The rain pelted the roof of our home. Each drop splashed open and died in either a pit or a pat. The zinc roof, with walls thick from cement blocks, was everything. Our house had been built by strong men with arms like the Hulk. My grandad drank white rum with those men and laughed from stools in bars. But my dad avoided them like the plague, as if they too carried the spirit that made him angry when he drank.
There was a makeshift outdoor shower , four posts fixed to the wall, with blue tarpaulin covering the sides and top. The floor was lined with matching blue linoleum, my mother’s own aesthetic contribution. She had tucked the sides carefully, turning it into a kind of vessel - a tunnel for showers. He had stacked four cinder blocks, one atop the other, like a platform. It held our color-coded plastic baths. That vessel also served as our laundry room.
Dad often worked shirtless, lifting buckets and pans filled with rainwater like a wrestler. That day, he told me to get the laundry basket—he couldn't afford to let the rains pass. He had been smuggling prayers to God all week for this downpour.
I returned, knees angled and fickle, and knelt beside him as he washed and wrung khakis and jeans stained with grease. Banana leaves swayed above us, and the trees seemed to rejoice. In that moment, I asked if I could help. He said yes.
Dad stepped into the unfinished building that would become my room and rested his back against the wall. Then he showed me how to scrub the clothes. Only our hands spoke as I tried to match his movements. The rain made music with the silence. There was no time.
Just us.
Then came the pang of hunger. My tiny wet feet almost slipped as I grabbed the sole bag of crackers from the cupboard. We sat and ate like Grecian gods on ambrosia.
That was innocence.
“You can leave home, all right. But home will never leave you.” — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
I am far from that blue tarpaulin shower, far from the weight of wet denim, but I have not left. Not really. Because longing does not travel in suitcases, nor is it soothed by central heating and direct deposit. Longing lives in the body, in the palms that remember work, in the stomach that remembers hunger, in the soul that still listens for rain on zinc.
To leave the Caribbean, or any "third world" country, is to make a deal with memory. You say: I will go. I will become something else. But the deal is a lie. Because even as you walk into opportunity, you carry the ones who had none. And somewhere between your first winter and your first promotion, you realize what you’ve traded. Not love. Not even family. But soul. The intimacy of shared lack. The kind of joy that comes not from what you own, but from who you endure with.
We walk into opportunity, and yet the sense of where we came from clings to us like shadow. It lives in the way we look at our new homes with an unfamiliar, almost sterile, air. It shows up in the way we measure success, not by the food on the table or the comfort of our chairs but by the laughter that echoes from the kitchen, the stories that are passed down in voices thick with accents we left behind. The weight of migration is not in the absence of the land we left, but in the absence of those shared moments—of us together, fighting the rain, building joy from what we could carry.
Velma Pollard, Jamaican literary genius, once wrote, “I am remembering my grandmother’s house / her quilted comfort / the scent of nutmeg.”
That line haunts. Because I wrestled a two hundred pound man in Walmart for the last bottle of nutmeg . Only to learn that comfort cannot be factory made. It must be inherited, or built from scratch in your granny’s kitchen with a grater.And yet, the scent of nutmeg, follows me in strange places. It’s in the scent of freshly ground coffee in the morning, in the slow boil of sweet corn on the stove, in the warmth of a blanket during long winters. Those scents transport me, just for a moment, back to the place where we measured comfort not by the temperature of the room but by the presence of those we loved. I realize that the longing never disappears, it just reshapes itself into the routines we build in foreign places. But the ache remains.
This is the ache that sits in an immigrant hearts like stone. The knowledge that you are better now, by every metric that matters to your host country, and yet somehow emptied.
Hughes wrote, “I tire so of hearing people say / Let things take their course. / Tomorrow is another day. / I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.” And still we work. Still we send money home. Still we smile when someone says, “You must be so glad to be out of there.”
And then there is the duality of our existence. We wear our new identity, proudly displaying the privileges and opportunities we now have. But underneath, there is a quiet resistance, a refusal to allow ourselves to forget what we left behind. And we begin to realize that this is where we are - constantly building the bridge between who we were and who we’ve become. A bridge that, no matter how much we try, will never fully close the gap between the two worlds.
But we are not out. Not really.
We left the land, but the land did not leave us. It shows up in how we peel oranges, how we scold our children, how we stare too long at concrete floors when the sun hits just right.
Bob Marley sang, “My feet is my only carriage,” and many of us are still walking. Toward visas. Toward green cards. Toward rest. But some part of us remains barefoot in banana groves, chasing laughter, washing clothes, eating crackers as if they were ambrosia.
We are still walking, carrying with us a map that we cannot throw away, no matter how many streets we travel or cities we conquer. Our bare feet mark the path from one place to another, from one life to another. There is a kind of redemption in this journey—not because we’ve escaped, but because we’ve learned to make peace with what we left behind and carry it with us. Our feet may be moving forward, but our roots will never forget the earth they came from.
There is redemption here. Not because we made it out, but because we remember. Because we carry our people forward even as we move away. Because we do not forget the lessons taught in tarpaulin tents and zinc-roofed symphonies. We know what it means to build joy in a rainstorm.
To find sanctity in suds.
And so we write. We write because the past is not past. It is prelude. It is purpose. It is proof that luxury without memory is just noise.
We write because there was once a man, shirtless and silent, who taught a child how to clean grease from cloth while the trees swayed like praise dancers.
We write because home is not behind us. It is within.
To be continued …
Thank you for reading .If this reminded you of home, of a person you carry, or a place you never truly left, I’d love to hear from you.
Feel free to share a memory in the comments. Or simply sit with it, and know you’re not alone in the ache.
Tears of love and longing
I appreciate the attached audio. It helped along with reading. This is a well- written piece that captures the core , shared Caribbean memories. Indeed they have helped to shape who we are , who we have become and is becoming. Keep writing. Your Caribbean voice matters. ✊🏾