FROM the FIELD

The articles in this issue reflect two very different aspects of Caribbean reality for the generation now in their 40's: two portraits of two lives in a microcosm of Diasporic experience called Grenada. The poetry and art result from the season we are all experiencing now.

He was Charles as a young man, Assata Imari now. Known as a fine soccer player and hard-working vegetable vendor in the seventies, his label today is "deported criminal", as in "hardened criminal", "dangerous criminal", "thrown out of the United States criminal". In earlier years he had relatives and friends, a bed, a place called home. Today he sleeps in abandoned buildings and fields because he's got no home and no one to trust. As an island youth, he moved freely on land and sea. Today the police keep him penned in when cruise ships come, not because he's been known to rob or steal but because his scarred, half-naked, black body and wasted appearance frightens tourists.

He goes, more often than not, without a shirt and scars are what take the observing eye. Neck to navel, his body's been cut: short, horizontal strokes from knives and broken bottles, the skin opened, thickened, purpled in the healing after fights and self-inflictions. When he, they, anyone comes for blood, he breaks glass, rips skin, slices himself so they see he is unafraid to bleed and die, see there is something wild about him, see that taking him would not be easy.

He is the oldest of five children, each of a different father. His mother, bitter or oddly proud, often told him, "the only man I haven't laid's the man in the moon". As a child, he was the older brother and like a father to the younger ones. As a child he moved away from mother's ways, thought her too hard, too rough on the small ones. As a boy he saw that "when I spoke to the children nice, they were nice but if I was harsh, they backed off. So I say we have to be more loving and respectful with one another. Make things comfortable. We can't yell at Jimmy, 'hey, you stink'. We should say 'Jimmy, here is what happen, you're a little older, I think you should get yourself set up, take a little shower'".

There was not enough money for food as a boy, certainly no money for school. At the age of 13 he was on his own and on the street, unskilled and unemployed, unable to read or write, hustling, playing soccer, living on little in the tropics. Though not in school, he was intellectually curious and hung out with schoolboys of his age, fascinated by their excited talk about Africa, Castro, Malcolm. His friends, however, finished school and moved on to jobs or college, leaving Charles, a boy with no connections or directions, drifting. He delivered papers, he ran errands, he did odd jobs, he sold marijuana.

It is estimated by those close to the trade that 50% of the people on small Caribbean islands where weed grows well are involved profitably in some aspect of its growth, distribution and sale. Charles, an industrious youth, earned a reputation as a trustworthy dealer who sold good produce and brought no trouble. He reached out, traveled and sold in Trinidad, St.Lucia, Grenada, and St.Vincent until becoming too well known and spending too much time in island jails.

The saying is true: there are too many criminals because there are too many laws. If marijuana had been legal then and now, or if Charles had sold cigarettes and rum instead, he wouldn't be a "criminal". He'd be a “hardworking, honest businessman” making lots of legal money and enjoying the community's respect.

But he was not selling cigarettes and rum and his future, as seen from a cell in local prisons, did not look promising. It was time to move out, get anonymous, be unknown. He signed on for grunt work on a cruise ship and sailed, as directly as possible, to New York and the land of dreams. It took a minute but in time a Caribbean dealer in the Bronx judged him promising and took him on.

For the next twelve years he sold grass, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, mushrooms and hashish in Manhattan. He was a good-looking, soft-spoken man selling quality goods who attracted and served a steady clientele. And he made money, more than he had dared to dream, enough for a $1000 a month apartment in the Village and enough for the nightmare he had never dreamed, a $100 a day heroin habit. He was arrested, imprisoned nine times, and, at the end of the century, deported to the island of his birth.

"Most of the arrests were for selling drugs?"

"Most. I don't like robbing people. Once you do that, you'll do anything. If I'm hungry, I'd rather go up to a man and ask him if he can find it in his heart to help me because I'd like to cook something up. But New York has a mind of its own: one thing leads to another and you can't always go the way you want. Like when a brother's being initiated and the bloods tell you 'gi'me blood, I wanna see blood,' you have to show'em blood. Or like when the boss tells you to do something, you got to do it."

"If the boss told you to kill a man, would you do it?"

"He never told me that but if he told me, I might have to. It's wrong to take a human life but if God's protecting a man, no one can kill him.

"You know the work of 'Black Men Against Crack'?"

He nodded, "It's good what they do."

"So you were against cocaine and selling at the same time."

"I had to survive. A man has a right to survive. If there's only one mango on the ground and Johnny and I are going for it, I may have to push Johnny aside. I don't like to do that but I will."

"What happened in jail?"

"I got clean and learned manners. There's a lot of discipline in jail. You learn 'snitches get stitches' and to say 'excuse me' and not to step out of line. If someone's on the telephone, you don't stand too close, you don't crowd a man. Manners saves you from a lot of fighting. I was a Muslim by that time and in prison we wore blue pins to identify ourselves. We got a lot of respect. As a Muslim I learned to see how great the earth is and that wherever you stand on earth is the spot that one day will be a witness for or against you. We'll all be judged but God is good. He never gives a man more than he can carry even though sometimes it's hard to carry it. You can be going along thinking everything's all right when suddenly the wind that carries the oxygen just stops and nothing moves and you don't know what's going to happen and then a breeze comes up and you go on a little longer."

Back in the islands now, he's never been more alone. He has no family or trusted friends, no money, no job, no connections, and no prospects. He sleeps in abandoned shacks and sheds, sells a little when he can, runs occasional errands, approaches strangers who "might have it in their hearts" to drop a little something on him.

He's in a dead air zone now. The oxygen isn't flowing and it's hard for him to breath, hard to imagine better days coming but he's lived in that zone before and tells himself he's got to be patient, tells himself the breeze will come, that God doesn't give a man more than he can carry, tells himself his birth sign is a warrior's sign and warriors don't give up. "People walk on your heart, man. They don't care, nobody cares, so it's up to me to keep my standards. I'm going to make it now. I've been clean for two years and I'm living healthier. Maybe I'll write a little poem about what I've been through, something to help young brothers see things right."

On Grenada, one of the many talents maturing in the past 20 years is poet and visual artist Sadnar Connell. Born in 1957, coming of age during the turbulent 70's, she shaped herself into a woman “at home with the changing shapes creativity takes.” Her's is a sensibility honed early in the cauldron of revolution/coup/invasion/and the stasis of marginalization. With eyes and heart wide open, she expresses pure emotion with intense elegance:

Over lunch, Sadnar and I deepened a friendship begun twenty years before. Among other things, we talked of how she viewed the Caribbean as a creative context. She reflected: “What I find is that before 1995, art and written expression were at a standstill. They were stuck in formal imitation. I am trying to portray energies more than objects. To break de mold and bend de frame.

Sadnar's art beckons us to enter, answer back, touch, take the next step in imagination together. She invites us to: