Northern Range

I made “Northern Range” during my 2020 creative residency at the Brooklyn Public Library. The library requested video documentation of my writing process and as writing is not exactly a visually dynamic art, I decided to combine several elements—live typing, a few images, and a recording my late Aunt Kala made years ago of a recollection voiced by her mother, my late grandmother Florine—to portray all that I juggle as I write and also to mimic the mash-up character of my subject: Trinidad, the island my family is from.

The story my grandmother tells is scandalous and her way of telling it is filled with the only powers she can be said to have had: the power of words and the power of womanhood. Kala’s daughter—my cousin, the historian Tara Inniss-Gibbs—describes our grandmother’s words and my work in a way that is meaningful to me: “The classism and sexual politics, poverty and desperation…scheming and plotting over every move…is a provocative backdrop for your writing on Trinidad's natural landscape and racial politics.”

I’m not sure how many listener-viewers would understand my grandmother’s patois. I love it: the sound of it as well as its many gorgeous turns of phrase: “Boy, when old man see young girl: WOW” or “You see dees men is asshole? You don’ see de asshole?” or “Take care she turn ‘round now and start to steal ya” or, my absolute favorite for its expression of a self-defined ethical framework, other expectations be damned: “You come to my court.” I feel that last line so deeply, it’s as if it courses through my veins. In a way, I suppose it does.

As I recorded and re-recorded the video, having to begin from scratch every time I made a mistake that I had missed as I typed, I began to feel as if I were shooting a kind of performance in which I played a dramatic role that I was madly compelled to rehearse over and over until the performance turned out just right . . . or at least as I wanted it to turn out.

“Northern Range” was screened in August 2020 on the Brooklyn Public Library’s Grand Army Plaza façade as part of the library’s Cinema Ephemera series. It brought me to tears to hear my grandmother’s beautiful Trinidadian lilt and my aunt’s laughter echo throughout the plaza as my writing unfolded for passersby to see.