Thoughts on my mother

Here's a reflection I wrote back in 2022. As I read it now, I'm glad I wrote it, if just for how much it connects to the song 'Indentured Wayfarer' and the album I'm about to release - Songs from Pandama. This little essay explains the moment I decided I needed to explore more about my Guyanese heritage. Something crazy is about the vision of the little girl. I think it makes sense to me now, after my recent Guyana trip!

We’ve always had these nice and deep chats, especially in those days when I stayed at her house and she was living in Switzerland. She’d come home for the weekend and after gran had gone to sleep, me and my mum would sit in the kitchen around the round wooden table by the French windows and have a few cups of tea and talk, sometimes into the early hours of the morning.

Those years were my twenties. I’d finished university with a degree in philosophy, and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I felt that I wanted to be a musician, a singer-songwriter to be precise, but I was very far away from it, without a roadmap. Now I’m forty-one years old and I’m still far away from it, but at least now I have a roadmap.

I just went to England last month, and spent five weeks at my mother’s house, where in a new kitchen, in a new house, in a new part of the country, was the same round wooden table we used to sit around comfortably all those years ago. I hadn’t seen her for three years due to travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic, so we decided to have a week just the two of us, before my son and his mum would fly in from Malawi.

Our only chore during this time was to organise her garage, and see what I’d like to bring back to Malawi from my old things. She suggested that I bring the small blue suitcase filled with untidy writing in notebooks and on scraps of paper, that were the sum total of songs, thoughts and poems I’d written in my twenties, before departing on the one-way voyage to Malawi in 2012. One of those books sitting next to me now, from 2005, comes as a reminder of who I was in those days; a very depressed young guy; and a sentence about my mother in that book is what triggered me to start this essay. It says,

‘When my mum tells me from the point beyond her words that she wants me, I’m there. Because I have to be there, an emotion rises from my heart and says “Neil, stay” and I want to be there for her when I can and that emotion that calls me is love I guess. What else could it be? A sense of duty I suppose, but it does come from deeper than that “a sense of duty” place. It’s definitely a feeling.’

Back in December 2021 I went up to the northern part of lake Malawi and took LSD for the first time in seventeen years. Taking it wasn’t a casual decision, but something I’d been thinking about soon after making the decision to leave my son’s mother earlier in the year. I wanted to reflect on my life at this transitory moment, and it seemed like a good idea. It was an amazing experience, and things came up that I wasn’t expecting.

I had a very strong connection to my father’s love, but found a block when thinking about my mother’s. I’d also been having problems with alcoholism, and at the end of the trip I had a vision of an alcohol curse on my mother’s side of the family. In addition to this, a few months later, during a shiatsu session, I had a vision of a young girl curled on her side weeping, and myself carrying a great weight. I’d gone to see the shiatsu practitioner because of an ongoing left-shoulder problem, and he told me that I was carrying an invisible backpack, perhaps from my childhood.

I didn’t tell my mum about the LSD at the time, but I did talk about my discoveries, and we decided that when I stopped in the UK after the tour with my band, we should have a week just the two of us to talk about such things. It felt also that, since for the past seven years I’d been in a forced relationship, but that I was now finally free from, that it was going to be a much more open conversation than we’d been able to have in recent years. As the tour ended, as tired as I was, I was looking forward to sitting in my mother’s kitchen around the round wooden table, and talking into the early hours of the morning.

In the end we only managed to have two big conversations in that week together but they were both very revelatory. The first was about the alcohol curse and was mostly my mother talking about her childhood, and the second was more focussed on the invisible backpack and centred more around my childhood. As is the case between generations, myself and my mother had very different childhoods. I’m going to start with the second conversation.

I believe in things. Little signs that happen in life. In the week together there were duties that came up, so we were running out of time and had only dealt with one conversation, when we’d planned to tackle two. It’s true that she’d said the first conversation had really taken it out of her. She said that she spoke about certain things she’d maybe never spoken to anyone about before.

We came to a day where the evening looked free and in my heart I was hoping that it would be the night for the conversation about my childhood. A call from my brother put that in jeopardy as he wanted us to watch a certain documentary that would only be freeview until the end of the day. He also wanted me to watch it as he felt the content was meaningful for a meeting we’d be having the following day. I should have right then and there just said my piece, which was that I was hoping we could have our conversation that night. Instead I just said, ‘let’s see how it goes,’ and I know something about this response got on my mum’s nerves.

I was trying to imply that there might be other things to do that night but I guess I wasn’t straight, so it came to the point where I was half-heartedly trying to get the documentary to work, but having all sorts of problems logging into his Amazon account and getting it all wrong. Finally we had to bring the laptop out but what I just really couldn’t understand was why my mum wanted to watch it so much when I was clearly not interested. She’d already said that if I didn’t want to watch it it was fine, she would watch it on her own. Then there was the point where I got it working on the laptop but couldn’t find the cable to connect it to the TV. At this moment I said to her,

“Well you said you would still watch it on your own, so maybe you can just watch straight from the laptop?”

I can’t remember exactly what happened at that moment but I had to leave the room. I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. A feeling from very deep within had risen to the surface and was burning. It took me back to my childhood and the troubles I always had confronting my mother. I felt foolish of course, and somehow upset. There were negative feelings about my brother tied into the emotion too but mostly it was about my mum. Why was it so hard for me to just tell her what I wanted, when the thing I wanted was different from the thing she wanted?

I offered her a cup of tea, and after calming down a little bit decided that I’d tell her what I’d just experienced, as it seemed like a sign, and a very relevant way to get into the story of my childhood and my invisible backpack. What I wanted to ask her was why it was so important for her to watch this documentary at that moment. Was it just to save the four pounds that it would cost to watch it some other day? Or was it because my brother had asked her to watch it and she didn’t want to disappoint him? It was already a revelation for me, as the kind of person who never wants to impose my will onto anyone. I grew up with people who would fight to have things done their way, and discovered that the only way to have things done my way was to be alone. Are some of us just by nature non-confrontational or is it something we need to work on? Was this in some way connected to my invisible backpack? If the left shoulder is a sign of carrying guilt, where’s the connection?

The thing is that I’m definitely not living a life decided by my parents. I’m a hobo musician living in Malawi. That’s certainly not what they wanted. And my mum is open about how proud she is of me and the few things I’ve managed to achieve in my life, with Madalitso Band or even my own song-writing. All through the time in England, however, we were constantly clashing this time. I feel like she’s sensitive and I don’t want to hurt her feelings and maybe that’s why I avoid confrontation. But if that’s the case then why does it feel like fear. Did she go through something in her childhood that equipped her with this ability to bend the world to her will?

Since the trip to the UK and conversations with my mother I’ve become increasingly interested in her family history. I don’t know why I hadn’t jumped into it more deeply before, but now I’ve decided to fulfil the craziest of projects and trace our Guyanese ancestry back to India. It’s a journey that will take us through generations that were born in India and travelled on ships in hideous conditions for three months, as well as their descendants who were born on plantations and further generations who were born into wealth, and further generations who were born into alcohol, the memory of wealth but the reality of loss. That was my mum’s generation and her parents’ generation up to an extent also.

Is there a connection here to my invisible backpack? The journey begins…