by Ros Martin
I‘ve just spent the last two days in Reading with my two sisters and my mother.
Respite of sorts.
I have childhood memories of my older sister and I spending summer holidays with our cousins Joan & Dave Leacock, hanging out in Prospect Park. My niece and her children also live in Reading. Two brothers came up from London, one brought his wife and three children. Relatives and family friends came too.
How complex the family becomes when relationships breakdown, partners go..... What is remarkable, are the ties that bind; memories spoken and unspoken, old photographs of times gone by.
Why were we all there at my older sister’s Reading home? It was to honour an extraordinary matriarch, my mother, Leome Leida Martin nee Butcher celebrating her 93rd birthday.
When I took time out to read the Newton plantation document for the project whilst away, it dawned upon me, O My God! This is Barbados where my mother’s people come from! (Her grandma from Saint Lucy and her grandpa from St James).
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| my mother's family in St. Lucia 1938. Leome is 2nd on the right & below. |
I took the opportunity to talk to my mother again about her memories of her maternal grandparents, both she knew growing up in St Lucia in the 1920’s 30’s and 40’s. Great grandma’s name was Martha Elizabeth Phillips & she was an extraordinary cook. She married Francis Emmanuel Agard, who carried people’s ablutions on his cart to dump in the sea. Great grandma was sent from Barbados to St Lucia because she, was carrying an ‘outside child’...... In St Lucia, she met my great grandfather Francis, whom she subsequently married.
My late father’s people were Lagosians. Growing up initially in Kentish Town, London and then Southend-on-Sea in the 60’s as a child, I never knew any of my grandparents. My father had arrived in 1948 a medical student at Edinburgh Uni ( He never completed his studies) and my mother in 1958 a seamstress, had travelled as a single woman, alone on board a ship to England..... Both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were born in the late 19th century......
My thoughts on this literary archaeology project, to be honest up until now, I’ve been feeling I want to run .......
WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT?
These are our ancestors are they not yours and part of complex and painful intertwining histories of a global human community? Or are these mere bones, dug up, isotoped to discover what is it we do not yet know? What are we anticipating or hoping it will yield? And the yet to be acknowledged: black artists white scholars coming together of literature and archaeology. What do each of us represent in the name of humanity? What of our own unique histories will we examine and bring into consideration in studying this period, these sites?
How do you give dignity to the objectified in life?
And this the afterlife; the movement of a burial ground. How does this happen? Who and what is the object of study?
I am interested in the ethics we employ as we go about our work, consciously and unconsciously in devising this project, in engaging with it, the business of mining places, sites of memory and what is being brought to the table as it evolves.