Tag Archives: colonialism
FMM 11 8 2024 Our Better Angels
“The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.”~ Saadi. I have no memory of this, but when I was quite young (our family was still living in England at the time), I stood in front of our black and white television and yelled: “Stop talking about Mr. McMillan!” He was the […]
FMM 9 20 2024 Sticks and Stones
“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.” ~ Barack Obama. I have spent more than 85% of my life living in a land that was not the land of my birth. Thus, as I recently posted on social media, I identify as Immigrant. My […]
FMM 8 16 2024 One Drop
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” ~ Marcus Garvey. I became a teenager at a time of racial upheaval in the USA. It coincided with the growing consciousness (‘woke’-ness) in Jamaica of young people of African descent. Rastafarianism and awareness of African culture […]
FMM 5 10 2024 Shaping Culture
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ~ Ray Bradbury. When I was very young, I was volunteered to be a model in a ‘mannequin parade’. This was a fashion show, and I don’t recall the details, but it may have been some kind of […]
FMM 4 19 2024 The Rebel in Me
“I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.” ~ Sojourner Truth. They say you can’t go home again. I have always had a problem with that concept, mostly because I have been fortunate to call many places home in my life. A minister’s family (at least back in the day, […]
FMM 9 2 2022 Living History
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl. I often wonder what happened to Evelyn. The first school I went to in Jamaica was a private ‘Prep’ school, run by a married […]
FMM 6 26 2020 Stay Curious
“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” ~ Mother Teresa. I am not sure when it is that we begin to be curious about our parents’ lives before we were born. Perhaps it is when we hit our rebellious teenage years, sure we have all the answers and our parents […]
FMM 5 29 2020 No Jestering
“Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.“ ~ Amos 5:24 and Martin Luther King Jr., (Letter from the Birmingham Jail). Growing up and attending a school in Jamaica (as in any country associated with the British Colonial past) included studies in ‘Bible Knowledge’ (BK, or some variation on that name). […]
FMM 10 12 18 Who am I?
“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne. When I left Jamaica in the mid 70’s, I hadn’t heard the word ‘Soca’ used to describe the music we associated with those small islands of the Caribbean. It was Calypso music back then, and we mostly heard it in a 5-minute block […]
FMM 1 19 18 The Nosebleed Section
“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.” ~ Maya Angelou. I first felt the full force of racism in Jacksonville, Florida. It was 1978. I had driven there to take my Nursing Boards, what is now known as the NCLEX-RN. At that time there were three sites […]
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