A Spare View, by Arianna Schioldager

I am swimming in an electric lagoon.  I float with my stomach to the sky, cocooned in the dark cloak of the night and the stars overhead, innumerable, as though they are the poppy fields of the heavens.

My hands, paddling, light up and glow with each stroke through the effulgent waters.  I am surrounded by millions of microscopic organisms.  They become luminous once disturbed and all around streaks of light appear like galaxies across the water surface.

Orion’s Belt and The Big Dipper waft above me, and as I wave my arms and legs in outward motions, the light in the water unfolds from beneath like a peacock’s tail, unearthly and majestic.

My illuminated and ghostlike fingers carry the tales of all the lagoon has witnessed; with each stroke, I surge through and across an abyss of time.  I try not to cry, but I do, my tears drip from my face, and they too sparkle like tiny fireworks when they hit the surface.

Our guide announces that Falmouth, Jamaica, founded in 1769, coastline visible to the left of the boat from which I have jumped, had running water before the city of New York.

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Falmouth was one of the busiest ports in Jamaica, exporting both rum and sugar.  It was also, subsequently, a center for slavery.  Ships daily delivered slaves, transported across the Atlantic, and then loaded up the hulls with products manufactured by slave labor on nearby plantations.

Today, in the same harbor, Royal Caribbean is building a massive port for their newest behemoth, Oasis of the Seas.  It feels like a vaguely similar notion of exportation and exploitation, but the country cannot subsist without tourism.

Even here, swimming in the Glistening Waters, I am, despite my denials or best efforts, a tourist.

In the light, Falmouth boasts half built houses, pillars atop concrete platforms without rooftops, and shanty bits and pieces that face the blue water.  Trees line the roads and their branches bend down, tickling the earth, as if whispering the secrets of history to the soil.  From the moment I set foot on the land, its energy billows up around me like the smell of wet earth after a hard rain.

They say that Jamaican people are, despite an also impoverished state of affairs, some of the happiest in the world.  They are rich in spirit, high off their land, among other substances.

Days prior, I asked my fishing boat captain if he has ever left. “No man,” he says, “Why would I leave Jamaica, I pick a mango for breakfast and fish for my dinner.”

Though a question, he doesn’t pose it as such.  He isn’t looking for an answer and I suspect that none will do.  It is hard to find fault or argue with this sentiment.

Still there is sadness, hunger, and poverty.  A thin old man approaches me, cupped hand outstretched at the local market.  “Tummy so empty,” he says, pointing with the other thin fingers at his stomach.  ‘Tummy so empty,” he repeats again.  I give him what I can, acutely aware of my role as tourist.  I feel exploitative.

A lady in the market screams at me in a patois I cannot understand.  She is furious that we have come to their market.  Another vendor holds out fresh mango and smiles. “No matter lady,” she says, putting out the fire of the others words.

The energy of the land reflects these disparate voices; the sentiments weave into each other as though stretched out across a giant loom.  The happiness and sadness come and go with the tide, as they please, as they have done for centuries, echoed deeper by the pockets of history around every corner, deep notches like names in wood, carved out by some past spirit.

I can’t accurately write what the land has lived, what these waters carry.

You simply breathe the air and you inhale the elegy of people, the karma of the land.  The sticky weather feels hot like a fever in June – the sun burning off the injustices of those that came before.  It is a land that lives and breathes its past.  It is palpable enough to make you cry, even though its residents are smiling, some toothless and singing as they eat their Bammy cake, laughing as they cast their makeshift fishing rods into the waters, and grinning as they chat in front of their half-built castles.

And I do cry.  I cry sitting in the front pew of St. Peter’s Anglican Church, the oldest building in Falmouth, the capital of the parish Trelawny. The ceilings are over twenty feet high.  The pews crafted in mahogany are arranged both facing the altar and on each side of the altar.

There is a bronze plaque, just past the entrance on the right hand side that reads:

St. Peter’s Anglican Church/The parish church of Trelawny/Built c. 1795 on Land given by/Edward Barrett of Cinnamon Hill.

I later find out that Edward Barrett was the father of English Romantic poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  Edward sold a part of his estate to have the township of Trelawny, which included a courthouse, public gardens, and this Church, built.

The Barrett family tree has long roots in Jamaica as owners of plantations and slaves.  At the age of either six or eight, the exactness of which is debated, Elizabeth Barrett, wrote her first poem: “On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man,” apparently already distinctively aware that Falmouth had an economy largely based on slavery.

I am overwhelmed by the history and the present, the contrast of rich and poor, of anger and peace – the ever shifting variables of both a sadness and insoluble happiness.  The church lady by the door grins and answers questions with grace. I sit in my pew engulfed by the omnipresent orchestra of story and the clashing voices singing together.

Outside and surrounding all four sides of the Church are graves that span 200 years.   Trelawny residents sell their wares and ask for donations.  Goats meander across the split tops of concrete graves.  They tread softy.  I try to mirror their steps, tiptoeing across the grass.

As I float across the water, I remember these last few days.  I think of the fishing captain and the hungry man in the market. I think of Elizabeth, who left Jamaica for schooling in England, never returning to the island of her birth.  I try to remember the quietude and the patient memories of the land.  I try to remember that happiness and sadness exist together.  I look at the stars in the sky and the stars in the water.

My dream is of an island place

Which distant seas keep lonely

A little island on whose face

The stars are watchers only

Elizabeth Barrett Browning