A Botanical of Grief

Abstract

A Botanical of Grief writes connection to our Ancestors, delving into and relating their reinvented and white-coded experiences and spaces that they occupied. Through a poetic triptych, as protocol for talking to the dead, we reach to the need for irreducible narratives, to be accessed by descendants in defining themselves. We represent what we hear in the spaces between, silences that speak volumes and call for us to take heed. We ask, what is grief in the afterlife of enslavement? We explore deep grief and fear as fruit and seed, realms in which The Bahamas, The Caribbean countries, and their Diasporas remain moored. Our writing makes explicit the tensions inherent in deep grief, denied public mourning, and fear of connection, reverberating throughout diaspora, unresting in the blood and bones of those that went before us. We are represented only in select details of the history of this land. The weighted sorrow of the forgotten seeks to make new worlds. This exploration navigates a perspective outside the colonial presence of idyllic beauty and exoticism.