Welcome And Meet Sunny Brown

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Carry On Friends, the Caribbean American experience. And I am excited to have my guest on the show and the topic we are going to talk about. But before we get into that, I'm welcoming Sonny on the podcast. She, you know, she's in a background that looks nice and Sonny like her. So, Sonny, welcome to Carry On Friends. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Thank you, Carrie. I'm doing, I'm doing all right. How about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I am doing great. I'm doing great. So why don't you tell the community of friends a little bit about who you are, Caribbean country you represent, and a little bit about the work you do.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. So my name is Sunny Brown. I am a writer, essayist, and a teacher in prisons. And basically, um, I'm from Jamaica, uh, born and raised. And what I do is I write about these things that have been bugging me for years as a person who's left Jamaica as an adult to come live in the US and who's moved around the US and kind of take on the embodiment of what it is to be an American, the American dream. But there's still something underneath. Like I say, I've been an American longer than I've been a Jamaican. But when I say that, I mean like I've lived here and acted as an American. But underneath everything that I am and everything that drives me as Jamaican. But for the longest while you wouldn't know that because I was estranged from my family and my community and my mother. And that is the genesis of my essays and a work in progress that I'm doing right now called Washbelly that I'm querying to agents.

What Washbelly Means In Jamaica

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Wonderful. All right. I think everybody know this. But if you don't know what a washbelly is, tell them, Sonny, what is the washbelly?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

The last one. That's that's just really it. The last one born in a family. But they're they're caveats. It's the last one born in a family after the mother has had a long time where she wasn't expecting to give birth at all. Like she was like, I'm done, right? Like, we're done, we're not, we're not doing anything. And then one just pops up. And for me, my mother was 44 when she had me. Ta-da! So I'm a wash belly, but it also has cultural implications. As the last one, you are generally considered spoilt. You're generally considered to be the one who can't do nothing, kind of fool, fool, you know, then no, not young, because all your siblings are older and the birth order has already been established, and you just drop in and you disrupt everything. So you're either the favorite child or the child that gets overlooked. Often in our communities, we're the overlooked children, because again, well, you know, you just come and your place not cemented yet in the in the family, but also as the watchbelly, you're the one designated to take care of the parents when they get older.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

That's interesting. I've always thought it was the older one who's responsible. Uh, I guess it's shared duty. The older one runs things and delegates to the young one what I'm supposed to do. Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yeah. You said a lot of things in your intro. I want to come back to the teacher in prison, maybe at last, but you write about things bugging you. So let's talk about some of the things you write about that has been bugging you.

Land Language And Identity Shifts

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Uh land and language and how it shapes you, right? So there are tons of theories about how the idea of self-concept came into being. And we can go back to indigenous communities going thousands of years, millennia, right? About how things shape you. And one of the things that has been bugging me is I am not, you are not, most of the people listening are not originally from the Caribbean. We were our ancestors were brought there. But somehow we've made this place our own. But the land doesn't technically belong to us. We live there, we take care of it. And so it's become like we've become the caretakers. But what bothers me the most is how living in Jamaica, then moving to the United States, how that land and that atmosphere has changed my language. You notice I dip in and out of patois, I dip in and out of the accent, how that has changed who I am, because the land forms the language, the language forms the person and the thoughts of the person and the experience of the person. So I'll give you an example. And Kai Miller talks about this um a lot, like in his PhD uh research. When the English came to Jamaica and the Caribbean countries, they were trying to make Kingston a mini England, right? And then we left England, I mean Jamaica and went to the UK and tried to make Brixton a mini Kingston. And so that changes the people who are walking these places, right? It changes your gait, it changes who you are, how you speak, how you think. And that bugs me a lot. Like, would I be any different if I stayed in Jamaica?

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Absolutely. You would have been different. Because I I this, you know, I've talked about it, not in the way you've, you know, in well prose, you know, say it, but um, you know, I think about the st the many stories that live in us as immigrants. Like, you know, one of my favorite movies is Sliding Doors, and it's it's an old movie with Gwyneth Paltrow. And what happened somewhere in the movie, she had an accident. And, you know, if she had gotten on the train, her life would have been one way. And if she hadn't bumped her head and missed the train, her life would have been another way. And so, you know, I I know that there is an alternate life I could have been living if I had stayed in Jamaica, graduated from high school, um, and not left at the end of my ninth grade year. Um, so many variables, right? And even the path to the US, there's just so many variables. Um I think it's a very diasporic pondering, though.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Um but it's not just like uh it's not just your life experience, right? Of course it would be different, but with you, your sense of who you are, would would that be different?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yes, it would have been different 100%. I think there's a level of awareness that moving to the diaspora gave me. Like, I mean, uh the difference with the Caribbean versus a Europe or North America, even South America, right? The different countries there, you can cross borders by land, right? In the Caribbean, yeah, cross border by sea. And that's a very expensive border crossing, unless, you know, and of course, Hispaniola is very contentious with Haiti and the Dominican Republic. You do have um the island of St. Martin, which has two state sides, the Dutch side and the French side, but everywhere else is a pizza, is a rock, right? Maybe in the Eastern Caribbean, it's easier, you know, to move between Trilad, you know, um, and you have the ferries to get by. But for the most part, so I'm in Jamaica. I'm mostly exposed to Jamaicans until I decide to go to Yui. And that's where you're exposed to other people from other Caribbean countries, right? The University of West Indies. Outside of that, you're very Jamaican. Your your view through even watching TV, it's still a very uh it's a different lens. And it's when I came here, I was like, whoa, my sense of identity heightened, but the sense of community also heightened because you you're talking to people from other countries and you're like, oh yeah, we do the same thing, similar things. So yes, we we could go in, we could we probably need to have another conversation about this.

Why Estrangement Feels Unthinkable

SPEAKER_00 7:45

But the conversation I want to talk to you about, which really caught my eye, is um the idea of estrangement within families. And yes, that is how we uh we ended up here. So talk to me a little bit about that, the estrangement from your family and your community, as you mentioned previously.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Absolutely. So the process of leaving your country creates an automatic estrangement. And you try to do phone calls and everything, but there generally is like a rift in the family, right? And we don't really adjust for that. We expect when the picnic comes up or when people come to reunite that things go back together. They just like we cleave back together, but that does not happen. But we don't have any language for that. We don't have any language to talk about that, and then we're not necessarily the kind of people who could talk with business in front of other people because for Caribbean communities and for a lot of communities, family loyalty is not something that is just banded about. It is value. What happens in this house stays in this house, right? And so for us, it's deeply connected to our identity. And to walk away from a parent, especially a mother, is just saying, you it's like saying you don't believe in God. It's like saying, not that you have to, but it's like saying you don't believe in something fundamental like gravity. It's the unthinkable. Yes, yes. It's like, but you also have a risk of being cast out of the culture completely because walking away from um the mother figure in your life and saying, Madonna, McCanna deal with you, all the all the random madness you bring to my head is just not worth it. I'm gonna step away from my own sanity. As an American, I can do that easily. You know, you could you could technically be in very good graces with your parents and not actually talk to them or see them for three years, even though you live in the same country, because you could live in a different state, a different town, you get busy. We Thanksgiving, that's what we have. But in Caribbean communities, to not see your parents and to worse, say you're deliberately not talking to them, you're not helping them, it's it's like it's a sin. It just really is. And so at first, when it started for me, my mother had left us at 11, similar to her mother leaving her at three months to go work. Her mother went to Kingston from St. Elizabeth. My mother's business was uh destroyed. And so she did what a lot of people in the Caribbean do. She got a visa and she went to New York to live with my sister, who was already an older sister who's already established in New York. And she was there, and I did not reunite with my mother until she came back to Jamaica for a couple months, um, or almost a year when I was 17, 16. And by that time I'd moved out of the house, I was going to CAS, which then became UTEC, University of Technology. But I was, I was already like, I don't, there's not much you can do for me, anyways. And we had already had, like, when I was growing up, I always thought she picked on me. She wasn't very kind. She's like a lot of Caribbean women who don't have time for softness. So your sexuality is not, is not like encouraged or something for you to like even express or like explore. It's more something to be managed. Don't bring up no picnic on me out, you know? Um, and so like in that environment, I was sensitive, but I couldn't express that because there's no place for a sensitive child growing up in a place like Kingston, especially the 1980s and the the um 90s. So for me, like estrangement breeds through the silence, the things we don't say. And for some reason, fathers don't get it as much as mothers do, or the women in the family, because I think women in the family are the ones who keep us connected as a unit, as a family unit, and also keep the culture going. And so for a long time, I would go through bouts cycles of just not talking to my mom. Then I would go, like, oh, I'm can't do this, maybe I'll talk to my mother, may have to, you know, like reach out. And I would think things would be different. Like I could express myself to her. I remember trying to do that at 11, and the mom, the woman cussed me out, you know, just dog run, cuss me out. The worst kind of language you can use to an 11-year-old who's just trying to say, understand me, I want you to understand me, please. And I want to understand you, and we can be this mother-daughter unit because we don't watch so much TV, anyways. And I wanted that kind of connection.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

You were watching the Cosby's or some of them and they have very heartfelt conversation with Claire. And you're like, Oh, we can't have the same conversations. Yeah. And that's kind of before we started recording. Those are the type of things, like you, you know, this idea of, or maybe kind of what I was saying, like we watch American TV and we're like, oh, great, can we do some of this? And and you find out really quick, say, mm-mm. No foreign rule, a fairy rule, a different rule.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Although we take on so many things that are like foreign-minded, but we keep aside the things that really cause heart-to-heart connection and strengthen family ties. But there's also that silence. I knew I couldn't tell people what was going on in my house. Not that things were going on super bad. We weren't starved. Yeah, we get beaten. Sometimes we get beaten for nothing. But sometimes I like I really felt like my mother preferred um her male children. And some of the things that have formed me as I grew up was her saying, I'll galpit any good fights for breed. And so I'm not gonna invest in you any kind of money. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

I mean when I tell you like the levels of um how much your mother's generation, uh have you thought of how much, and I'm not picking up in her, but you know, it's very familiar. Like she probably got the same messaging.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

I'm sure. I'm sure. But you have to think to yourself at some point, what do you need to continue? Every generation has to say to itself, like, what is not useful? What wasn't useful for me when I was growing up? Do I really want to meet this out on my children? Because I don't think, I think there's some things that she thought about, like for her, having been abandoned at three months to go live with our granny. And being raised with a mother who was in Kingston, who, as she used to say, only concerned with a big friend and company. I can quote her, um, only concerned with a big friend and company. And like she held salons for politicians and you know, she was a dressmaker, and then my mother was running around without clothes. So understanding that, like, that's what you went through. I'm sure for her, her greatest thing as a parent was to make sure her children were by her. But even in that aspect, she failed because she ended up giving away a few of her children, as a lot of Caribbean women do. I'm never judging any woman for that, because sometimes you just don't have the economics to do it. And I don't want to also come across as just like berating women, because I know the dads have a big part to play and they don't always play their part. But I also know that their role is complicated. You may not live with the mother of your child, you may be at home living with your mother as a man and helping out your mother and the young children, your brothers and sisters. And so you will contribute to your, your, your woman's, your baby mother's household, but you also the lion's share of your labor and emotion goes to your mother. That's certainly repeated in my in my house. My brother, my eldest brother, essentially became my mother's surrogate husband. And I see that happening over and over. But what would have been helpful if I had a book or a movie to watch and go, oh, it's not just me. Because when it's just happening in your house and you can't talk to anyone about it, it feels almost like God picked on you to spit on you. And so you develop this whole different psyche that you it's hard to disconnect. And what's helping helped me to disconnect is just really writing about it and finding other like people who are talking about it. And now in the last few years, the topic of estrangement has become something that everyone's kind of chipping in because this generation is saying no. Like, I forgot what the statistic is. Um, but they say like a third of Americans are estimated to be estranged from their family member, not essentially a parent or a child, an adult child, they're estranged. And so I don't know what the statistics is in the Caribbean because it's not something that's necessarily being studied. But I mean, even Oprah was talking about it recently. And it's something that when you talk about I'm not gonna bother with my mother and father, people always come back to the Bible. Oh, but honor your mother and father so that your days may be long.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

But they forget in the New Testament, Paul says, Yes, the the there always the first part, say honor, like the first two verse, and right below it, right? As a matter of fact, my my son put that in the Father's Day card to his father the other day. Fathers don't provoke your children, right? It says Don't provoke your children.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

We never quote that part. Don't provoke your children. And so at one point for my mom, even though this is her generation, and she was born

Caring For A Parent With Dementia

SPEAKER_01 16:40

in 1934. So she's like a couple of generations back. But even for her and her generation, particularly like what do we need to move forward as a family, as a person, as a parent? And what what do I keep? What do I throw away? Every generation has to answer that. And I think like we let them off with, like, well, you know, it's the old generation, I set them stare. Humanity is still humanity regardless of the generation.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Wow. Let's back up a little bit. Um, let's situate the word estrangement because we've been using it, and I don't want to assume that everybody hears it. Like, I I have a concept of what it is. It's when you're just, as we would have saying at Jamaica, you're malice, your mother, you're not talking. Listen, Sonny, we are Jamaicans, we're gonna dip in our out, we're gonna do all of the things. You're malice, you're not chat to them, you know, we're not deal with them.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

I prefer the term I've stepped away from a harmful relationship.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, yeah. That means you don't talk to them.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

You just you keep it moving. Um one of my siblings and I, we are in constant cycles of politeness. Uh we're we're super tight, haven't seen you in a long time, can't wait to see you. We see each other, and it's like, oh, okay. And then we're just internally polite. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. And your partner, how is your partner? Oh, I'm fine, and how the kids were it's you know, like we're very polite. We're very polite. But it it the estrangement doesn't mean you don't love people. Like I love my mother. I I at the time I didn't have the word love. I used the word, I have a duty to my mother. And so when she got sick and it was like she was wandering the streets with dementia, it was also the time that I was pregnant with my last girl. And I wanted to change things. I didn't want to carry on the malice throughout the generations, right? She had done that with her mother, she was estranged from her mother, her mother was estranged from her mother, and I'm estranged from her. I didn't want to carry it on, I wanted to cut. And so, like, I reached out, and at that time her memory had gone to where she didn't remember me. And I was like, it is my duty to take care of her. And I thought by taking care of her, I would reclaim that part of my childhood or that part of part of me that really wanted my mom, did not happen because it's real life. We don't always get that opportunity for the nice, tidy ending as you would in a movie. So there wasn't any, you know, fade to black, and then you see me and my mom having like one last moment before she dies where she's like, and because they call me Anne, Anne, I love you, my daughter. No, it was none of that. Like she just died, you know? And I felt like also as a washbelly that my siblings had been older and had been either a surrogate financier for her life or surrogate husband, that they had selected me inadvertently or deliberately to watch her die. And so, like, I worked through that whole thing in my memoir, this idea of wanting to reconnect. And at the time I want to reconnect, it's no longer possible. And so what I did was find I found a way through taking care of her to also reconnect to my Jamaican roots. And when she ended up dying, like a couple months later, I packed up my family and moved from Utah where we were living to Monteco Bay to live.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

So let me ask, is it an essay that's part of a larger memoir

Turning Family Pain Into Memoir

SPEAKER_00 20:13

that you wrote? And let's talk about the specific moment you knew you had to write this essay or write your memoir.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah, yes. Um, I have been writing my memoir in my head as soon as I said, I'll come, I'll come pick up mom. As soon as I told my sister that, I knew that at some point I would have to write about this. It's too much to interrogate, to not actually interrogate it. Why am I even going to pick up a woman that I said I hadn't talked to in years? Like one of the last conversations I had with my mom, I was going through a divorce. And her her first words were not, oh my God, I'm so sorry. This must have been difficult for you. You know, I had a four-year-old, I was trying to rebuild my life, went back to live with my sister. It was, I didn't tell you, I didn't tell you, saying that I work. And it was like, I don't need this. I, you know, I just picked up myself and my son. I didn't, I have a suitcase, I don't need this. So why was I doing this? Like I had gone through years where I never did enough for her. Like there wasn't enough money I could send her, there wasn't enough gifts I could send her. And she counted her feelings for you or your feelings for her and how much you gave her, like how much time, how much money, especially, was always connected to something like that. And so I knew it was coming. And I am a writer by trade. That is what I went to school for for journalism, and then I became a creative writer. I just happened to teach comic book memoirs because you know it pays the bills, but also something I love. But um, what I'm writing is my memoir, and I'm I'm correlated that to agents, but I selected one essay. I modified the first chapter where my mother's just moved with me, moved to Utah. I went and got her, and she's in Utah, and we're going to the clinic to get her checked out here and a And all that just to see what I'm up against and to see how far the disease had progressed at that time. And if my sister ever watches this, I'm gonna say, you lie, you did tell Miss she was okay and she just needs some time with the family. She was in late stage dementia, okay? Late stage. Anyway, um, so I sent in an essay to Jenny Bartoy, she's a fantastic editor, uh, French Canadian, uh, French American editor. And so she was doing an essay with Stephanie Fu, Erica Krauss, Cheryl Strait of Wild, if people watch that movie, um, Disha Philia, my fave. Uh, and I sent it in and she was like, yeah, and it's the only one that's based in the Caribbean. Everybody's like Asian or they're they're American or different kinds of things. People are estranged from their kids, but there's none from the idea of like, I chose to be away from my mother as a Caribbean person with all that carries. And also I'm I'm not just estranged, but trying to reconnect. And so the essay is about that reconnection and realizing there's no reconnection. There's never gonna be any moment where I can say, okay, this part has been laid to rest. It's essentially like this is just gonna be a wound that stays a wound.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

And I think that's what I was making a note, and I think um we're in this situation, we're talking about your mom, but it could be anybody else in your family, technically, right? Um, and I think one of the things that I'm picking up and that I recognize is that you know, you go back because you're hoping to make it better and you realize that it cannot fix. So you just have to kind of deal with, okay, let's just move from a starting point as opposed to try repair. But and and I and I'm wondering how much of that is the magic, in quotes, of American television, right? This idea of repair and fix it, um, put it in a nice pretty box, and then we we we're right off in the sunset, or everything is, you know, however, after. Um, and how much that has impacted our expectations of um what reconciliation could look like, or um your contentment looks like, right? Because, you know, there like when I talk to my mom and my uncles, I I remind them, like when my grandmother was alive and a little older, she, you know, she always had our ways, right? Them, you know, me, a grandma general, right? And R G. You understand? So everything comes through me. And, you know, being in the middle of them gave me a perspective and a window into my own relationship with my mother and growing up and saw seeing my mother's relationship with the grandmother. And I, my mother, my grandmother's mother, like the roles they play. We live in a very it's almost matrilineal in some ways, and then the men are over here somewhere doing some things, and how much of that is passed on or caught and no one's ever fixed it. So we just we just think that this is how we're supposed to behave. And the only time that changes, in my experience and from observation, is when there is a daughter that's born in the middle, so the grandchild then gets a certain level of love and care that the the the daughter would have liked but doesn't get. Not in all cases, but I've seen it, right? Um and and just kind of like even talking to my mother, my mother complaining about certain things. I said, I just wanted to know that it's the same way you know used to complain about grandma. I tell her that all the time, right? I just wanted to know. I sit there and listen to her. I'm gonna say, yeah, this all like when grandma, you know. So a lot of it is just about patterns and recognizing or the inability, especially when you're, you know, I I think going back to your point, how we would be different. My mother would have been a different mother if she had stayed in Jamaica. Living in America forced my mother to be a different mother because the things that she would have done in Jamaica couldn't really apply the same way. No, and so um my mother apologizing for certain things is just a part of her adopted, yeah man, yeah man. Like like I am sorry.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Yes, yes. Who are you as so you didn't make more of her? Can I have one?

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Let me tell you, it's a process, but that's but that's the beauty of it, right? I can tell where my mother, so growing up, my mother would, you know, my friend, she said she called herself the dragon now. She spit fire. That's how my mother used to itch into herself, and she truly was. So, but but again, over time, right, years after the event, right? So when she said I'm sorry, it wasn't in that moment, it was years later. She apologized, right? Because, you know, I wasn't looking for it, but I also in that moment recognized that she had to experience her own growth, right? To to deal with that. And I know that's very different from you, but then there are some people who just now grew up. And they they they they won't they they won't see themselves. And also from my experience, there is just I'm not gonna even try, you know. If we sit if we're in a room and we see them, we're gonna be polite. Good evening, good night, good afternoon. But that's the extent of it.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

We we use politeness as a tool. Um,

Silence Politeness And Family Power

SPEAKER_01 28:08

let me let me first address the the TV expectation, the media expectations. One of the biggest exports America has is they are good at exporting their culture and their media or their culture via their media. I don't know if I was looking at media, could be. It's hard to say like it didn't influence me, thinking that I could reconnect to my family. By nature, I'm a very forgiving person. I'm very empathetic and I try to understand where people are coming from. But in my family, that is a weakness. Because, like, why? Um, and so like with my mother and other family members, like you said, it doesn't have to be the mother. There's cycles um where you go through, you try to reconnect, it doesn't work, you go away for a certain time, and you do that again. And my cycle ended because she had dementia when I brought her to Utah to take care of her. There's no reconnecting to anything. And a lot of it we just thought maybe this is how she is. And so now I'm thinking, looking back, knowing what I know about Alzheimer's and the development of the disease, and possibly, possibly, uh a very tenuous connection to the soil in St. Elizabeth that is rich in bauxite. Maybe that had to do with her neurological development. I don't know. It might be more emotional than anything else, and just like being abandoned herself. But I I think like I wanted a mother who don't want a mother, who don't want a father. I wanted a father too. And I ended up reconnecting with my father before he died. And I just I wanted a kind of mother that would say, You're my daughter and I love you. You're my daughter and I accept you. You're my daughter, you don't need to do anymore. But instead, I got the women in my family are very much like it's almost like we are pitted against each other. And for my sister and my mom, there used to, there used to always be this competition between my mom, like what my sister did was always like downgraded. And I see my sister doing the same to thing to me. She'll she'll praise somebody for something very simple that she doesn't know. And if I did the same thing, she'd be like, oh, you know, it wouldn't be warranted anything. And there's this constant competition in the women in our family. I didn't want to continue that. Like I love the fact that my daughters are beautiful. I love the fact that my daughters are smarter, and I hope they're smarter than me. I hope they do way more things than me. But for that to exist in my family and a lot of other families, it just doesn't happen. And I think we don't talk about it. It's that silence that we're talking about. We complain, but we just don't talk about it. We don't even admit it to ourselves that, you know, boy, maybe I did provoke my child, and maybe that's why they're not really doing things. And then for adult children, we see the caretaking that we have to do as the washbelly or the oldest. We see the caretaking, not out of love or like, you know what, um, this is my family member or whatever, but we see this duty as kind of like a weapon. You see, oh, you didn't treat me bad, watch me going treat you good. And it's not just us because Tyler Perry does it in his movie Diary of an Angry Black Woman, where she's caretaking for the husband who treated her bad, and she ends up throwing him in the bathtub or whatever. But it's like, but it's almost like that, that is my recompense, you know, me take care of you. You need somebody, and I'm like, that's not healthy either.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

You know, um the idea of as we were talking, you know, this this this politeness and silence. We used, I'm gonna tell you. I think Caribbean people, you know, I cannot speak for all Caribbean people. I can speak as a Jamaican. The simplest of things can be used as weapons, our passive aggressive tools. Yes. It's all right, it's all right. It's all right. Yeah, the silence are evening, you know, like you know, morning. Good morning.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

That sounds like a long that sounds like a long-term Jamaican marriage where they stop like talking to each other, they still marry, they're still in the house, but like they talked through the children. Go tell your father someone wants a drive.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

I mean, just just it's in it could be anything, you know, other family members not talking, you walk into the house, you know, address people, you you know, say a broadcast, good evening, you know, you know, because you know what? Like they're there, I mean, we're joking about it, but is the interrogation of you know how we are and how much of it is so innate that sometimes if we're not self-aware, you know, we can't catch ourselves, right? Because we're not immune to it, right? We we try because as much as I was trying to raise my kids differently than how I was raised, them still said, Mommy, you're too loud. Yeah, shout after. I mean, I mean, it's yeah, I just say, Yeah, but I catch myself and I adjust and you know, and then we make a cameo appearance again with the loudness, right? But I also think there's a certain generation of us based on your timing and when you went to cast and all of these things, we we come from the same ginger, and so the the things that we absorbed were not just only at home, they were in the community and they were also in school, and uh a certain level of tolerance, right? So we've learned that and I guess I'm not saying this is not wrong. We've learned that our emotions or responses were stifled, right? And over time, that stifling of our emotions create repressions in some areas. So, like, you know, sometimes you just don't know how to vocalize how you feel because you were, you know, I I've I've said it ever since I started the blog. I said there are things that we were told as children that we've still internalized as adults, like speak when you're spoken to, answer when you're told. You know, if something is happening, make your anything for laugh, make your anything for cry, make like you're supposed to suppress. And we don't think it's a thing, but if we do take the time to think back, how much of that has informed our lives? And by far, many people are gonna be like, I'm a better person for it, and that's fine, but without

Class Obedience And Emotional Repression

SPEAKER_00 34:33

doing the work, that internal work, yeah, some things you can adjust.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Can I say this? When I moved back to Jamaica in 2023, um, I'm big on research, right? I love to do research, and I was like, how can I reintegrate myself into this culture that I've been away from for 27 years uh since I was 20. And one research I came across was from Yui, uh University of the West Indies, one of campus. And it had to do with politeness in societies, in our society. And what it found, and I'm being very broad brushed here, so forgive me if I'm masquering this, um, and always factor at me, but what it found was that for different socioeconomic strata, um, obedience and politeness are tightly connected. So if you are at the top where you don't have to, you can go to the grocery store and swipe your card or pay your money and not even look at the bill. So we're talking like people who are just not worried about certain things financially. You are training your children to question authority. You're training your children to have critical thinking because you expect them to take on the company. You're gonna send them when they hit 16, you know, they're gonna do one of the traditional high schools, and then you're gonna send them off to Europe or somewhere um abroad for boarding school to finish their education and then go to uni, right? You're not coming back to Jamaica, you're going to uni, and then after that, you come back to Jamaica and you take over the business and do whatever. Middle class is a little bit of um, a little bit of uh physical punishment. You know, don't do this, I have to slap you to make sure you don't do this, because this might harm you. But it's okay to be curious, but still have some manners, right? But it's okay if you don't want to say good morning to everybody on the bus, you don't have to say good morning. In fact, you know, you've been taking the bus, you know. But at the lower end, solid working class, I'm talking people who depend on other people for their pay. So the ones who do the work that we don't want to do but won't pay, um, so that they can have a living wage. So they raise their family with a strict, you have to have manas. You must say good morning, you must brush your teeth, you must smell good. Like it's real, that is how they parent. There was that rigid rigidness that you don't see in other structures um in society. And so they don't talk because they're too afraid and you are too compelled to go, like I have to act a certain kind of way. So you swallow all the things that you feel because you can't ball, because why picking enough a ball, right? You can't talk about things because you talk your business too much. So all these different things. And so it's interesting. Like, I found um the idea of estrangement happens throughout, yes. But in, and this is purely anecdotal, in certain stratas, it wasn't a thing. It was expected that you go off and do your own thing. But in certain other stratas, you have to stay close to the to the home, to the community. You can't spread your wings too far. And I used to hear this all the time when I was growing up. Oh, they'll get far in mind and they'll go far in, and then they'll get far in mind and they've not even taught to people. And they're not even contemplating that you are working two jobs or you're you're busy, or you just moved on because you leave people behind throughout life. Those things are not something that we accept, that you can just move on from the culture. And when I moved to America, I had made a promise to myself that when I turned 40, I was gonna move back to Jamaica, right? I'm not gonna stay here forever. But as I was living here, I felt like the easiest way for me to deal with life, especially once I moved past the nexus of New York and the East Coast and Caribbean communities being there primarily. Once I moved past it and I started exploring different parts of myself, I was like, rah, you know, I really don't like tin mackerel. I don't have to eat it. I don't really like church chicken. I don't have to eat it. You know, like I don't have to make recipes every Sunday. I can do something else, raw. I'm not gonna do some pasta. You know, like once I started, it's not just exposure, but it's just like this like, I don't have to stay connected to be Jamaican. I can be all these other parts of who I am. And I also wanted to dabble in other cultures. I wanted to see what it's like to be in a cowboy lifestyle because I lived in Texas and I wanted to be in that environment because it was right there and it's ready. And so why not jump into it? So I didn't allow myself to hold on so tightly to the culture and in a way, like being estranged for my mom, because at that point I had left New York and left my family behind because I just couldn't deal with the internal cascast, the the fight between my sister and my mom. There was just this constant fight and I felt pulled between being loyal to my sister because I know how my mom is, but being loyal to my mom because I know how my sister is. And so I was like, I'm just gonna move as far away. So I moved to New York from Jamaica in July of 1998. By February, by January of 2000, I'm sorry, 1999, I was in Chicago, didn't know a soul, not a soul, because I just didn't want to deal with it. And I figured the best thing I can do, these feelings I have, I don't know how to understand them, the best thing I can do is get move away from it.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

Sonny, we're gonna have to have another conversation because I said there's so much that you're talking about. Um like I have a couple questions that I really feel like I want to get to, which is you know what you're t you so so you are breaking the cardinal rule. Your company show can't talk your business, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:59

Them can't beat me.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Yeah, but again, the silence as a tool comes comes in, right? And I I think through how you know when we think when we're going back to land and language, right? So as a lot more Jamaican Caribbean people move away from the land and come here, right? And you think of family history and how much gets lost because the estrangement is tick, and nobody don't want to talk to nobody. Uh, everybody version of the Tory is the right version of the Tory. So um for the person who because this is for the person who is doing the estranging and having children, and like you have children and you want the children to kind of have a connection to their roots, how do you navigate that?

Keeping Kids Connected To Roots

SPEAKER_01 41:00

Ah, that's a difficult question. Um, when I talked about the things that we keep and the things that we leave behind, one of the things that I kept for my family that I think my family did really well was the stories. No, no surprise, I'm a storyteller. But the stories that I my mother would sit, because there was a time when I was growing up that she was actually kind and nice to me. And it's usually in the evening, she used to go to bed early. So by the time the sun gone down, she'd have a night gone, and she had the naviola cold cream on our face and our neck, and you know, she she take our pot. But she would she would come into her bedside and she would tell us stories of all these different family members going way back when. And God know, or rather, Jano. I'm really grateful for it because it cemented me in this on this planet. I knew I didn't just come. I knew our people didn't just come. We've been here for a long time. Knew all St. Elizabeth represents. I don't claim St. Elizabeth, I'm from Kingston still. But that's where my family is from. Like, and and she would take us to country every few weeks. And I go see the grave side, and I see the family members, and we go talk to Miss Edna, we go talk to Moss Albert, we would talk to people. And so I connect my children by doing that. I also connect my children to the things that my mom did, that I did. Like, she was a fantastic cook. I mean, this woman could, she would make like three course meals from scratch, and you're like, where does this come from? And so, like, every day was like a different day, um, food-wise for dinner. And so I connect my past with my children through the foods. So I make the same foods that my mom made with some modifications. I have a vegetarian. Uh, and so those are the things that I use and I tell them about my mom, but I don't tell them like to me when I was growing up, I was scared of her and I thought of her as a monster. I don't tell them those things. I don't tell them that she really believed that children, girl children, her words, shouldn't be educated because Audeman Gadua breed, and so why waste your money? Um, she wasn't educated herself, and that love could only be commodified. You have to let off money, right? It's always a money, money, money, money thing. And it's it's like something that I see within a family, a sibling of mine. Like it's always every conversation we have is centered on money. It makes me feel a certain kind of way. Like everything is just money, it's like other ways to other metrics in life to measure. So that's how I keep them connected. And I also have my brothers who are older than I am. Like I have a brother who's 24 years older, and I have another brother who's like almost like eight years older. So when we had the book launch in Miami, they live in Miami and they came out. And I always say, like, I write my stories for my brother because I need them to understand how we grew up. And I've listened to the stories everyone in my family has told for my whole childhood, and I've kept notes. Um, like I jot down what people say I've always had a journal. So when people say, I've never said up like man in 1982. Right here, my handwriting is what he said. But um they came out, and even though I was chatting my business and talking about our mom and how difficult her mom was, you have never seen two people more proud. Like they never leave Fort Lauderdale, the the uh the 15th parish. They don't leave Fort Lauderdale for nothing. So for them to go into Miami, rush over, and to listen to their little sister talk about her difficult relationship with our mom, and for them not to feel any kind of way means that they change too. They have the capacity to grow, even though they're there's standard yard man, you know. Like my brother don't even eat pork because back in 1960, something one hog eats a man, so I'm not eating pork, you know. But to see them so proud and happy that I was putting this out and navigating it so they could navigate it made me happy. And then knowing that my kids will see my memoir and understand where I come from and maybe understand themselves much in the same way that my sister, my I understood myself as I was listening to my mother's story.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Yeah. Um, and I again I wonder how much of that is living in America away from the heaviness of the culture and how your brothers have changed, you know what I mean? Like how much stepping away from that. The other thing that I wanted to ask, and then we'll wrap up because we we have to have another conversation.

Mental Health Colonial History And Healing

SPEAKER_00 45:33

How much, you know, mental health is the the hot topic, right? But when we done grew up, we never there was no mental nothing, you know. And I'm curious, you know, given the abandonment your mom had, how she was raised, whether you have had any thoughts, whether there was something else socio-emotional or mental health-wise that had was going on with her that a lot of us in Jamaica probably would have it's undiagnosed, the generation of uh undiagnosed whatever. Have you considered that was something that she would have been dealing with? And I'm not picking up for her, and I'm not saying that it must be something mental health, but you know, based on talking to you and based on how empathetic you are, I imagine you you thought of all the different things. So I just wanted to ask.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

I truly do not know. Her dementia presented in a way where we didn't know for a long while that she was sick because we're like, I saw she's still, I saw she's there. She threatens you with them as shit, and then the next day she love it, and why you for come to Reshabs forgive you, I such a. So I don't know. I I honestly don't know. But here's what I say. You look at our countries and you look at the murder rate, you look at the abandonment rate for um parents abandoning their children, you look at the broken homes, uh broken families, you look at all these different things. And if you were to say, what could be, what could possibly be the cause of this? Is this this is what a sane society does? This is what a well-regulated, emotionally regulated society does. I don't know. I can't speak to that because I don't have any like research numbers to like pull data from. I can only say like everything to me goes back to slavery and colonialism. You can't talk in slavery. You don't have any space, you don't have any place to even have your own feelings and call them your own or name them. We weren't educated, right? We were just people to work as enslaved people. And then we get liberation or we take liberation, and then we don't even take a beat to say, all right, all right, all right, oh no hush, come, let's let's kind of figure this out. No, it's like straight to nation building. We have to be this, we come up with this motto, Otto Many want people to pacify foreign investors so they won't feel like we're a black country and we're gonna like like kill white people. Um I I don't know if specifically my mother, if it was mental health. I know for me, having a therapist has helped me work through a lot of things. So the negative feelings I used to internalize that then became anxiety, that then became like um wanting to not eat and not talk, which happened when I was very young. There was a time in my life I did not speak. I did not say one word. It wasn't, I was in prep school, I didn't speak. And my mother was like, oh yeah, somebody OBR. And it wasn't until my brother, my eldest brother, said, take her to the doctor, have her talk to somebody. That was her last draw. And then having somebody, just one person, this has been going on for two, three years, just having one person say, How are you feeling? What's wrong? That was like, oh, here's what's going on. And then I could say it, and then I I got better and I got help. And this is in tramecus. It's not like you have to go abroad to have somebody, a professional, talk to you about mental health. So I don't know, but I'm I'm sure that something must be like so. If it if I know something goes, something like so, but I can't say definitively it's so.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

Okay. If I know if I know something near go so, yes. Yes. You you brought up another term, and I'm hoping that maybe we use this to wrap

Abandonment Versus Estrangement

SPEAKER_00 49:24

up. And if you feel like the conversation don't done, that's because it's a big topic, and we probably have to have another conversation. What's the difference between abandonment and estrangement?

SPEAKER_01 49:37

Oh, abandonment is honestly a lot of people who are fatherless will already identify with this. Abandonment is just like, you exist? I didn't know. I or I knew I didn't care, or it doesn't bother me to reach out to you. So it's not by choice for the person who's abandoned. The the other person is just gone. And to me, estrangement is a decision that's made where like I'm connecting with this person. If things were right, I would still be still be connected to this person. I think that's where estrangement and abandonment are different. Somebody not like, oh, and I'm a U Tina, so I'm not gonna take care. That to me feels like abandonment. Or to put it in, people are not gonna like hear this. You leave for America, you leave for Canada or the UK because you need work and you leave your children, they become barrel children. Um, you call them once in a while, but you're really not a parent. That is a sense of abandonment. Your motivation is honorable, you're trying to work to support the family. I I understand. I understand. But as somebody who was abandoned by family members who had to go seek work, it feels just like it doesn't feel any different. I don't care if you pay the school fee, I don't care if you pay rent, I just want the parent or the family member by my side. Um, and then estrangement really honestly is just you saying, You're too much. I'd love for us to to be one, I'd love for us to be connected and to be in relationship with each other, but because of the things that you do brings certain brings up certain things in me. I just can't. I cannot. For my health and sanity. I'm gonna wish you well and stay afar far away.

Where To Read Washbelly And Connect

SPEAKER_00 51:12

And so this essay and your memoir, where can people read it, uh, get it, all the all the things? Because I think I mean this is the first time we've had this discussion directly on the podcast, and it's a topic that I mean we know it, you know, we just don't talk about it, you know. So, you know, I'm sure this is there's gonna be a follow-up. So just let everyone know where they can read and listen, engage. Where would what do you have? I'm still not getting back to the prison, the teacher in our prison. So that's why you definitely have to come back on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

I would love to come back on the podcast because it's hopefully all things go well with the pilot. It's something we can broaden out to the rest of the Caribbean, so it's a big deal. You can read my essay, Washbelly, which was an excerpt from my memoir in No Contact, Writers on Estrangement, edited by Jenny Bartoy. You can find this in any bookstore. You can also order order it off Amazon or from Catapult Books. Great book. Some of your favorite writers are already in here. No, no, why didn't pick me, but my glad didn't pick me. So I'm in here. Actually, I'm a really good writer. I don't know why I'm saying that. Uh I write about all things Caribbean, including living in Martinique, having them go through a revolution and going, raw, why am I here? Really leave myself from Kingston come dead, yes. So but um, so you can do that. And my memoir, Washbelly, is I'm I'm cornering it. So I'm in the process of coronet to agents, that hopefully they will pick it up. Somebody will pick it up and love it as much as I love writing about it. And hopefully it will be somewhere in on bookshelves and within two years. I want to say I'm not the only Caribbean writer who's writing about this, and I want to shout out Camille U Adams, she lives in Brooklyn, um, not too far from me, actually. She wrote How to Be Unmothered, um, a Trinidadian memoir, and that is a gut punch. The best part is she rhymes her lines, so it's actually really tight.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

I must see, I'm gonna see if McCann pull it up. Um, but yeah, this is like a broader conversation for sure.

SPEAKER_01 53:21

Yeah. It's not just it's not just Jamaica Kincaid writing Annie John and My Mother. Um, there are other contemporary writers like I hers came out last year, 2025 or 2024. But if if you want to have a Trinity spin on it, that that's a gut punch too, seriously.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

Wow, Sunny, I'm so glad that we had this

Final Thoughts And Walk Good

SPEAKER_00 53:44

conversation. Um a decent piece of labrish. Decent. I'm eternally grateful.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

Yes. And if people want to uh reach out to me, because I know people might have ideas, they can find me on TikTok and um Instagram, or you can just go on my my website, Sonny Brown.com, and just reach out to me. I I love to talk to people about this because you're not alone if you're deciding this is something you want to do, and you're not alone if you decide this is what you have to do and you're in it, or maybe you want to reach back out and reconnect. There's tons of resources.

SPEAKER_00 54:19

Wonderful. Sonny, again, thank you. You'll be back on the podcast soon once we land on the topic. And as I love to say at the end of every episode, walk good. I say that too. Walk good. Yes, yes. See, we have family.