by Sharon Millar
Que c'est dis. [It is said]
Once upon a time grandmothers on Caribbean islands stitched blankets of words for every little girl born to daughters and sons. Every evening, the grandmothers could be found spinning delicate webs of stories down near the water. There were so many tales that could be woven into the texture of each blanket that the grandmothers took their time sorting through individual stories, handpicking jeweled words that had been passed down since the start of time. Often it was necessary to pick apart the blankets of words that had been given to them by their own grandmothers. It was not uncommon to find blankets being swapped when someone had lost a strand of a story. When a baby girl was born, grandmothers cheered and shook their blankets until the silver threads sang and chattered like parrots. Sometimes it was necessary to insert a small barbed patch, but they crafted these difficult stories in the manner of the ti marie plant that opens and closes its leaves when touched. In this way, they hoped to shield the granddaughters from stories that should only be learned on the marriage bed or at the side of small graves.
And so it was that baby girls learned how it was they had come to be in this place. They also learned how to cook to feed a family of ten when there was food but for five, they learned how to speak the language of women and even as adults, it was not uncommon for women to hold their blankets close to ease the pain of life. Words were their balm and their bridge. No one was ever buried with her blanket. When the time came, and the babies grew into old women, the blankets were saved and re-crafted, the memories and wisdom of each woman working its way into newer and ever more intricate patterns of life stories, loving made for babies to come. In this way, the women fought illness, raised their children and loved their land and their men. In times of crisis, blankets would be harvested from every home and strung across the length and breadth of villages so that whole communities could listen to the whispered words handed down from grandmothers long dead.
One day a stranger came to the islands, navigating his ship across underwater volcanoes and past strong cross currents to bring new words to their islands. But these new words were harsh and foreign and no one, not even the grandmothers picking frantically through the threads of time-soft blankets, could find any sign of this new language and the ways of these new people. Soon there were no more grandmothers and fewer and fewer babies. The islands appointed a keeper of blankets but it was not long before she too succumbed to grief and confusion and the blankets were lost.
Soon many new people came to the islands. They came in myriads of ways but without the blankets, there was much forgetting and fighting and stories that should have been carefully worked into ti marie patterns to shelter the young, roamed freely causing pain and suffering. For many years, the islands lived in Babel-like confusion and there was a scourge upon the beautiful lands. There was much cruelty and blood ran like rivers down the sides of mountains. The islands tried to keep talking to each other but soon they lost the threads of their own stories and began adopting the stories from other places. In this way, each island soon had its peculiar strain of stories that hung from the trees and lay flat on the rivers, rising at night to whisper and mumble into the ears of the sleeping. But without the patterns of lovingly crafted blankets, the stories often grew monstrous in the shadows and people, both old and new, began to fear the tales. For many years, the men decided what tales would be told and even though there were, like all places, men who were good and men who were bad, not even the good men could fashion the stories into patterns that could save the communities.
For a long time, the women forgot there had ever been blankets of words with which to swaddle their daughters because many daughters had been separated from their mothers. As is the way of the world, eventually this chaos of pain and suffering began to produce its own beauty. At first, it was seen in the people, a rainbow mix of different colors and voices. And it was not long before these people, the products of the old and the new, the just and the injust, began to find their voices. At first they sang. They sang to the heavens and they created music and instruments such as the world had never heard. Soon the stories they began to tell their children spoke of common things and the goodness and healing. Yes, there were ti maria patches of thorny pain and tightly boxed tales of the days when the blood steeped the islands, but, at night, words no longer crept under the doors with the night chill.
One day a little girl was born on one of the islands with the gift of stories and the memory of a blanket.
“Where is my blanket?” she asked her grandmother.
Que c’est dis.
It had been so long since anyone had heard about the blankets that no one knew of what she spoke. They gave her blankets of wool and blankets of cotton, embroidered blankets and crocheted blankets, but still she would not settle. It was a rare thing to be born with the gift of stories but no one could remember the blanket of words that she remembered so well. So one day, long before she was a grandmother, she went down to the sea and sat under an almond tree. It was here that she crafted her first blanket. It was clumsy and filled with patches of ti marie leaves and bougainvillea thorns because these were the only words that she could cobble together. Soon she was making three blankets a day and then four. As the words spun in the air, she remembered the old patterns and the old stories and like a slow awakening, soon all the women began to remember.
It seemed that no matter where the women had once travelled from, there was still a memory of words and a grandmother’s gift. For some the memory of a blanket, for others the warm memory of a soft pillow, and for others still, there were memories of silver shields, and those of hammered gold. For two weeks, the memory of word-crafted gifts swam up around the women. In this way, they remembered. It was not long before the grandmothers began gathering near the water where they sat evening after evening, spinning stories into gifts for their newly born granddaughters.
I know this story because my grandmother told it to me. When I was born, she gave me the gift of a word blanket and it is a precious thing. But to my sister, she gave the gift of a silver shield crafted with wise words and the power to protect her from the scourge of forgetting. Each grandmother carefully chooses the gift that she will give to her granddaughter. Some will need strength and some will need softness. Some will be forced to remember and some will be asked to forget. It is the true gift of a grandmother that the gift knows its owner.
Today I am spinning a blanket for you, my granddaughter. As yet unborn, you have asked me in a dream to spin you a special blanket. In your life you will be asked to do many brave things but your blanket of words will always remind you of the strength of women in whose line you follow. This blanket will ask you to be true to your country and your countryman. It will demand that you write the history of these islands in stories and song. It will remind you that you are of this place by blood and by bone and that is something that you will always carry with you. In this blanket I am weaving the yellow of the pouis so that you can see them as I see them today; I am weaving the forest floor and the tallest tree; the silk cotton and the saman. I do this so that you will love this land as I do. And so that you will never forget the things that are hard to remember because it is only by words that we can learn the magical power of healing. This is the word blanket I leave to you, my granddaughter.