I went away, I leave and I come back home. I come back to stay. I must see my way —Andre Tanker
It’s not taboo to go back to what you’ve forgotten —Akan proverb
If you’re tempted to do a Dry Season clean-out and burn that “old rubbish”—documents, family snaps, old newspaper clippings, tantie’s hat, tonton’s ping pong and granpappi’s washikong—think twice and before you bun dong your own and your neighbour’s house consigning more of our collective and your own personal past to the flames of forgetting, introduce yourself and that pile from the past to the Caribbean Memory Project (CMP).
Earlier in the year co-founders of the CMP, Trini-born to the bone Dr Kevin Browne, assistant professor of Rhetoric at New York’s Syracuse University and Dawn Cumberbatch, local film, video and event producer and scriptwriter, hosted a colloquium at the Trinidad Theatre workshop, introducing CMP, an online resource “to promote public awareness and participation in the collection and circulation of everyday archives for cultural, social and historical research.”
The genesis of CMP is grounded in the recent personal past of its founders. Browne, who left Trinidad in 1989 before entering sixth form at Presentation College Sando, experienced an epiphany on the day in 2004 when he simultaneously received his acceptance at Penn State to read for his PhD and news of his grandmother’s death. Returning for her funeral he was shocked to find out so late in the day that she had been a teacher.
“This project was born of shame” (at his ignorance of this piece of family history) and he resolved to pursue his doctoral research “in honour of her.”
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