Resources by Carol B. Duncan

Playin’ Mas’ – Intertextual Oz As a person of Caribbean heritage and a scholar of Caribbean and African Diasporic studies, I see elements of Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival in accounts of Geoffrey Holder’s approach to envisioning The Wiz. It was Holder’s costuming, first iterated in sketches, which led to the choreography and storytelling of the The Wiz. As in the tradition of “playin’ mas’” (playing masquerade), movement, music, and costuming are intimately connected. The look and construction of the costuming plays a large part in determining the movement. The cyclone which whisked Dorothy away could be conceptualized as Oya, the Yoruban orisha of the whirlwind and guardian of the cemetery. This reading brings a sensibility to the Oz myth which opens it to other possible readings of text in context. Here, I am thinking about the tragic real-life history of1 expansionist national policies towards “western” landscapes in the late nineteenth century which saw the displacement of Indigenous people. While Baum’s narrative does not overtly touch on this aspect, Oz is peopled by different sorts of beings vying for sustainability given the tyranny of the wicked witches.This musical theatrical production was adapted as a film in 1978 with the same name, The Wiz. Plot elements were adjusted to accommodate an older Dorothy, now a teacher, played by Diana Ross. Set in an urban landscape, Dorothy’s snow cyclone travel to Oz lands her in a dystopian New York City. The Scarecrow, played by Michael Jackson, delivers a powerful lament about injustice in a new song introduced in the film called “You Can’t Win.” The song “Home,” like its parallel “Over the Rainbow,” is the movie’s emotional heart and center followed by Lena Horne’s Glinda the Good’s impassioned anthem for self-awareness, “If You Believe in Yourself.”The Wiz reboot of 2024 features a younger cast in which Dorothy’s companions on the Yellow Brick Road are her peers in age. In media interviews director Schele Williams noted that Dorothy, played by Nichelle Lewis, finding community with similarly-aged companions is relevant for a twenty-first-century social context. Williams sees the finding of one’s group of affirming and encouraging peers as a central task of contemporary life.What does it mean to teach the mythos of Oz twenty-five years after I first contemplated doing so while designing a course which I introduced in 2000? Twenty-five years ago, I focused on how Oz represented changing geographical and cultural landscapes at the turn of another century. The movement from a mostly rural population to more people living in cities was a salient feature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in the US. Oz, a prison drama television series of the same name was also popular during its six-season broadcast from 1997 to 2003. Where was “home” for incarcerated persons?As a class, we discussed the hero’s journey with reference to the work of Joseph Campbell and its relevance for science fiction and fantasy narratives including Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999). The course contrasted this search for home with diaspora identities and religious traditions where the search for home complicates Dorothy’s assertion that “there’s no place like home.” Other retellings include Geoffrey Maguire’s 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is based on both Baum’s 1900 novel as well as the 1939 MGM musical. A Broadway musical called Wicked based on Maguire’s book premiered in 2003. Here the Oz mythos is retold from the point of view of a character who is usually positioned as Dorothy’s arch nemesis.The Oz mythos remains a rich field for exploration in religious studies classes. It is still eminently teachable today. The text’s multiple and continued readings and reinterpretations, across a variety of genres, make it especially suitable for study. Students are exposed to the concept and practice of intertextual reading, and to the subfields of film and religion and visual cultural studies. These in turn allow for the study of shifting cultural signifiers and the enduring legacy of powerful stories. Teaching Oz in the twenty-first century allows for continued exploration of the meaning of home, community, and individual and collective journeys in an ever changing and shifting geographical and cultural landscape.There are many metaphorical yellow brick roads. I would want students to explore North American S/F (speculative fact and fiction) and fantasy literatures and their intersection with religious studies. Situating Oz as an important (although certainly not the only) origin point for fantasy literature in a North American landscape including its tensions, contradictions, and continued troubling legacies would be a richly rewarding teaching and learning experience. Oz should be put into dialogue with the texts of Octavia Butler, for instance. In my past teaching, I taught Oz alongside the imagined worlds of Star Wars and the emancipatory visions of Rastafari. Teaching Oz opens possibilities for journeying through visual and textual studies and exploring their meanings in comparative contexts.

The WizIt is the malleability of the Oz story to reflect different social, historical, and cultural contexts while utilizing recognizable symbols – special magical shoes, the Yellow Brick Road – which makes it such a powerful myth of America. Early in the twentieth century, within a few years of the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stage productions had already begun. The 1939 MGM film in which the title was shortened to The Wizard of Oz proved to be iconic in its portrayal of the story of Dorothy and her friends’ journey through the magical land of Oz and their journey of self-discovery. Oz started out as a literary narrative but is retold as a musical film. The Hollywood film musical was well established as a featured genre in which songs, their lyrics, and dance sequences were part and parcel of the narrative. The film musical, in turn, drew on the tradition of musical theatre. Musical theatre’s earlier predecessors included vaudeville, and prior to that, the minstrel show, the earliest popular stage entertainment in the United States.Minstrel shows emerged in the nineteenth century as performances of imagined blackness based on racial stereotypes. Minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (makeup, wigs, and costuming). Minstrel shows proved to be so popular that there were minstrel shows featuring black performers who donned costume and makeup on stage to perform caricatures. While minstrelsy was supplanted by the movies as the most popular form of mass entertainment, it still lingered well into the twentieth century in stage shows and in film. Reflecting segregationist policies of the era, not many people of African descent who identified as black were cast in mainstream musical theatrical productions. Coupled with this practice, there were all-black musicals on Broadway. In Dahomey was the first such musical, staged in 1903. Others followed in subsequent decades leading up to the staging of the 1964 all-black cast of Hello Dolly! featuring Pearl Bailey in the title role.The introduction of The Wiz in the mid-1970s featuring an all-black cast should not be separated from its contemporary sociocultural or historical context. This staging drew on Baum’s original storyline, as well as on the 1939 MGM musical, but the story was transplanted from turn-of-the-century Kansas to contemporary urban, black America. The full title was The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical of “The Wizard of Oz.” This title was a statement about the musical’s positioning in relation to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz which itself was positioned in relation to Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And so, as an audience, we are presented with a version of a version of a version in the fashioning of an authentic representation. The direction and creative costume design by Geoffrey Holder is in itself worthy of exploration, as I will discuss below.Occurring only a decade after the tumult of the 1960s, The Wiz reflected 1970s black American musical genres incorporating soul and gospel-tinged R n’ B in its lyrical content. Its storyline featuring a young Stephanie Mills as Dorothy provided a powerful message of belonging, self -awareness, and affirmation of black identities through embodied performances. With costumes by Trinidadian-born dancer, choreographer, actor, and artist, Geoffrey Holder, the musical was a triumph, winning seven Tony’s (considered the pinnacle of awards for Broadway musical theatre) in 1975. These included Best Musical and two for Holder as director and choreographer.

The Mythos of Oz This year, 2024, marks two milestones of Oz, an American mythos based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the first instance, it is the eighty-fifth anniversary of the MGM movie musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in the second, the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the musical theatre production, The Wiz. Beginning in 1974, The Wiz toured in selected cities in the US before its groundbreaking promotional television advertisement and premiere on Broadway in 1975. It went on to commercial and critical success winning multiple awards. Significantly, a reboot of The Wiz began touring in the fall of 2023, originating at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, where its life as a stage show began in 1974. It will return this spring, 2024, on Broadway. Such is the power and endurance of the mythos of Oz that 124 years after Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion set off to “follow the yellow brick road” in search of the Wizard of Oz, audiences are willing to “ease on the down the road,” in a reboot of The Wiz. I was first introduced to Oz as a recently arrived immigrant child from the Caribbean in the 1970s. Classmates in my elementary school in Toronto told me, and other newly immigrated children, that The Wizard of Oz would be televised. Before the advent of cable television, streaming services, and the Internet, the viewing of the 1939 MGM musical starring Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale was regarded as a yearly ritual amongst my childhood friend group. Reading L. Frank Baum’s books followed after viewing the 1939 film. This was my first introduction to the world of Oz, and the story of Dorothy’s mythic journey, as something other than casual viewing for entertainment. Unbeknownst to me and my playground friends, the viewing on television and its discussion and reenactment at recess the next day was part and parcel of a ritual of retelling and performance in which the story became our own. We were thrilled when The Wizard of Oz was chosen as our school’s musical play in the mid-1970s. Cast as Dorothy, sixth-grade me saw more than a glimmer of my own story of uprootedness, as a recent immigrant from the Caribbean to Toronto, in Dorothy’s plight as a stranger in a strange land trying to find her way home. The messages of empowerment, good overcoming evil, strength in the company of friends who are with you on a long and challenging journey, and help from wise, good, and powerful beings like Glinda, were comforting. While we learned iconic songs from the 1939 movie like “Over the Rainbow,” and “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” we also heard references to Oz in the rock group Toto’s “Tinman,” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Significant, too, was the popularity of an adaptation of the myth of Oz in the Broadway musical, The Wiz, and its film adaptation in 1978. These were among the first broader popular cultural references to the myth of Oz. Decades later, in January 2000, I introduced an undergraduate course, “Religion and Popular Culture,” at Wilfrid Laurier University. In designing the course, I returned to my earlier fascination with the mythos of Oz. This time, through the lenses of religious studies and cultural studies, I viewed Oz as mythos – recognizable in its symbols and storylines yet malleable enough to be reinterpreted from multiple vantage points. In teaching that course, I was able to focus on broader themes of mythmaking and American civil religion through exploring Oz as a kind of urtext of American popular culture, visible in multiple movie and theatrical productions since its initial introduction as a novel by L. Frank Baum. Oz was both a mythical landscape of terror, wonder, and possibilities as expressed in numerous theatrical and film productions and popular songs, and a secular sacred text of the United States. Its endurance is enabled by the malleability of meaning attributed to its symbols. L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first in a series of books. The children’s book, featuring its story of young Dorothy Gale living with her aunt and uncle on a Kansas farm who gets whisked away by a cyclone to the magical land of Oz, has become a touchstone of American fantasy literature. There are nods to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. These books feature young girls who are whisked away to other landscapes beyond the mundane and everydayness of their daily lives. They must endure trials during their journeys and eventually return wiser and stronger in some way. Oz is revealed to be a carnivalesque huckster hiding behind gimmickry. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” says Oz, as Toto, Dorothy’s animal companion, pulls the curtain to reveal his fraud. Baum’s narrative uses fairytale elements evident in the British late-nineteenth-century children’s literature genre but places them in a specifically American landscape – the Midwest and the state of Kansas. The element which pulls Dorothy to another world is drawn from the midwestern landscape itself – a cyclone which whisks her up and out of the farm and Kansas. From there, Dorothy’s adventures begin with her landing on and killing the Wicked Witch of the East and acquiring the magical shoes coveted by the witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West (they are silver in the book but red in the film). She confronts her adversary, the witch’s sister, and begins her journey. Dorothy does not realize that she has had the power to return home all along because of the magical properties of the shoes. Her companions – the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion – who accompany her to meet the purportedly all-powerful Wizard of Oz also have desires which they hope that Oz can fulfill. The friends eventually discover that what they desired was within them all along. It is that quality of self-discovery and empowerment from within which, arguably, is the source of the power of the myth of Oz. This emphasis on empowerment from within resonates with notions of self-mastery and/as self-discovery which are key elements of the American Dream when articulated as the perfectibility of the individual self in the best of all possible worlds.

None of the women in my motherline drove a car regularly before the 1970s. To get to where they were going next in their lives, when they left where they were born, they navigated saltwater roads. They moved house; whole villages, islands, and continents receding in their wake. They lived as the newly arrived outsiders in other Caribbean islands, the United States, England, and Canada as they gave birth to us, the next generation. Before she got on the boat that would cross the Atlantic to England, my mother walked her island world just up the road from the deep-water harbour. My work as a teacher, scholar, and writer focuses on the religious lives of everyday folk in communities in the African Diaspora in North America and the Caribbean. The oeuvre of anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) helped me hone some essential items in my toolkit. Key among these is Hurston’s recognition of the centrality of oral traditions in southern US black communities. Her brilliance as a scholar and writer is based on her keen observation as an anthropologist and on her self-reflexivity as a member of the communities with which she worked. Her stance was unusual for the 1930s and prescient of the call for research reflexivity in anthropological and other social sciences and humanities which emerged later in the twentieth century. Hurston was also a traveler. She journeyed throughout the US South and the Caribbean including Haiti, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, to record the stories, songs, and folklore of black communities. She drove a car on her trips through the rural US south conducting research. In a memorable episode recounted in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston tells readers about her escape from a conflictual situation in a work camp by leaving late at night and driving away. She also wrote about a road trip and her drive across the Canada/US border from the state of Michigan into the city of Kitchener in southern Ontario. I was intrigued to learn that Zora Neale Hurston had driven through, or possibly even stayed, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I teach at a university in what is now called Kitchener-Waterloo. For years, I have tried to retrace her steps in the Kitchener end of town imagining where she may have stopped for a meal or an overnight stay. Did she park her car on Duke Street in downtown Kitchener close to where Canada’s first black lawyer, Jamaican-born Robert Sutherland (1830-1878), operated a law practice decades earlier? Did she stay at any of the inns or on the outskirts in nearby smaller towns? Perhaps she rested in a rented room with a black family using the informal word-of-mouth shared information which helped black travelers navigate racially segregated landscapes. Hurston enigmatically notes in her observations that life on both sides of the border looked very similar from her vantage point. What did she mean exactly? I interpret Hurston’s comment as referring to social as well as geographical landscapes. It is a sly indication that de facto racial segregation existed across the border in 1930s Ontario. Racialized segregation shaped her experiences on both sides of the US and Canada border. Hurston’s strategies of navigation as a black woman driver and traveler would have been needed in both places. Indeed, the Canadian historical record supports Hurston’s assessment. After all, Herbert Green’s Green Book, a handbook for black motorists on road trips published from 1936 to 1966, provided references to safe places not only in the US, but also across the border in Canada, in the province of Ontario. My search for Zora in the local and regional African diaspora is not only through textual and visual records but also literal as I walk the streets of small towns and drive rural roads in my very old car trying to match place names from old maps and memoirs with current locations. Sometimes I meet an empty field or a church building now repurposed as a home but on occasion I have visited buildings which are still standing and church communities which are vibrant even though their locations have shifted. Surrounded by rural farmlands and smaller towns, Kitchener-Waterloo is located on the traditional unceded territory of the Haudensaunee, Anishnawbe, and Neutral Indigenous peoples. As a British-born black woman of Caribbean heritage living in Canada, I have thought about how my own complex identity has been shaped by forced and chosen migrations of previous generations. In courses that I have designed, I ask students to read, think, and write about the local in connection to regional, national, and international historical and contemporary contexts. In doing so, they are encouraged to consider studying religion and culture beyond static notions of historical dates and immobile structures and fixed figures. This approach challenges ideas of “history” and “religion” happening to abstract, far away actors while the current local context remains unexamined, safe, and uncomplicated. Citations: Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991

In late May 2021, a shocking revelation made the news. The T’Kemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that evidence was found using ground-penetrating radar of 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of a former church-run residential school to which Indigenous children were sent as mandated by the Canadian government. Since then, hundreds of other unmarked graves of children and youth at other residential school sites have been found. These were educational institutions from which students emerged as “survivors” rather than “graduates.” They were institutions characterized as perpetuating “cultural genocide” aimed at wiping out Indigenous cultures, beliefs, and languages. The first opened its doors in 1828 and the last closed in 1996. The horrific findings at T’Kemlúps and other sites of former residential schools provided further evidence of the abuse suffered by generations of Indigenous children as documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools which ran from 2008 to 2015 in Canada. To lose one’s life as a student at an educational institution staffed by adults entrusted with care, many of whom were priests and nuns, is the ultimate in betrayal of trust. The revelation of these deaths of Indigenous children and youth prompted me, as a religious studies professor, a woman of Caribbean heritage and descendant of enslaved Africans living and working in Turtle Island/North America, to reflect on the broader history of what “education” in the twenty-first century means and my role as an educator. Given the legacy of church-based institutions in the education of enslaved, indentured, and colonized peoples during the colonial era, emerging untouched as a disembodied learner is impossible. What challenges have we inherited as students and educators and what pedagogies can we bring to classrooms as correctives and alternatives, including systems of Indigenous knowledge outlawed during the colonial era? This is an enormous question a thorough answer to which is beyond the scope of this short reflection; however, daring to ask this question is necessary if as educators we are to confront with honesty and integrity the myriad ways in which educational institutions and processes, even those which are well-meaning and couched in terms signifying a commitment to equitable principles, have been complicit in colonial rule. Throughout the British Empire, children and youth were subjected to disciplinary action under colonial rule. Canada’s colonial history as a settler colony in the British Empire and Caribbean nations as a former monocrop economy dependent on the production and sale of sugar and its byproducts are linked. Some children, at various times, were deemed by law and/or custom unmanageable, “truant,” “incorrigible,” “delinquent,” and were subsequently criminalized and in need of “reform,” “training,” or correction by some combination of discipline, punishment, and education. Training schools were instituted in the Caribbean beginning in the post-slavery era, primarily, though not exclusively, for male children and youth. In a Canadian context, as discussed in the documentary Born Bad (CBC, 2021), training schools were instituted in the early 1930s with the final one closing in 1984. These training schools, which predominantly affected white, working-class youth, were total institutions which were supposed to look after the educational and cultural needs of children and youth in a residential setting. The training schools were often located in small towns where children were removed from their families and home communities. In recent years, alleged abuses at former Canadian training schools have come to light with a class action lawsuit pending. In a Caribbean context there is evidence of a shift towards awareness and addressing of factors such as childhood trauma in the lives of children and youth in training schools. What has become increasingly apparent over the last year is that even though unmarked, the burial places of the deceased Indigenous children and youth remained a part of the topography of the physical land and cultural landscape. Secrets of small towns and rural communities in which residential schools and training schools were located are now being revealed to a broader public. In effect, these sites are simultaneously unmarked and marked by their tangible links to individual families and communities. The challenge for religious studies education is to come to terms, honestly, with the legacy of churches (in Canada, the United Church, Roman Catholic and Anglican), mandated by the federal government for over a century to carry out residential school education. The ways in which religious studies is taught could benefit from exploration of these colonial linkages between the Caribbean, Canada, the US, and other former British settler colonies such as New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Studying the impact of religious institutions in these geographically distant yet historically-linked areas would require a comparative approach anchored in the experiences of survivors and witnesses revealed through combined methods of historical and archival research and shared oral histories. This endeavour will require collaboration and fortitude but it is a necessary process and one that begins with individual reflections and actions of engaged educators. For information about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action please see: calls_to_action_english2.pdf (gov.bc.ca). For information on contemporary status of incarcerated youth in some English-speaking Caribbean countries see “The Status of Youth in Incarceration in the Caribbean” (2020): FreemonNunoKatz2020.pdf.

In my early Caribbean childhood of the 1960s and 1970s after leaving England, the country of my birth, stories surrounded us. Often, they were whispered and overheard in partial, redacted fragments, or they were spit out into the air with force, the words ricocheting off the walls and buildings of our individual and collective histories and rebounding in fragments to listeners in myriad shapes and patterns. At other times, the stories were gently ladled—soft, soothing, and nourishing in the recollections of elder women and men who chose their words with care, deboning the sharp bits while maintaining the flesh of the experience for young listeners. As children, my brother and I were often reminded never to eat fried fish while simultaneously carrying on a vigorous conversation because the slipperiness and sharpness of the fish bones made them more likely to shift from between our teeth and lodge sharply somewhere between the first bite and the swallowing of piquant deliciousness. Fairytale horror always got our attention. I regard the silence of eating fried fish as one of the crucial lessons of conversation because it taught us how to listen carefully. Now while fish bones were discarded, the bones of chicken and other meat were often ground to a powdery mass—“down to the marrow”—the chewing of which was an enjoyment of the meal. In this way, eating bones were both cautionary as well as savoured metaphors about speech, listening, and enjoyment. We grew up with grandparents, people born at the turn of the last century, descendants of the enslaved, on small islands of the Eastern Caribbean in what was then a far-flung shore of Britain’s imperial project. At one time in the late eighteenth century, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his soldiers were stationed there in Antigua, at the naval dockyard built by enslaved folks on the south coast looking over the waves at Guadaloupe. Sitting on the front stone steps of our grandparents’ home, too young for school, we too were sentinels who drank in salt air. There were a few cars and trucks, but mostly we watched people; they embodied the world beyond garden gates, doors, and louvres (windows). We saw children in their freshly pressed uniforms going to and from school and grown folk walking by and calling out their greetings, selling their wares with snatches of song, including fish, ice wrapped in burlap, and salt peanuts. And if there were praises and curses belonging to dramas that began long before they walked by, we heard those, too. My brother and I traveled through the centuries, daily. We walked by structures, including the Anglican cathedral that we visited each Sunday, built and rebuilt over the last few centuries. Nothing was designated a historical site. I do not recall any plaques or markers. There were gravestones and cannons and cannon balls, material evidence from a colonial past. A woman selling fruit around the corner from our house greeted my grandfather in his mother tongue, Antillean French Creole, every day as he took his constitutional walk after lunch. I imagine her saying “Sa kap fet?” (How’s it going?). The scales on which she and other market women confirmed the price of her goods, accurately pre-weighed by her touch, were heavy dark metal forged before our time. When we returned to the house with longer shadows in tow perhaps my uncle would be there, his car parked outside and the gentle tick tock of his wristwatch marking modern time. We learned to move between these various eras. We were travelers seated on the front steps of the house, books and words and stories for fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere from which we took deep garden-perfumed gulps, sunglasses a barrier protecting our eyes from some alternate sun. After flying to Canada in the early 1970s in a giant version of the red plastic plane from the cereal box, we felt the shift and change, jarringly, in the unaccustomed motion of escalators and elevators and trains and buses and another English language. But the stories, we remembered the stories, and we learned to chew and spit and talk and write them. In my teaching and design of Caribbean and African Diaspora religious and cultural studies courses, these storying practices contribute to imaginative pedagogies. They are especially useful when engaging students in the study of topics which are potentially difficult and traumatic. Storying as a teaching method has the capacity to both disrupt and challenge as well as to protect. Storying invites multiple vantage points and critical assessment. Finding the story bones is a process of meaningful engagement with the past and holds the potential to connect our various worlds of being as teachers, scholars, and learners.   Photo by British Library on Unsplash Enslaved people cutting the sugar cane on the Island of Antigua, 1823. Download this photo by British Library on Unsplash unsplash.com

“Write your name, for me, please,” she asked, a sturdy index finger tapping on a piece of paper, on the table at my aunt’s house. She was my paternal grandmother, Johanna, or Teacher Kate, as many people called her, and she was visiting her family in Toronto from Guyana. She would have been in her sixties then, a compact Black woman with flawless skin, a kind, steady gaze, and a resonant alto speaking voice. You could hear the mixture of crisp and precise British-influenced English that would have been expected of schoolteachers of Teacher Kate’s generation, born before World War I, in a corner of Amazonia and at the edge of the British Empire. You could also hear the rhythms of Caribbean creole speech, reflecting Guyana’s cultural legacy of majority populations descended from enslaved Africans and indentured folk from the Indian subcontinent and China, among others. Teacher Kate’s work in classrooms with children began before 1930 as a pupil-teacher, a form of teaching apprenticeship of young teenagers that was regularly practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the early decades of the twentieth century. “Write your name, for me, please.” It was a directive, an invitation, and a question all rolled into one as we gathered around my aunt’s dining table. This was the late 1970s, pre-Internet, and I was in my early teens and already in high school. At that point, I had attended school for almost a decade split between Antigua and Canada, having spent my infancy in England, the country of my birth, as a child of the Windrush migration. The late 1970s was a magical transitional time in Black musical cultures as it was the era of the earliest commercial hip hop recordings, disco, funk, and R n’ B. We also listened to reggae, dancehall, calypso, and soca, Caribbean popular musical genres as well, new wave, punk and pop and rock n’ roll on AM and FM radio—our musical choices reflecting our transnational existence between recent Caribbean memories, the larger social context of a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape, contemporary Black Toronto realities in the Caribbean diaspora with close sonic and familial ties to major urban centres in the US and England to which Caribbean people had migrated. My friends and I emulated the look of the Pointer Sisters, The Emotions, or women lead vocalists in Chic. In our stylistic ambitions, we existed on a continuum of retro 1940s, church, and our imagined Studio 54. Our looks were achieved through making our own clothes with Simplicity and Butterick patterns, and reworking and mending heavily discounted seconds (discarded mass-produced clothing with what we considered minor and correctible mistakes like crooked seams and missing buttons) purchased cheaply in the garment district in downtown Toronto. That day I wore a belted, light beige, cap-sleeved dress in a shimmery fabric. My hair was still natural, a few years away from its 1980s curly perm, and picked out into a ‘fro. This was the late 1970s and in Black diasporic girl stylistic cultures in my corner of Toronto afros, cornrows, and other natural styles still reigned supreme with the occasional hot comb pressed straight styles for special occasions. I wondered why Teacher Kate would want me to write my name as an introduction to who I was as a student and her granddaughter. Why not ask me to read out loud or to recite memorized passages of poetry, bible verses, or dramatic plays? I had already had lots of practice in public speaking at school and in church, in Canada, where my first recitation was Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom.” I remembered the church assembly in the Jamaican Pentecostal congregation that met in the basement of a mainstream Protestant church in our Toronto neighbourhood, now called Little Jamaica. We were Anglicans but my mother insisted that we go to the church down the road and around the corner from our house that we could reach without crossing a major intersection, and where our friends from school, recently arrived kids from the Caribbean, also went to church. “Write your name for me, please.” So, I picked up the pen and I wrote my first name in cursive and print. “Write your whole name.” I wrote my first and last name. My grandmother inspected my writing and complimented it while also giving some pointers to improve the cursive. “Write it larger,” she said. I wrote my name several times and each time I did so with more confidence than earlier versions. Now, I wrote my name every day in school on assignments and had done so for years. My friends and I even practiced our autographs. I had written my name years ago in my British passport as an elementary school student. This occasion, however, felt different. In the analog world of the late 1970s, just a few years before the launch of the digital age, my grandmother was inviting me to come to the table of knowledge, to take up space, and to write myself into the narrative in my own hand, boldly and confidently and with style. Words mattered. I got it. I created my signature in that moment with its large cursive letters. Teacher Kate lived for over three decades after that night, in total just over a hundred years. By the late 1970s she had already taught several generations doing the hard work in the post-slavery and British colonial era of the first half of the twentieth century of teaching literacy. Many had entered Guyana and other Caribbean territories as transports of empire through the forced migrations of the slave trade and indentureship, without signature—perhaps an “x,” or even a thumbprint for the latter. I was only Teacher Kate’s student for that one evening but I learned a crucial lesson of accepting the invitation to take my place and to write my name and write myself into being. Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash