember the name of the book or the poem in which we had read about this little boy and liked him. We did not wear shoes while we wondered whether the wave that licked our feet and our pink heels, the wave that brought the fateful cobbler into John’s pink heel, that washed my uncle in, dead and swollen, was the same wave born inanother country, and that had travelled alongside the steamer and the Canadian lady-boats and deposited the little blackened piece of wood, or stick, or flotsam and jetsam, at our feet. Or whether it was the same wave as those thousands which washed the ships of groaning Africans sardined in holds on our beaches where the tourist hotels are built. In my elementary school, Mr. Thorpe, our teacher, stood one afternoon before our class, First Standard, with sweat of his honest underpaid labour pouring off his face, as the tears poured from our eyes, as he poured “comma-sense” into our heads and ears and backs and backsides, because we had not remembered that a little piece of blackened stick, or wood, was properly known as “flotsam.” He screamed as he poured the knowledge into our small minds and bodies.
    “Flotsam!
The proper word is
flotsam
! What is the proper word? Say it again! Flot
-sam! Flot-sam!”
And each stress of pronunciation was riveted home with the heavy hand of pronouncement from the pronunciating tamarind rod. The rod of tearful justice. And from that soaked afternoon, I associated the two words to have the same meaning:
pronunciation
and
pronouncement
But we were acquainted with another kind of “flotsam,” since one or two of us, not John and I, were sometimes called “the flotsam of our society.” It was the English vicar, one morning at matins, from the pulpit made of lignum vitae by the hands of the village’s cabinet-makers, who