CHAPTER 1
Childhood Years
The Omen
Françoise Hardy, Françoise Sagan, Françoise Dorléac. What do these three women have in common? I mean, besides the obvious: sharing a seemingly popular first name.
They are house-hold names in France and across much of the francophone world. But more importantly, as it pertains to this narrative, they were role-models to my eldest sister who, when she was a teenager, kept newspaper and magazine clippings of those celebrities in a giant white notebook. Especially of Françoise Hardy who had a hit pop-song in 1964 and became an overnight teen sensation at 17. My sister, a melomaniac, never tired of singing Françoise Hardy's melancholic love songs. Françoise Sagan wrote her first best-selling novel at the age of 19 and Françoise Dorléac was a budding actress whose career was curtailed by a fatal car crash. What my eldest sister admired most about her three idols, besides their talent, was the symbolic meaning of their first name and the personality traits it's rumored to connote: pride and free spirit.
My eldest sister, whose first name also connotes pride and a free spirit, had some idea that she was named after my father. However I doubt if she realized, as I did much later, that she was possibly perpertuating a tradition that required the eldest daughter to be named after the father. I had noticed that naming pattern among several relatives and had concluded that it must be one of those African traditions that had miraculously survived the enslavement of African peoples by Europeans and remained imprinted in the subconscious. Indeed I know of three female relatives, two of them my seniors by more than a decade who, as first daughters, have been named after their fathers.
My eldest sister took great pride in her first name, to the extent that it gave her a special status within the family unit and something in common with those three celebrities. She never missed an opportunity to gloat about it, going as far as hinting at a possible personal renown in the future, like her three idols.
My eldest sister, Ciska, entered this world with a split forehead, a forehead split in two by a frown, a frown that shortened her eyebrows, even while she slept. My mother pointed to that frown often, every time the family browsed over the few faded family photos. In her opinion that frown was an omen.
In those good old days of no radio and no television in the average household, family gatherings were a frequent occurrence on lazy rainy Sunday afternoons, at our home anyway. The gatherings usually consisted of my mother surrounded by the steadily growing number of my siblings, and me. We never reached the soccer-team number of eleven, as planned by my father, but came pretty close. Indeed, after two miscarriages, the symbolic figure nine was reached and my mother announced her retirement from childbearing.
A couple of us hovered over my mother's shoulders. The younger ones were perched on the arms of her bamboo armchair or sat at her feet. We passed the photos around, marveling at pictures of elders we never knew and at those of younger versions of my mother and father. Whom was mom trying to fool? No way those slim, trim, smiling youngsters and our parents were the same people. They may bear some resemblance to our parents, but that's about it. The younger siblings, especially, were in total disbelief. They remained unconvinced that their parents had a first life.
We did not own a photo-album in those days, a luxury. Such items were not even to be found in most shops. Why it never occurred to any one of us to explore our innate creativity and to attempt to invent our own crude homemade album, I'll never understand. A photo-album has to be bought, not made, to have any value. This must be a third-world thing: Consuming as opposed to producing.
Anything imported was generally held in higher regards than anything local. While it was true that many imported items such as dairy products and leather goods were in fact of better quality than their local counterparts, this predilection for anything imported had been extended to include such items as canned meat, canned fruits and canned milk. Hosts would proudly serve their honored guests tea, with condensed, as opposed to fresh, milk. In those days, local dairy farmers would make daily home-deliveries of their unpasteurized milk which had to be boiled by the consumers. As the milkman would measure and pour the milk in my mother's bowl, the aroma of fresh raw cow's milk was strong enough to attract all the stray cats in the neighborhood. When boiled, the milk would yield a thick, rich, velvety cream that rose to the top and attested to the freshness of the product. In that same spirit of reverence for anything imported, canned peaches would make their way to the dining table on special occasions only, which, in retrospect, was not a bad thing. For Christmas and on New Year's, the odorless slices of canned peaches (which, by the way, were less affordable than fresh fruits) soaked in their syrup alongside fragrant and succulent fresh mangoes, lychees and pineapples.
Other displays of such third-world mindset never ceased to amaze me later on in life. For example, while visiting the family after seven years of living abroad, I once watched my sister as she swept the floors. Instead of collecting the trash on a piece of cardboard (in the absence of an official made-in-China dustpan) and throwing it in the trash-can, she pushed it outside in the yard, then proceeded to sweep the yard later, thus creating double work for herself!
Then there was the clothe-line issue! My Afro-American mother-in-law first brought it to my attention one day while I was hanging some clothes on her clothe-line. The way I operated was archaic, and I fully agreed. Why, before securing it with pins, fold the laundered item in half over the line, the way it was done during the pre-clothe-pin era? Why not have it hang fully spread out, for faster drying? Is such mind-set a remnant of our age-old attachment to tradition as inherited from our African ancestors? Tradition over practicality? I obtained the response to that conjecture a few months later.
While pursuing graduate studies and residing in the married student housing complex, I once observed a neighbor, the wife of a fellow-student, as she hung out clothes in the above-described manner. When questioned, ignoring my suggestions, she replied: "That's the way it's done at home. I see no reason to change." She was from Nigeria.
But let's resume our photo-viewing session! My father was usually absent from those gatherings for the simple reason that, as a longshoreman, he worked different shifts that included nights, weekends and even holidays. He had to remain available, to stay on call on account of delayed ships or ships that reached the port earlier than expected. In those good old days, 'On Call' unfortunately, did not mean that he awaited a phone call from his boss. But then again, who owned a phone in those days beside law-enforcement and health-care employees? Instead he would look over towards the harbor every hour or so to see if any new ship had docked. Indeed, as our home stood in an elevated area, at the foot of the mountain range surrounding the city, the harbor was fully visible from home by all family members, except for the unknowingly myopic ones, which included me. Considering my own vision to be the standard and using it as a yardstick, I did not really believe those who described the different ships at berth. How could they see those ships at such a distance, without binoculars? My father was even able to identify the different ships as Dutch, South-African or Australian. Those of his fellow longshoremen whose residences did not enjoy a view of the harbor had to go in person to the workplace just in case a ship showed up.
Although my father's line of work called for relentlessly long hours, 'between-harvests' time, to use his expression, did bring him some respite every now and then. Indeed the sugar-industry was then the country's main source of revenue; it has since been supplanted by the tourist-industry. So, every now and then, my father was able to take his rightful place in our family tableau-vivant.
The frowning baby in my mother's arms was her second child and eldest daughter, Ciska. The photo, which dates back to 1952, had been taken in a studio, of course, since a personal camera was then an extremely rare commodity. My father is standing next to my mother who is seated and holding her newborn daughter. My eldest brother, then one year old, is standing between my parents. A rare and much cherished family photo that is part of the family heirloom, as no such picture exists of the other siblings.
My mother rejected the suggestion that the baby's frown might just be a case of indigestion or hunger, or an expression of discomfort: "Irritated babies, hungry babies, sick babies, don't just frown silently! They whine or cry! A premonitory birthmark foreshadowing doom and gloom, that's what this is." My mother refused to budge from her position. Later as we were growing up, my mother was to make frequent references to that frown, whenever Ciska, as a child, would act recalcitrant, disobedient or downright rebellious. As an adolescent, she had absolutely no regard for my mother's parental authority. In the history of mother-daughter relationships, theirs had to have been the most dysfunctional that ever existed.
My personal interpretation of that frown is that Ciska, even in her unconscious state as an infant, must have somehow sensed that she had stepped into a hostile world where she would be served more than her fair share of alienation. She frowned, probably because she was already absorbing negative energy from her immediate environment. The maternal embrace was not succeeding in bringing feelings of safety and security. General and Child Psychiatrist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing seems to support and confirm that interpretation. In her work entitled "The Isis Papers, the keys to the Colors", on page 2188, she states: "The newborn infant can tell from the mother's first touch whether she is pleased or disappointed with its color, appearance and gender. Certainly later the child can tell the mother's respect for Blackness by comments she makes about who is a pretty girl, who is a handsome boy and who has the proverbial "good" and "bad" hair."
Ciska started displaying an uncommon intelligence very early on, an intelligence that, no doubt, accounted for a heightened sense of self-awareness and perceptiveness that caused her to overanalyze her interactions with the world to the point of seeming paranoia. Coupled with that uncommon intelligence or maybe produced by it, was an authoritative, proud and defiant nature. She could not stand blatant injustice. She was about ten years old when she decided to abstain from doing house-chores because, as in most households, those were assigned solely to female children. In households with male children only, the mother was the 'bonne a tout faire'.
"How come boys are dispensed from doing house-chores?" Naturally she never received an answer to that question since she was questioning the natural order of things that no female child in any family had ever challenged.
The boys in my family had but one responsibility: collecting firewood from the neighboring hills weekly or monthly or as needed. In Ciska's eyes, that was not even a chore. That was an expedition full of the promise of fun and excitement. The curious and adventurous little girl that I was shared her big sister's view.
One seasonal activity begrudged by neither the boys nor the girls, and for obvious reasons, was the hauling and disposing of chopped cacti whenever my father trimmed the hedges. He had us competing with each other for the fastest round-trip to the dumpsite, the only thing slowing us down being the prickly thorns and the pungent, poisonous milky substance streaming from the green cacti. "Don't let that stuff get in your eyes. You will go blind!" Obviously a scare tactic on the part of my parents, because I have never heard of any such case of blindness; eye inflammation at best. We were remunerated according to the number of baskets we emptied at the dumpsite.
Daily unremunerated chores, however, were solely the lot of the girls. And they included washing dishes, cleaning the house, sweeping, dusting, mopping, cleaning after and bathing the younger siblings. Running errands was the lot of whoever happened to be around at the time my mother needed someone for a quick trip to the store. And let's not forget plant-watering and yard-sweeping. As teenagers, the girls' chores also included laundry by hand and ironing, while my mother continued to launder and to iron her sons' clothes. Ciska had a problem with that set-up even though it was indeed the norm in most families, or maybe precisely because it was the norm. To her that was grossly unfair, not to mention that she considered house-chores totally beneath her and a total waste of precious study-time.
Another area in which Ciska challenged my parents' authority, especially my mother's, was religious practice. Our ancestors' enslavement by the French, followed by colonization by the British, had long guaranteed our unfailing loyalty to Christianity. As practicing Catholics, we went to confession on Saturdays and attended mass on Sundays. In those days and still today, Sunday service was primarily an opportunity for the congregation in general and the young congregants in particular, to showcase their sartorial elegance. In some well-to-do communities, Sunday morning services had transformed the church aisles into walk-ways for fashion-shows that reached their crescendo during communion, when you had to walk all the way up to the altar to receive the Eucharist before returning to your pew. The last communicants to reach their seats were those purporting to be the best-dressed nonpareil. And of course that was fine, if you had nice clothes to showcase. That was not the case for my siblings and me; the reason being my father's core philosophy about life, in general, and clothes in particular.
My father was a man who, at the tender age of ten, was kicked out of the house by his own mother. The story goes that, unlike his younger brother, he was a spit-image of his father. He reminded his mother too much of the man who had abandoned them. She remarried but the step-dad died shortly afterwards. In any case, my father had to devise and develop survival strategies to make it on his own through adolescence and early adulthood. At an age when the average teenager's preoccupation was what to wear to the next dance, he had to worry about where his next meal would come from. So, to him, and understandably so, dressing his fast-growing children in the latest fashion was not at the top of his priority list.
Clothes and shoes were routinely passed down from one sibling to the next, unless they were in no condition to be passed down. While my eldest brother and sister were spared hand-me-downs, the rest of us were not so lucky. Me, especially. Why? Well, I was the fifth child, and the fourth one was a boy! More than once I've had to choose between going barefoot and wearing shoes out-grown by that brother. Remember! We are not talking about unisex-style footwear here, but rather unequivocally distinct male and female leather shoes! But I digress.
So we had a roof over our heads. We did not go to bed hungry. We owned one school uniform outfit and one Sunday church-outfit. What else could we possibly need? My father firmly believed that all your material needs had been met once you had nutritious food, sturdy shoes and a comfortable bed. Everything else was superfluous. And by shoes, please understand that I mean school-shoes, in secondary school. We walked barefoot to Preschool and Elementary school up to the third grade. From the fourth to the sixth grade we wore slippers, which explains why my mother's evenings were often spent pulling splinters from the soles of some of us, careless steppers.
My siblings and I were not keen on attending the 8 A.M. Sunday service. We did not own a different outfit for every Sunday of the month. To be caught in the same outfit twice in a row was the epitome of shame and disgrace. And since not attending church on Sundays is a sin (not a mortal one, thank God), my mother devised a strategy. We would attend the 4 A.M. service which offered a three-fold advantage in regards to our dilemma: We would leave and return home in the dark. The 4 A.M. congregation consisted mainly of insomniac seniors who were too busy nodding during the sermon to notice anybody's attire. Finally, the church was not very brightly lit.
