Under The West Indian Sky
Taken from Rainy Season 2011/2012 by Amanda T. Mc Intyre. Photos by Steve Hernandez
Dear Tessa,
In tonight’s torrents I think the time to tell has come. It is with a great amount of contrived patience that I produce this correspondence. I would have written sooner but the weather prevented me. The sky hidden away in her grey blankets refused to give counsel and I couldn’t make the decision on my own. I couldn’t find the words by myself. I couldn’t approach you without mediation.
When we met I felt the first drops of the rainy season. It was, for me, the most definitive, duplicitous and sensual moment of the year; a time that gave me the ability to align my imagination with actual experiences of you and start the production of this work. I wish our moment could have remained but there was too much rain. It was beautiful but it made me realise that my approach was wrong.
In the year’s twilight when I see the season approaching its natural conclusion, I write to you out of no desire except, that you finally know that I love you and I’m sorry. I write to you out of the memory of the time when all I could give you were words, when the only commitments I could make were literary, but what you needed was not the rainy season of my imagination but a real reign of love growing upwards and outwards from a troubled history.
I wanted to create a space for us to find accommodation, that we could crawl into and make love uninterrupted; a space like an off-road bar east of Arima called ‘Time and Place’ where all the patrons are women who toast to life, touching their lips to the wet rims of glasses, intoxicated by the disinhibition afforded through this kiss. A space like a matikor night that goes on forever with no bridegroom, with no pundit circling like a corbeaux, waiting to swoop down to devour the woman’s name and regurgitate her animated corpse into the after-life of marriage; no girls lost forever; only wholeness and truth and celebration; safety and the blessed communion of the saints, who eat the flesh and drink the wine of the salvation found between the legs of the divinely feminine universe, undulating in the ecstasy of an atmosphere saturated with a voluptuously female energy. This was how my mind distilled my raw emotions to produce a refined love for you.
This practice of constantly translating you into images was both incorrect and selfish, as it exposed us to the cruellest form of censorship, reality. I was not prepared to confront this truth and ultimately, I now realize, the only way you could have engaged me as yourself, a self I fragmented for artistic convenience, was through antagonism.
How were we to know that it would come to this estrangement? What were the signs? What was it that made us believe that rain came from the sky through some magical device?
Once I had a dream and in it I saw myself asleep. I walked away from the bed leaving my body at rest and went into the most curious of adventures. Suddenly, I was lost and when I realized this I grew anxious. In desperation I tried to make my way back to my room but, before I was able to return I woke up. It is from this dream of you that I find myself awakening.
This letter is my attempt to investigate my still not properly understood consciousness of you and also to simply address certain truths at the end of a season of love; the rainy season.
Please forgive me. Forgive my mind for the metaphors it meticulously manufactured; that separated the parts of a woman whose existence was the only legitimacy she ever needed. Forgive my heart, which loved that process more than it loved you, and please forgive all my flawed affections still confined in the limitations set by this language.
I hope earnestly that my words find you in good health and I pray that with them you receive my peace on this occasion.
Under the West Indian sky,
Sirjane
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