Prologue:

Memoirs are more the province of the prominent and the exalted among us aren’t they? Why would a regular guy, an ordinary person who has led an altogether undistinguished life write of his experiences? What am I trying to prove? Am I bragging or complaining? Is it simply narcissism and self absorption that has motivated this examination of my life?

While there undoubtedly are elements of a rather large ego at work here, although probably no larger than yours, there are redeeming qualities to this narrative of the minor travails and little victories of a small life. For starters, my story is the story of emigration from family and country, a story of new beginnings in a different world, a story of coming of age in two different cultures, a story of the struggle to belong and to be included in the face of other pressures to isolate and exclude, a story of the initiation of an adolescent from a visible minority into the larger society. The story takes place first in the Caribbean and later in Canada, although the places of origin and of later residence could be different and still have familiar resonance.

The motivation specific to this examination of my life began in the nineteen seventies when I had been in Canada for twenty years.

My mid life crisis started early. I was in my mid thirties and had been mired in a depression which had passed the acute phase many months ago, a depression which in its third year now had become my reliable companion. It accompanied me to the workplace and turned my nightly attempts to sleep into terror filled rounds of panic attacks, cold sweat, pounding heart, suffocation for lack of breath and sleep paralysis featuring desperate but frustrated efforts while falling asleep to scream myself back to consciousness before I cross over into an abyss from which there was no returning. These reflexes to return to consciousness only resulted in muted mumbling before I became again awake. In a state of terrible agitation, I would then lay awake afraid to fall asleep again, the struggle not worth the unhappy prospect of repeating the unpleasant cycle.

Over time this condition removed the value of sleep as a restorative factor and the resultant sleep deficit simply reinforced and prolonged my depression. Life at these times seemed simply not worth living.

Superficially I had no good reason to be depressed. I had all the trappings of a successful life, a good job as a college instructor, a devoted, intelligent and attractive wife, and two accomplished children. On the face of it things, life could get no better. The logical disconnect between the bleak psychology of my depression and the fact that by all objective criteria I seemed to have found the happiness so desperately pursued by humanity, left me to conclude along with some of the darker thinkers of existentialism that life was indeed absurd. Or maybe there was something wrong with me. Maybe this was the precursor to some more difficult mental condition yet to come.

I knew of two alternate remedies to strive for deliverance from the impasse in my life: God and psychiatry. A third option was available and periodically entered the mix in my internal dialogue, but I was a coward and repeatedly dismissed the option of self destruction. I was also very curious about the person that was me and had some interest in sticking around to see what was to become of me and of the three other people with whom I now shared a life.

God as a remedy had been a possibility. The sheer simplicity of the evangelical message which I remembered from my childhood in the Brethren Church in Jamaica would be a ready-made, familiar recourse. Give your heart and life to the Lord, an easy formula for anything that ails you, plus the added benefit that in so doing you guarantee yourself a spot in heaven after you die. The panacea of Christ as antidote to depression and to every thing else was available.

I was vaguely cognizant that my skepticism about religion was a likely part of the difficulties that I was experiencing. I was not sure what role, if any, religion played in my then current psycho-physical crisis. Was it the lack of religious practice in my then current life that precipitated my durable depression? Was it the fact that I had not dealt with the doubts I had concerning the literalistic interpretation of the Bible in evangelical churches or the tendencies of each fragment of a fragmented faith to claim exclusive possession of spiritual truth?

Psychiatry at this stage was not an option. At the time psychiatry was considered an indulgence of the idle rich and of celebrities in the entertainment industry. I met neither of those criteria and I was still able to function relatively normally at work and in social settings. Once relieved of the contact with the public however, I would collapse, become tense, lose focus and  develop a bewilderingly diverse set of psychosomatic conditions. I was loath to contemplate that I was psychologically weak, mentally unstable, incapable of withstanding the rigours of life. To contemplate psychiatry as a remedy was to admit to mental weakness. I was not yet prepared to so admit.

Could heredity explain my long lasting depression? I had a half-brother who suffered from mental illness, probably schizophrenia. Was it something that that I shared with my mentally unstable brother be at the root of our common problem?

In an instinctive way, attempting to shed light on my dismal psychology I began to talk about my childhood to my wife. This process exposed some unresolved moments of trauma from the first decade of my life. One morning at 2:00 a.m. after another period of agitated sleep and night terrors brought on by my panic attacks during sleep, I awoke after a dream which I was convinced represented symbolically the moment of my birth. I was the nucleus in a shiny, fragile, iridescent soap bubble blown around in a silent but windy landscape of low shrubs on a rocky hillside. In my sleep deprived, semi-hallucinated state I realized that my dismal outlook was probably composed of the burden of unresolved issues that I had internalized and which had accumulated over the first decades of my life. I became increasingly aware that I still had a frightened child inside me waiting for some guidance to resolve the difficulties which, although glossed over with a shiny veneer of normalcy and acceptance, still festered beneath. I had “moved on” as they say but I still had not gotten over the ignorance of my origins and the uncertainty of my destiny. The detritus of my past was now getting in my way. Those toxic silences about my origins had produced at least one victim. I could ignore my past at the price of remaining forever stuck in some uncomfortable limbo. I got up from my bed and recorded the dream encounter in the form of a poem.

That night I knew that I had to go back to play a role in the life of the infant, the child and the adolescent that I had been. I had to become father, advocate or older brother to the me that I had left behind. I had to launch a retroactive rescue of the child who had struggled to make sense of his life or risk staying in a permanently depressed state. I would put a more favourable spin on some of the moments I had lived. Where there had been gravity I would introduce levity. If I was successful in reassuring the child, I had a chance at least to give a more healthy perspective to the adult who was struggling with an intractable depression even if my adult brain had already been modified and wired by the conditions of my infancy and youth. Maybe the child and the adult could undergo an evolution in tandem, the child retroactively and the adult from then on.

Very early in the process I realized that as a child I had no voice. I could speak but what I transmitted was information of the most rudimentary nature. Opinions, preferences and ideas were not a part of a child’s repertoire. This, of course was general to all the old authoritarian cultures and not specific to mine. Children were to be seen, not heard. With the shifting and unstable nature of my early life however, and the sensibilities that I possessed, I developed no confidence in my own ability to contribute in any way to my little world nor to the larger community. I had evolved quite naturally out of this voiceless, disempowered child into a disenfranchised adult.

With virtually no juvenile voice, my psychotherapy could best be done by writing. And while writing about my early life I decided that the child and the adolescent would have the adult voice, the one that had emerged out of the experiences of the younger me, as incongruous as it will appear. The experiences in the anecdotes are those of the child and the recounting, editorializing and the hyperbole are those of the adult advocate of the child thirty to fifty years after the events.

As an inheritor of a culture which prescribes appropriate behaviors in most domains of life and makes judgments on those prescribed norms, I had over my shoulder, the troubling presence of many of the champions of that approach to life who would look somewhat disapprovingly at the disclosure of details of a personal nature. In that tradition such admissions could be considered vulgar and common place. Why unearth details of a past which is sometimes less than glorious? Maybe to give a voice to those who, despite the best intentions of all concerned, had marginalized themselves psychologically. Maybe the resolution I needed to my difficulties could only occur in the presence of candor and sincerity.

In time I found another, more positive reason to persist in exploring my childhood, teen age and early adulthood. In mid life I grew into a curiosity about my family antecedents and the motives for their actions. I assumed that my children and grandchildren would in turn experience this desire to know about their parents especially about the pre-adult parts of their lives. Moreover, unless my children and grandchildren choose to leave Canada they will never experience the heartaches and adjustments of the immigrant nor feel the insecurities of arriving into a community of strangers.

A few additional details of an “housekeeping” nature seem to be in order. It is best to start with the end in mind and at the end of this project of recounting the life of the young me, the reader will wonder at the decision to terminate the narrative on the cusp of adulthood. In the process of planning this account of my youth I concluded that what makes me somewhat unique or interesting as an adult in Canada are precisely the moments of my greatest insecurity, my childhood and uncertain transitions from my rural Caribbean beginnings to my emigration to an urban milieu and eventually my emigration to North America. Of the adult that the child became, nothing will be said beyond the moments critical to the realization that self-examination was necessary and potentially instructive. Suffice it to say that the adult lived a life of quiet evolution from the child that I was to a much older child, though wiser.

That I have lived to become a grandfather is a source of constant and pleasurable surprise to me. I owe this modest achievement to two women. Gloria, my father’s youngest sibling, rescued me from an environment that had threatened to overwhelm me. She became my mother and brought me with her when she moved to Canada. Deanne, my wife, persevered through the times of my discontent. The rewards for her perseverance are the two families of our children, families which never cease to delight and enchant us.

The lyrics which introduce the anecdotes are more than gratuitous offerings since they are not only props for the narrative of my early life but are also intermediaries for recall. They are the matrix of cultural trivia into which the memories of events are embedded.

As well, it seems prudent as the geriatric that I now am, to practice remembering until the little holes in the fabric of memory consolidate and merge to erase our knowledge of ourselves and present us again, if not with a tabula rasa, the clean slate of our birth, at least with a cleaner slate on which to write our next existence.

Ladysmith, B.C. April 2006

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