I don't know exactly when it happened.

Nobody called a family meeting. Nobody sent an email. There was no official
passing of the torch. I just heard myself talking to my kids one day and realized, oh
shit. I'm the elder now.

I'm the person telling the stories now. I'm the one saying, "When I was growing
up..." I'm the one explaining what things used to be like. And every time I hear
myself doing it, I understand my parents a little more.

I grew up in Jamaica at a time when life looked very different.

I remember taking two buses in grade 6 to get where I was going.

I remember my mother telling me about the Blackheart Man, who was apparently enough of a threat to make children behave.

I remember bush tea being the answer for damn near everything.

Gas? Bush tea.

Belly hurting? Bush tea.

Something else wrong with you?

Somebody was going outside to pick something and boil it.

I remember an outside toilet.

I remember when having one or two television channels was perfectly normal. Then satellite came along and suddenly it felt like the whole world had entered the house.

These things sound ancient when I say them to my children.

Which is rude, because I am not ancient.

But I also grew up surrounded by people whose names weren't necessarily their names.

My mother's name is Barbara.

Everybody called her Cecile.

I didn't even know her name was Barbara until I was about twelve.

And my question remains:

If y'all liked the name Cecile so much, why didn't y'all just call her Cecile?

My uncle Earl?

His actual name is Baldwin.

That's crazy.

Then there was Robert.

Family called him Bobsie.

The community called him Flora, after Hurricane Flora, because, as the story goes, "dem seh it mash up everything."

So somehow one man managed to have a government name, a family name and what was basically a community damage assessment.

Jamaican nicknames aren't nicknames. They're oral history.

When you're young, none of this feels like culture. It just feels like your life. You
don't realize you're collecting stories. You don't realize the way people talk, cook,
tease each other, name each other, sit, stand, point, laugh, mourn, celebrate and
survive is becoming part of you.

Then you leave.

I moved to Miami when I was eleven. And migration does something strange. You
start realizing that things you thought were simply normal are actually specific to
where you came from. You begin comparing without even trying. You learn another
place, another rhythm, another way of doing things, while still carrying the first
one.

And then one day you have children of your own.

They don't have your childhood. They're not supposed to. Their world is different.
Their references are different. Their experiences are different. My job isn't to
recreate my childhood for them or convince them that my generation did
everything better.

But I do want them to know where they come from.

I want them to know the people. The stories. The foolishness. The music. The food.
The land. The things that were beautiful and the things that were complicated.

I want them to understand that heritage isn't a costume you put on when it's
convenient. It's something you learn, respect and carry.

And I want them to be curious about other people too.

Being rooted in your own culture shouldn't make you less interested in somebody
else's. It should make you understand why theirs matters to them. Travel has
taught me that over and over again. You don't walk into somebody else's country
and measure everything against your own standards. You observe. You ask
questions. You listen. You learn. You respect the fact that people had whole
histories before you arrived.

Maybe that's part of becoming the elder too.

You stop thinking inheritance is only the stuff people leave you when they die.
Sometimes it's a way of speaking. A recipe. A nickname. A joke. A photograph. A
song. A gesture. A story somebody told so many times you thought you'd never
forget it.

And then you realize forgetting is absolutely possible.

That's probably why so much of what I'm making now keeps circling back to
Jamaica without me forcing it.

Yard Notes came from photographs and ordinary moments that I didn't realize I
was archiving when I took them. Men sitting outside. Family on verandas. Children
after school. People simply existing.

Then Culture Study started looking at the smaller things. The way we stand. The
way we point. The way a pose can be so familiar that another Jamaican sees it and
immediately understands what they're looking at. POSE made me laugh because it
wasn't some grand statement about Jamaican identity. It was just, "Look at how we
stand." And somehow that was enough.

Maybe painting it, photographing it, joking about it, writing it down and designing
from it is simply another way of remembering.

Because now I'm not just the child receiving the stories anymore.

I'm one of the people responsible for passing them forward.

Which is still slightly offensive, because again, when exactly did I become the
elder?

But here we are.

With love,

Kimlayn

oh shit… iAmTheElderNow.

iRemember