Caribbean Roots & Personal History

The Museum of The New World El Museo de Las Américas deserves a visit and more funding for African Studies. I’d love to see the understanding and scholarship focused on the countless valuable lost human lives.  I’d like to see these missing histories recovered and restored, polished and displayed, full of their inherent glory.  For every human story is one of survival, strength, and fortitude.  You just have to cast reality in the bright light of romantic thinking.

“Was hast du gesagt?”

I insisted we visit El Museo de Nuestras Raices Africanas in Old/Viego San Juan Puerto Rico.  Unless we really aimed, we were not going get there.  The target was an hour away via auto.  In order to visit the museum we had to escape from the manicured reality of vacation paradise.  It was so glaringly comfortable, at the resort, we almost couldn’t leave.  Hot tubs, infinity pools, sunken bars… I was being extravagantly pampered, ensconced in pleasure, getting massages, downing Piña Coladas, making small water color paintings, and reading my beloved Judge Dee novels.

Yet… we had to go to Old San Juan.  It turned out that the Museum was not a dedicated museum anymore, rather a mere suite of rooms or a salas, a devoted to the plight of a portion of the ancestors of our Caribbean forefathers, in the larger museo.

The culmination of the trans-national flight was to be in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  We were planning to visit my father’s grave, with the children. Thereby, creating indelible family memories.   A sub-text to the trip was helping me to reconnect with myself.  Any deep questioning of the self may prompt you to visit ancestral lands and places where you are instantly factored in as a vital part of the community.  My pueblo, the people of Caribbean and I connect, click… being immediately familiar, yet appropriately formal, as we are…   Therefore, there was no resistance, only the unwavering laser focus of my husband, propelling us toward leaving the staged comfort of our resort in Fajador, a sea-side marvel, made complete by its private beaches on Palomillo Island to visit the city of Old San Juan and specifically the museum where I hoped to learn more about the humans that were abducted and introduced to the Caribbean as chattel, the African slaves forcibly imported to the “so called,” NEW WORLD.

My loving Big Scientist German husband worked his magic to execute this significant excursion out of the usual travel loop to Hawaii, which he loves and has kept us flying west and very rarely east, for several years…    He knows exactly what I require to unwind: a private beach, a doting staff, fried plantains, watercolor tablet at the ready, a stack of Judge Dee Murder Mysteries, and plenty of rum, to boot!  Yet, this trip was about more than mere poolside decadence with a splash of creativity.  It was a soul-healing journey into the facts around who I really am. 

Yet, the hands of the masseuse were small and strong, covered in olive-oil gloves, reminded me, in her effective silence that everything is done differently in the Caribbean.  The caring touch connected me with memories of my mother, she used olive oil for skin treatments, too.  Then I had a bath in coconut milk and a rice-based scrub.  They washed my hair and put a berry-red stripe in the front.  My nails were polished and I was ready to take the shuttle to Old San Juan.  We paid for a private taxi, instead.

Post Spa Treatments: Frau Kolb is ready to visit Old San Juan

Police patrol the second oldest city in the New World, a statue of Ponce de Leon, seeker of the Fountain of Youth and first governor of Old San Juan, wearing pantaloons and armor, presides over a town square under renovation.  Hah!  The field where soldiers met with cannon balls is in resplendent display, thronging with international tourists.

This museum visit came on the heals of my trip to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles California.  My intention was to take-in for the first time, really, the “African heritage,” which is evident in my fine tighter curls and milk chocolate good-looks.  People keep telling me, I’m a “black person,” yet the darkest man I ever knew was my father and he never mentioned this obvious “fact,” to me.  His own sense of identity had little to do with the his onyx hue of skin.  He had no concerns about his own racial identity.   I received little instruction in what it meant to be “Negro,” my father’s policy, was to assimilate, to blend in with the machine, erasing all traits that might make him appear foreign.  Thus, he wore suits and polo shirts… however, never able to fully blend in, he favored his polos in bright yellow, which looked great on him, …

The Afro-Latinos of Santo Domingo… Old San Juan, and… I hope to visit soon: Havana… are my people in that they recognize me. My real name, is common in the Spanish speaking Caribbean.  (Upon re-entry to the United States, I return to the land where people mispronounce my name with impunity.) I open my mouth and speak my Spanish and immediately doors fly open.  My voice is familiar and without meaning to be, commanding in a trust-worthy, generational sound of inherited privilege, which humans trust… just think how American women swoon for posh sounding British actors, take Hugh Grant, for example… my voice is reassuring to the locals, because, thanks to the fact of my wayward, unwanted, mother’s origin, I come from the social elite of our island nation(s).  Thus, my voice  is a sonic key to trust and immediate higher status in the Caribbean, the land(s) of my parents and grandparents.   It even works, sometimes outside the Caribbean.  Yet, in Los Angeles, so close to Mexico, my Caribbean Spanish is met with questioning.

I saw my grandfather’s photo for the first time, last week. 

My father was ambitious.  He married my mother because he firmly believed she was his ticket into the upper echelon of Dominican Society. One of a large family, a group of mostly Africans from the English speaking Isle of St. Croix, he saw the Dominicans as a dashing and heroic people.  Known in the Caribbean for their fabulous leader, El Jefe, their great infrastructure, and Spanish pizzazz… He idealized them.   He had read about the dazzling members of my mother’s extended family his whole life, growing up in the slums, shoe shining for needed family sustenance, his mother a domestic in a fine home, where she learned table manners… and brought these “better,” customs to her shack-home, in pieces.  Shards smuggled out from under her patron’s noses, she learned that eating was to be done on many plates and slowly… no rushing, she urged my father.  He listened with one ear and ran out the door to his next adventure until he fell in my mother’s carelessly laid, yet effective, net of beauty and welcoming gestures, knit by her fine last-name, and her descendant from the ultra-glamourous playboy and socialite’s darling, Ricart, son of the Ricart that was the brother of…  Ah!  

Spanish Conquistadors… addicted to gambling and the beauty of the native women and the importance they were vested with in the Caribbean… Who cared about them back in Europe?  
Mother was looking to get out of Dominican Republic and my father’s status a young attorney, a graduate of the local University, the first University in the New World,  The opportunity presented itself, which made him a welcome immigrant to the United States, when professionals from everywhere were invited to uproot and come earn in the land of milk and honey. His education made him a welcome immigrant to the United States, in the early seventies. His legal degree was a shining neon sign saying, “EXIT,”  to my mother, who was fed-up being a piece of meat in a country where sexism makes virtual slaves many women.   My mother was the singular secretary assigned to the thirteen recently graduated attorneys.  She has a gift for organizing.  She became a treasure to the department.  Men were vying for her attention.  Yet, was welcome and loved by my father’s mother, my namesake, upon a chance meeting.  Besides, my mother had more than her fair share of baggage.  She had had four children, who were living with her at her Aunt’s home.

Daniel Branagan was the best father.  He talked to me all the time, lecturing on ethics, body language, street smarts, safety, and critical thinking skills.  He taught me to think like a stray cat, assessing danger in a wild New York City of the early eighties.  He taught me to defend my positions.  He taught me to read the signs in the sky and the writing on the wall.   I’ve always had a library, because my father always had lots and lots of books.  He demanded that I “always carry a book with me,” to this day, I do. Falling into the American work forced he earned a decent living selling furniture at a store on 14th Street near Union Square, in my native isle, of Manhattan.

Christopher Columbus/ Christobal Colon, statue in Santo Domingo, Capital of Dominican Republic.  He was the first to lay claim to the treasure isle of lovely, old Santo Domingo, thereby “discovering,” America.

So… we hit the Museo de Nuestras Raices Africanas.  I was looking for answers, deeper understanding, roots… not Hollywood made but real and indelible.  Sadly, there was only one, rather shabby, room devoted to the African diaspora, in the Museum of Latin American, which was very well conceived and gave me the opportunity to learn more about Puerto Rico’s and Dominican Republic’s native people, the Taino.  Sadly, the exhibit that was meant to be so enlightening, it was supposed to show what the living conditions on a slave ship were like and to really instill pride in the many descendants of the erased people, stolen from Africa… there was one image… I found haunting.

The video instillation which was supposed to show us HOW it felt to transported as cargo in a slave-ship felt, literally, failed to turn-on.  It was broken.  I wanted to see it and I was crushed because the halls/salas devoted to the native people of the Latin American jungles were particularly vivid and did enhance my understand of a part of my ethnic, physical, cultural being.  They hired a European master realist sculptor to cast members in vanishing tribes as models of the vibrant culture which is being erased by the “NOW or flowering of… But there were no bronzes of the lost Africans.  None.  No record.  We have the proof of them in us, in our blood, our music, language, and dance.

We are partially all African.  We are Jewish.  We are Chinese.  We are Caucasians.  We are.

I was ready for another dip into the abyss.  I had endured “the horror, the horror!”

I had visited the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.  I’d witnessed the monuments, read books on The Holocaust, but… finding proof, respect, honor, of the people, kidnapped and sold… this was “curiously absent.”  I am becoming ravenously hungry for a history of my father’s ancestors, the once enslaved people, descendants of the stolen human loot of Africa.  It looks like I will have to continue searching for poignant records and moving museum exhibitions focused on the Caribbean people’s African roots, origins because I did not find all the answers I was looking for at El Museo de Las Américas.

I demand to know more about ALL my ancestors.  I learned more about my mother’s father on this trip, than I expected.  My grandfather grew up attending cock-fights, horrific gambling matches, with his father an heir to several family fortunes, writing eloquent poetry and political ballads, he died young.  I knew that his father was born to a well-off Spanish family and that he visited Dominican Republic to attend a cock-fight (how despicable!)   I knew he had blond hair and blue eyes because that fact had so impressed my dark-brown Daddy.  My father, Daniel, the Black Knight, so rushed to believe the Dominican propaganda machine’s messages, he embraced a love for his nation’s unique beauty, the warm and inviting water, the delicious fresh food. Ah!  My beautiful black marble sculpted father, loved the air, the water, the land of his memory so much that he returned to Dominican Republic, time and again until he returned to die there, only to be taken for the last ride of his life… but that is another story…. by his adopted “son,” and chauffeur, his final caregiver…betrayed his trust by never paying a cent of the promised money, my financial inheritance, a contract he signed,  in illiterate haste, which released me from guilt and duty in that he was false in his dealings with my father’s will.  (Thank goodness I wasn’t sitting around waiting for that pocket money!  I forgive the traitor.  Yet, I think… what a silly move!)

My father’s investment in time, love, and energy pays off in my life daily and in that I know how to manage, how to observe the law, and how to float and swim toward goals, yet not against the current, with it, in flow… how to align myself with prevailing benevolent powers, seeking protection in the authority of my accomplished husband, for example….  that I am able to move forward despite challenging circumstances which befall us all.  My sense of honor demands that I keep my father’s memory alive because I am grateful that as his daughter I received a tremendous dose of intelligent attention from the moment I was born until I showed that I would be falling in love with some other male and leaving him, someday.  Thank goodness, in a wave of clarity toward the end of his life my father woke-up from the dream of empty ambition.  He forgave me on his death bed for being me.  He died blessing me and telling me that his birth family had failed him.  He said he had adopted a new son, a man, his driver…a man with not one but two wives… looking identical… like twins and yet one was the dried up virgin and the other a wet valley of seductive corruption.

My father showed bad judgement in his choice of chauffeur.  Hah!

I’m so glad that my Papa gave me his blessing before dying.  I wear his good wishes with pride.   It is somehow linked in my mind that I’ve developed an obsession with Judge Dee, mystery novels by Robert Van Gulick, a 1950’s Dutch Diplomat Chinese studies school and … they… well they… sound like Daddy and the rough yet organized world he faithfully described; he taught me about the unchanging universe.  He taught me the law the justice of the universe.  The righteous truth that there is more than enough for every person within themselves to create abundance for others.  I read Judge Dee and I hear my father in the solving of simple mysteries with a handful of clues… I also LOVE my Big MONKEY, my sweet German Husband that underwrites my explorations of the past and supports my ongoing investigation on Talkinggrid because he is the father of our family and trustworthy and kind, like my Daddy was when I was his baby Monkey.

Next year: we will be traveling to Europe and covering more Muse News abroad.  So… get ready and donate NOW, why don’t you buy yourself a freakin’ ad, or donate some cash like artists, independent art collectors, musicians, and holistic healers, and other supporters of The Talkinggrid do.  Thank YOU again to all those that contribute with encouragement and by reading.  Please, let me know IF I made too many offensive errors.  I’m OPEN to donations and suggestions.  Thank you!

Ah!  I unlock myself before YOU, lucky regular readers of the Talkinggrid!

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I upload more and take responsibility for all its errors and mistakes, many are on purpose… others are happy accidents, which prove this site to be what it is: the work of one, artist, woman.

Yours truly,

Frau Kolb