Nevis and the Feeling of Otherness

Looking over to St. Kitts from Paradise Beach, Nevis.

We landed in St. Kitts with a bump, but a soft bump, at around six on a night in August. I anticipated the hot, sweet, easterly wind sweeping off the land and the sea to hit my face as soon as I descended the stairs onto the tarmac. It did and was just as satisfying as I thought it would be.

At customs, there are two lines: one for tourists and one for residents. As a child, Nevis was my only sense of a home on land. I have held Nevis citizenship since I was a teenager, but I still get feelings of being a fraud when I line up in the resident’s line.

It is a feeling of being “the other” that has plagued me all my life. Generally in Nevis, only people of African descent are considered to be from the island. There are a few exceptions, but sometimes the classification of being a white West Indian isn’t the most positive of associations, considering the slave-based economy of a not so distant past.

On the way to the boat that would take me to Nevis, the taxi driver asked me if this was my first time visiting. I am so used to this question that without missing a beat, I tell him “No, I was actually raised here,” and the funny thing that happens now, is that I am actually older than a lot of these people asking me that question.

The young taxi driver was incredibly nice and waited with me in the darkness that envelopes the St. Kitts’ peninsula at night. We eventually saw the tiny lights of the water taxi entering the bay to pick me up at the small wooden pier. The taxi driver gave me a hug and the first mate loaded my bag into the bow of the boat. Once the boat was on it’s way to Nevis again, he gave the very official spiel of safety guidelines onboard as well a listing of the beverages available aboard: the monologue that they save for tourists. The funny thing is he was probably younger than me too.

Once on Nevis, the air was literally thick with humidity as summer is incredibly sticky, but metaphorically, it was thick with the memories of my childhood. The dock that I used to jump off when I was a kid, the old Hamilton sugar mill that my mom used to tell me was Sleeping Beauty’s castle and the sweet smell of mysterious flowers that drift off the mountain at night. I remember that particular aroma would feel like the sweetest thing I had ever smelled after being offshore for seven days.

We always seemed to sail in from Bermuda at night.

There were all these memories around me, but I still felt like a complete stranger at times. Everywhere I went, people would ask me if this was my first time to the island. Even white people would say that I didn’t sound like a Nevisian, which is true. I never picked up the dialect because even with that, I felt like I would be considered an imposter.

But I am Nevisian, in part. Just not wholly. And who knows how large that part truly is.

I do have a Caribbean lilt in the way that I speak that is intensified when I am in Nevis. I also have nearly 30 years of memories of the place, albeit fewer ones in recent years. I have memories that Nevisian kids born in the 2o years now will never have. Like seeing donkeys being used as a primary form of transportation or the beach that I used to play on was once filled with beautiful, tall palm trees before they were killed by disease.

Charlestown, Nevis.

I finished my work on the island and left, both exhausted from the work I had done and by the constant barrage of memories and emotions about the place.

With belonging and yet not belonging, there is this middle world that you exist in, and I have lived in it for many years. I have different identities that all co-exist inside of me. Sometimes one is stronger than the other. Sometimes they don’t get along. I have a Nevisian part, an American part, a British part, a Puerto Rican part, a French part and a part made up something from my family’s adventures around the world. They make me who I am and yet, they also make me an outsider.

But this otherhood has made me a great observer of others, which I use in my work to tell people’s stories. I am not stuck in a rigid cultural system of thinking. I know when to fade away in to the background and let other people’s stories shine through.

The trip to Nevis, as with any travel, let me delve into my inner world and figure out just a little bit more who I am and what my place is in this world.