WEBVTT 00:00:00.937 --> 00:00:02.633 This is a photograph 00:00:02.633 --> 00:00:05.449 of a man whom for many years 00:00:05.449 --> 00:00:09.170 I plotted to kill. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:09.170 --> 00:00:12.190 This is my father, 00:00:12.190 --> 00:00:15.927 Clinton George "Bageye" Grant. 00:00:15.927 --> 00:00:18.198 He's called Bageye because he has 00:00:18.198 --> 00:00:22.358 permanent bags under his eyes. 00:00:22.358 --> 00:00:25.134 As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings, 00:00:25.134 --> 00:00:29.250 I dreamt of scraping off the poison 00:00:29.250 --> 00:00:33.200 from fly-killer paper into his coffee, 00:00:33.200 --> 00:00:35.055 grounded down glass and sprinkling it 00:00:35.055 --> 00:00:38.044 over his breakfast, 00:00:38.044 --> 00:00:39.754 loosening the carpet on the stairs 00:00:39.754 --> 00:00:43.482 so he would trip and break his neck. 00:00:43.482 --> 00:00:45.109 But come the day, he would always 00:00:45.109 --> 00:00:47.361 skip that loose step, 00:00:47.361 --> 00:00:49.190 he would always bow out of the house 00:00:49.190 --> 00:00:51.030 without so much as a swig of coffee 00:00:51.030 --> 00:00:53.818 or a bite to eat. 00:00:53.818 --> 00:00:55.104 And so for many years, 00:00:55.104 --> 00:00:57.064 I feared that my father would die 00:00:57.064 --> 00:00:59.138 before I had a chance to kill him. 00:00:59.138 --> 00:01:03.730 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:03.730 --> 00:01:06.721 Up until our mother asked him to leave 00:01:06.721 --> 00:01:08.378 and not come back, 00:01:08.378 --> 00:01:12.634 Bageye had been a terrifying ogre. 00:01:12.634 --> 00:01:16.219 He teetered permanently on the verge of rage, 00:01:16.219 --> 00:01:19.827 rather like me, as you see. 00:01:19.827 --> 00:01:23.127 He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton 00:01:23.127 --> 00:01:26.286 and demanded total silence throughout the house, 00:01:26.286 --> 00:01:28.958 so that when we came home from school 00:01:28.958 --> 00:01:30.998 at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle 00:01:30.998 --> 00:01:34.248 beside the TV, and rather like safe-crackers, 00:01:34.248 --> 00:01:36.734 we would twiddle with the volume control knob 00:01:36.734 --> 00:01:39.527 on the TV so it was almost inaudible. 00:01:39.527 --> 00:01:41.838 And at times, when we were like this, 00:01:41.838 --> 00:01:44.270 so much "Shhh," so much "Shhh" 00:01:44.270 --> 00:01:46.135 going on in the house 00:01:46.135 --> 00:01:48.110 that I imagined us to be like 00:01:48.110 --> 00:01:51.610 the German crew of a U-boat 00:01:51.610 --> 00:01:54.102 creeping along the edge of the ocean 00:01:54.102 --> 00:01:55.918 whilst up above, on the surface, 00:01:55.918 --> 00:01:59.663 HMS Bageye patrolled 00:01:59.663 --> 00:02:01.790 ready to drop death charges 00:02:01.790 --> 00:02:05.777 at the first sound of any disturbance. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:05.777 --> 00:02:08.712 So that lesson was the lesson that 00:02:08.712 --> 00:02:10.160 "Do not draw attention to yourself 00:02:10.160 --> 00:02:12.424 either in the home or outside of the home." 00:02:12.424 --> 00:02:15.110 Maybe it's a migrant lesson. 00:02:15.110 --> 00:02:18.280 We were to be below the radar, 00:02:18.280 --> 00:02:19.775 so there was no communication, really, 00:02:19.775 --> 00:02:22.936 between Bageye and us and us and Bageye, 00:02:22.936 --> 00:02:25.544 and the sound that we most looked forward to, 00:02:25.544 --> 00:02:27.298 you know when you're a child and you want 00:02:27.298 --> 00:02:30.736 your father to come home and it's all going to be happy 00:02:30.736 --> 00:02:32.490 and you're waiting for that sound of the door opening. 00:02:32.490 --> 00:02:33.746 Well the sound that we looked forward to 00:02:33.746 --> 00:02:35.639 was the click of the door closing, 00:02:35.639 --> 00:02:40.347 which meant he'd gone and would not come back. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:40.347 --> 00:02:43.806 So for three decades, 00:02:43.806 --> 00:02:46.847 I never laid eyes on my father, nor he on me. 00:02:46.847 --> 00:02:48.615 We never spoke to each other for three decades, 00:02:48.615 --> 00:02:50.416 and then a couple of years ago, I decided 00:02:50.416 --> 00:02:54.687 to turn the spotlight on him. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:54.687 --> 00:02:56.575 "You are being watched. 00:02:56.575 --> 00:02:58.431 Actually, you are. 00:02:58.431 --> 00:03:00.495 You are being watched." 00:03:00.495 --> 00:03:03.159 That was his mantra to us, his children. 00:03:03.159 --> 00:03:04.832 Time and time again he would say this to us. 00:03:04.832 --> 00:03:07.935 And this was the 1970s, it was Luton, 00:03:07.935 --> 00:03:09.564 where he worked at Vauxhall Motors, 00:03:09.564 --> 00:03:11.391 and he was a Jamaican. 00:03:11.391 --> 00:03:12.450 And what he meant was, 00:03:12.450 --> 00:03:14.561 you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant 00:03:14.561 --> 00:03:16.479 are being watched 00:03:16.479 --> 00:03:18.136 to see which way you turn, to see whether 00:03:18.136 --> 00:03:22.255 you conform to the host nation's stereotype of you, 00:03:22.255 --> 00:03:24.855 of being feckless, work-shy, 00:03:24.855 --> 00:03:27.416 destined for a life of crime. 00:03:27.416 --> 00:03:29.150 You are being watched, 00:03:29.150 --> 00:03:33.493 so confound their expectations of you. 00:03:33.493 --> 00:03:37.771 To that end, Bageye and his friends, 00:03:37.771 --> 00:03:39.426 mostly Jamaican, 00:03:39.426 --> 00:03:43.180 exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura: 00:03:43.180 --> 00:03:45.794 Turn your best side to the world, 00:03:45.794 --> 00:03:48.068 show your best face to the world. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:48.068 --> 00:03:49.842 If you have seen some of the images 00:03:49.842 --> 00:03:51.978 of the Caribbean people arriving 00:03:51.978 --> 00:03:53.630 in the '40s and '50s, 00:03:53.630 --> 00:03:55.026 you might have noticed that a lot of the men 00:03:55.026 --> 00:03:56.915 wear trilbies. 00:03:56.915 --> 00:04:00.556 Now, there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica. 00:04:00.556 --> 00:04:03.499 They invented that tradition for their arrival here. 00:04:03.499 --> 00:04:05.266 They wanted to project themselves in a way 00:04:05.266 --> 00:04:07.600 that they wanted to be perceived, 00:04:07.600 --> 00:04:09.031 so that the way they looked 00:04:09.031 --> 00:04:11.974 and the names that they gave themselves 00:04:11.974 --> 00:04:13.646 defined them. 00:04:13.646 --> 00:04:19.135 So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes. 00:04:19.135 --> 00:04:23.147 Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear. 00:04:23.147 --> 00:04:25.859 Anxious is always anxious. 00:04:25.859 --> 00:04:28.588 Clock has one arm longer than the other. 00:04:28.588 --> 00:04:32.236 (Laughter) 00:04:32.236 --> 00:04:35.610 And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear. 00:04:35.610 --> 00:04:37.444 When Summerwear came to this country 00:04:37.444 --> 00:04:39.563 from Jamaica in the early '60s, he insisted 00:04:39.563 --> 00:04:41.940 on wearing light summer suits, 00:04:41.940 --> 00:04:43.596 no matter the weather, 00:04:43.596 --> 00:04:44.934 and in the course of researching their lives, 00:04:44.934 --> 00:04:47.910 I asked my mom, "Whatever became of Summerwear?" 00:04:47.910 --> 00:04:52.737 And she said, "He caught a cold and died." (Laughter) 00:04:52.737 --> 00:04:54.593 But men like Summerwear 00:04:54.593 --> 00:04:56.055 taught us the importance of style. 00:04:56.055 --> 00:04:58.177 Maybe they exaggerated their style 00:04:58.177 --> 00:05:01.393 because they thought that they were not considered 00:05:01.393 --> 00:05:03.497 to be quite civilized, 00:05:03.497 --> 00:05:06.313 and they transferred that generational attitude 00:05:06.313 --> 00:05:08.913 or anxiety onto us, the next generation, 00:05:08.913 --> 00:05:11.100 so much so that when I was growing up, 00:05:11.100 --> 00:05:13.473 if ever on the television news or radio 00:05:13.473 --> 00:05:14.981 a report came up about a black person 00:05:14.981 --> 00:05:16.665 committing some crime — 00:05:16.665 --> 00:05:20.329 a mugging, a murder, a burglary — 00:05:20.329 --> 00:05:23.881 we winced along with our parents, 00:05:23.881 --> 00:05:26.545 because they were letting the side down. 00:05:26.545 --> 00:05:27.998 You did not just represent yourself. 00:05:27.998 --> 00:05:29.740 You represented the group, 00:05:29.740 --> 00:05:34.248 and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with, 00:05:34.248 --> 00:05:36.512 in a way, that maybe you were going 00:05:36.512 --> 00:05:40.656 to be perceived in the same light. 00:05:40.656 --> 00:05:44.428 So that was what needed to be challenged. 00:05:44.428 --> 00:05:48.709 Our father and many of his colleagues 00:05:48.709 --> 00:05:52.170 exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving. 00:05:52.170 --> 00:05:54.392 They were built to transmit but not receive. 00:05:54.392 --> 00:05:57.243 We were to keep quiet. 00:05:57.243 --> 00:05:58.596 When our father did speak to us, 00:05:58.596 --> 00:06:01.461 it was from the pulpit of his mind. 00:06:01.461 --> 00:06:03.049 They clung to certainty in the belief 00:06:03.049 --> 00:06:07.178 that doubt would undermine them. 00:06:07.178 --> 00:06:10.769 But when I am working in my house 00:06:10.769 --> 00:06:14.620 and writing, after a day's writing, I rush downstairs 00:06:14.620 --> 00:06:17.926 and I'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley 00:06:17.926 --> 00:06:20.790 and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies 00:06:20.790 --> 00:06:23.286 and I'm so excited that my children stop me, 00:06:23.286 --> 00:06:26.966 and they say, "Dad, nobody cares." 00:06:26.966 --> 00:06:30.956 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:06:30.956 --> 00:06:32.870 But they do care, actually. 00:06:32.870 --> 00:06:34.433 They cross over. 00:06:34.433 --> 00:06:36.940 Somehow they find their way to you. 00:06:36.940 --> 00:06:40.544 They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life, 00:06:40.544 --> 00:06:44.570 as I did with my father and my mother, perhaps, 00:06:44.570 --> 00:06:47.184 and maybe Bageye did with his father. 00:06:47.184 --> 00:06:48.826 And that was clearer to me 00:06:48.826 --> 00:06:51.784 in the course of looking at his life 00:06:51.784 --> 00:06:54.840 and understanding, as they say, 00:06:54.840 --> 00:06:56.152 the Native Americans say, 00:06:56.152 --> 00:06:57.781 "Do not criticize the man until you can walk 00:06:57.781 --> 00:07:00.093 in his moccasins." NOTE Paragraph 00:07:00.093 --> 00:07:02.992 But in conjuring his life, it was okay 00:07:02.992 --> 00:07:06.260 and very straightforward to portray 00:07:06.260 --> 00:07:09.240 a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s 00:07:09.240 --> 00:07:14.224 with bowls of plastic fruit, 00:07:14.224 --> 00:07:17.288 polystyrene ceiling tiles, 00:07:17.288 --> 00:07:19.576 settees permanently sheathed 00:07:19.576 --> 00:07:22.948 in their transparent covers that they were delivered in. 00:07:22.948 --> 00:07:24.800 But what's more difficult to navigate 00:07:24.800 --> 00:07:26.292 is the emotional landscape 00:07:26.292 --> 00:07:28.262 between the generations, 00:07:28.262 --> 00:07:33.000 and the old adage that with age comes wisdom 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:35.045 is not true. 00:07:35.045 --> 00:07:38.528 With age comes the veneer of respectability 00:07:38.528 --> 00:07:41.896 and a veneer of uncomfortable truths. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:41.896 --> 00:07:44.668 But what was true was that my parents, 00:07:44.668 --> 00:07:47.144 my mother, and my father went along with it, 00:07:47.144 --> 00:07:49.912 did not trust the state to educate me. 00:07:49.912 --> 00:07:52.402 So listen to how I sound. 00:07:52.402 --> 00:07:56.684 They determined that they would send me to a private school, 00:07:56.684 --> 00:07:58.441 but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors. 00:07:58.441 --> 00:08:02.232 It's quite difficult to fund a private school education 00:08:02.232 --> 00:08:04.872 and feed his army of children. 00:08:04.872 --> 00:08:06.856 I remember going on to the school 00:08:06.856 --> 00:08:08.980 for the entrance exam, and my father said 00:08:08.980 --> 00:08:12.580 to the priest — it was a Catholic school — 00:08:12.580 --> 00:08:16.807 he wanted a better "heducation" for the boy, 00:08:16.807 --> 00:08:19.735 but also, he, my father, 00:08:19.735 --> 00:08:22.375 never even managed to pass worms, 00:08:22.375 --> 00:08:24.995 never mind entrance exams. 00:08:24.995 --> 00:08:26.940 But in order to fund my education, 00:08:26.940 --> 00:08:29.663 he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff, 00:08:29.663 --> 00:08:32.765 so my father would fund my education 00:08:32.765 --> 00:08:36.369 by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car, 00:08:36.369 --> 00:08:37.801 and that was made even more tricky because 00:08:37.801 --> 00:08:39.961 my father, that's not his car by the way. 00:08:39.961 --> 00:08:41.769 My father aspired to have a car like that, 00:08:41.769 --> 00:08:43.845 but my father had a beaten-up Mini, 00:08:43.845 --> 00:08:48.343 and he never, being a Jamaican coming to this country, 00:08:48.343 --> 00:08:50.696 he never had a driving license, 00:08:50.696 --> 00:08:54.260 he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT. 00:08:54.260 --> 00:08:56.199 He thought, "I know how to drive; 00:08:56.199 --> 00:08:59.279 why do I need the state's validation?" 00:08:59.279 --> 00:09:01.511 But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police, 00:09:01.511 --> 00:09:03.724 and we were stopped a lot by the police, 00:09:03.724 --> 00:09:04.941 and I was impressed by the way 00:09:04.941 --> 00:09:06.840 that my father dealt with the police. 00:09:06.840 --> 00:09:09.648 He would promote the policeman immediately, 00:09:09.648 --> 00:09:13.735 so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs 00:09:13.735 --> 00:09:14.919 in the course of the conversation 00:09:14.919 --> 00:09:16.903 and wave us on merrily. 00:09:16.903 --> 00:09:18.771 So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica 00:09:18.771 --> 00:09:22.953 called "playing fool to catch wise." 00:09:22.953 --> 00:09:26.322 But it lent also an idea 00:09:26.322 --> 00:09:28.128 that actually he was being diminished 00:09:28.128 --> 00:09:30.432 or belittled by the policeman — 00:09:30.432 --> 00:09:32.249 as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that — 00:09:32.249 --> 00:09:34.820 but also there was an ambivalence towards authority. 00:09:34.820 --> 00:09:36.465 So on the one hand, there was 00:09:36.465 --> 00:09:38.092 a mocking of authority, 00:09:38.092 --> 00:09:40.408 but on the other hand, there was a deference 00:09:40.408 --> 00:09:42.229 towards authority, 00:09:42.229 --> 00:09:44.184 and these Caribbean people 00:09:44.184 --> 00:09:48.321 had an overbearing obedience towards authority, 00:09:48.321 --> 00:09:50.529 which is very striking, very strange in a way, 00:09:50.529 --> 00:09:53.633 because migrants are very courageous people. 00:09:53.633 --> 00:09:56.393 They leave their homes. My father and my mother 00:09:56.393 --> 00:10:00.320 left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles, 00:10:00.320 --> 00:10:04.144 and yet they were infantilized by travel. 00:10:04.144 --> 00:10:05.912 They were timid, 00:10:05.912 --> 00:10:07.361 and somewhere along the line, 00:10:07.361 --> 00:10:09.202 the natural order was reversed. 00:10:09.202 --> 00:10:12.689 The children became the parents to the parent. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:14.646 --> 00:10:17.143 The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan: 00:10:17.143 --> 00:10:19.142 they would work, some money, and then go back, 00:10:19.142 --> 00:10:21.965 but the five years became 10, the 10 became 15, 00:10:21.965 --> 00:10:24.310 and before you know it, you're changing the wallpaper, 00:10:24.310 --> 00:10:27.942 and at that point, you know you're here to stay. 00:10:27.942 --> 00:10:30.406 Although there's still the kind of temporariness 00:10:30.406 --> 00:10:32.853 that our parents felt about being here, 00:10:32.853 --> 00:10:37.040 but we children knew that the game was up. 00:10:37.040 --> 00:10:39.798 I think there was a feeling that 00:10:39.798 --> 00:10:45.148 they would not be able to continue with the ideals 00:10:45.148 --> 00:10:47.155 of the life that they expected. 00:10:47.155 --> 00:10:49.137 The reality was very much different. 00:10:49.137 --> 00:10:51.211 And also, that was true of the reality 00:10:51.211 --> 00:10:52.629 of trying to educate me. 00:10:52.629 --> 00:10:56.691 Having started the process, my father did not continue. 00:10:56.691 --> 00:10:59.419 It was left to my mother to educate me, 00:10:59.419 --> 00:11:02.140 and as George Lamming would say, 00:11:02.140 --> 00:11:05.919 it was my mother who fathered me. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:05.919 --> 00:11:08.261 Even in his absence, that old mantra remained: 00:11:08.261 --> 00:11:09.948 You are being watched. 00:11:09.948 --> 00:11:13.150 But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety, 00:11:13.150 --> 00:11:15.399 so much so that years later, when I was investigating 00:11:15.399 --> 00:11:16.713 why so many young black men 00:11:16.713 --> 00:11:18.844 were diagnosed with schizophrenia, 00:11:18.844 --> 00:11:21.351 six times more than they ought to be, 00:11:21.351 --> 00:11:24.623 I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say, 00:11:24.623 --> 00:11:29.081 "Black people are schooled in paranoia." 00:11:29.081 --> 00:11:32.952 And I wonder what Bageye would make of that. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:32.952 --> 00:11:35.479 Now I also had a 10-year-old son, 00:11:35.479 --> 00:11:38.328 and turned my attention to Bageye 00:11:38.328 --> 00:11:39.704 and I went in search of him. 00:11:39.704 --> 00:11:43.306 He was back in Luton, he was now 82, 00:11:43.306 --> 00:11:46.946 and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years, 00:11:46.946 --> 00:11:48.544 and when he opened the door, 00:11:48.544 --> 00:11:52.448 I saw this tiny little man with lambent, smiling eyes, 00:11:52.448 --> 00:11:54.791 and he was smiling, and I'd never seen him smile. 00:11:54.791 --> 00:11:57.839 I was very disconcerted by that. 00:11:57.839 --> 00:12:00.900 But we sat down, and he had a Caribbean friend with him, 00:12:00.900 --> 00:12:03.455 talking some old time talk, 00:12:03.455 --> 00:12:05.929 and my father would look at me, 00:12:05.929 --> 00:12:07.583 and he looked at me as if I would 00:12:07.583 --> 00:12:11.227 miraculously disappear as I had arisen. 00:12:11.227 --> 00:12:13.463 And he turned to his friend, and he said, 00:12:13.463 --> 00:12:16.423 "This boy and me have a deep, deep connection, 00:12:16.423 --> 00:12:19.383 deep, deep connection." 00:12:19.383 --> 00:12:20.780 But I never felt that connection. 00:12:20.780 --> 00:12:23.559 If there was a pulse, it was very weak 00:12:23.559 --> 00:12:26.383 or hardly at all. 00:12:26.383 --> 00:12:28.223 And I almost felt in the course of that reunion 00:12:28.223 --> 00:12:32.840 that I was auditioning to be my father's son. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:32.840 --> 00:12:34.832 When the book came out, 00:12:34.832 --> 00:12:36.568 it had fair reviews in the national papers, 00:12:36.568 --> 00:12:39.840 but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian, 00:12:39.840 --> 00:12:42.127 it's the Luton News, 00:12:42.127 --> 00:12:45.903 and the Luton News ran the headline about the book, 00:12:45.903 --> 00:12:51.122 "The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift." 00:12:51.122 --> 00:12:54.434 And I understood that could also represent 00:12:54.434 --> 00:12:56.337 the rift between one generation and the next, 00:12:56.337 --> 00:13:00.341 between people like me and my father's generation, 00:13:00.341 --> 00:13:02.589 but there's no tradition in Caribbean life 00:13:02.589 --> 00:13:04.693 of memoirs or biographies. 00:13:04.693 --> 00:13:08.777 It was a tradition that you didn't chat about your business in public. 00:13:08.777 --> 00:13:13.433 But I welcomed that title, and I thought actually, yes, 00:13:13.433 --> 00:13:15.329 there is a possibility that this 00:13:15.329 --> 00:13:19.522 will open up conversations that we'd never had before. 00:13:19.522 --> 00:13:23.726 This will close the generation gap, perhaps. 00:13:23.726 --> 00:13:26.253 This could be an instrument of repair. 00:13:26.253 --> 00:13:28.654 And I even began to feel that this book 00:13:28.654 --> 00:13:31.542 may be perceived by my father 00:13:31.542 --> 00:13:35.718 as an act of filial devotion. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:35.718 --> 00:13:39.453 Poor, deluded fool. 00:13:39.453 --> 00:13:43.494 Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be 00:13:43.494 --> 00:13:46.353 the public airing of his shortcomings. 00:13:46.353 --> 00:13:49.254 He was stung by my betrayal, 00:13:49.254 --> 00:13:51.326 and he went to the newspapers the next day 00:13:51.326 --> 00:13:52.510 and demanded a right of reply, 00:13:52.510 --> 00:13:54.742 and he got it with the headline 00:13:54.742 --> 00:13:57.902 "Bageye Bites Back." 00:13:57.902 --> 00:14:00.870 And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal. 00:14:00.870 --> 00:14:03.748 I was no son of his. 00:14:03.748 --> 00:14:05.829 He recognized in his mind that his colors 00:14:05.829 --> 00:14:08.197 had been dragged through the mud, and he couldn't allow that. 00:14:08.197 --> 00:14:10.782 He had to restore his dignity, and he did so, 00:14:10.782 --> 00:14:13.210 and initially, although I was disappointed, 00:14:13.210 --> 00:14:14.890 I grew to admire that stance. 00:14:14.890 --> 00:14:18.293 There was still fire bubbling through his veins, 00:14:18.293 --> 00:14:21.910 even though he was 82 years old. 00:14:21.910 --> 00:14:24.472 And if it meant that we would now return 00:14:24.472 --> 00:14:27.703 to 30 years of silence, 00:14:27.703 --> 00:14:33.663 my father would say, "If it's so, then it's so." NOTE Paragraph 00:14:33.663 --> 00:14:36.855 Jamaicans will tell you that there's no such thing as facts, 00:14:36.855 --> 00:14:38.880 there are only versions. 00:14:38.880 --> 00:14:41.361 We all tell ourselves the versions of the story 00:14:41.361 --> 00:14:44.216 that we can best live with. 00:14:44.216 --> 00:14:46.743 Each generation builds up an edifice 00:14:46.743 --> 00:14:48.810 which they are reluctant or sometimes unable 00:14:48.810 --> 00:14:51.118 to disassemble, 00:14:51.118 --> 00:14:54.764 but in the writing, my version of the story 00:14:54.764 --> 00:14:56.832 began to change, 00:14:56.832 --> 00:15:00.826 and it was detached from me. 00:15:00.826 --> 00:15:03.755 I lost my hatred of my father. 00:15:03.755 --> 00:15:08.239 I did no longer want him to die or to murder him, 00:15:08.239 --> 00:15:12.483 and I felt free, 00:15:12.483 --> 00:15:17.347 much freer than I'd ever felt before. 00:15:17.347 --> 00:15:19.227 And I wonder whether that freedness 00:15:19.227 --> 00:15:22.142 could be transferred to him. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:24.218 --> 00:15:28.570 In that initial reunion, 00:15:28.570 --> 00:15:30.946 I was struck by an idea that I had 00:15:30.946 --> 00:15:34.390 very few photographs of myself 00:15:34.390 --> 00:15:36.764 as a young child. 00:15:36.764 --> 00:15:38.954 This is a photograph of me, 00:15:38.954 --> 00:15:41.271 nine months old. 00:15:41.271 --> 00:15:43.193 In the original photograph, 00:15:43.193 --> 00:15:46.146 I'm being held up by my father, Bageye, 00:15:46.146 --> 00:15:48.390 but when my parents separated, my mother 00:15:48.390 --> 00:15:51.160 excised him from all aspects of our lives. 00:15:51.160 --> 00:15:55.224 She took a pair of scissors and cut him out of every photograph, 00:15:55.224 --> 00:15:58.766 and for years, I told myself the truth of this photograph 00:15:58.766 --> 00:16:01.770 was that you are alone, 00:16:01.770 --> 00:16:04.570 you are unsupported. 00:16:04.570 --> 00:16:06.842 But there's another way of looking at this photograph. 00:16:06.842 --> 00:16:09.418 This is a photograph that has the potential 00:16:09.418 --> 00:16:11.922 for a reunion, 00:16:11.922 --> 00:16:14.710 a potential to be reunited with my father, 00:16:14.710 --> 00:16:18.774 and in my yearning to be held up by my father, 00:16:18.774 --> 00:16:21.274 I held him up to the light. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:21.274 --> 00:16:24.210 In that first reunion, 00:16:24.210 --> 00:16:26.512 it was very awkward and tense moments, 00:16:26.512 --> 00:16:27.854 and to lessen the tension, 00:16:27.854 --> 00:16:31.192 we decided to go for a walk. 00:16:31.192 --> 00:16:33.193 And as we walked, I was struck 00:16:33.193 --> 00:16:35.464 that I had reverted to being the child 00:16:35.464 --> 00:16:38.957 even though I was now towering above my father. 00:16:38.957 --> 00:16:41.208 I was almost a foot taller than my father. 00:16:41.208 --> 00:16:43.816 He was still the big man, 00:16:43.816 --> 00:16:48.537 and I tried to match his step. 00:16:48.537 --> 00:16:50.114 And I realized that he was walking 00:16:50.114 --> 00:16:52.890 as if he was still under observation, 00:16:52.890 --> 00:16:55.801 but I admired his walk. 00:16:55.801 --> 00:16:58.129 He walked like a man 00:16:58.129 --> 00:17:01.000 on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:04.952 mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal. 00:17:04.952 --> 00:17:08.576 There was dignity in defeat. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:08.576 --> 00:17:10.993 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:10.993 --> 00:17:11.871 (Applause)