JUMP AT THE SUNS

I grew up between parched Southern Cali suburbs and maternal and paternal immediate and extended family in Jamaica. I was exposed to rural/city dynamic from early on. Even in Jamaica, the stratification was apparent: my maternal grandparents set roots in the bush of central Jamaica in ostensibly the poorest of conditions -- no running water, outdoor toilets and baths -- but with a wealth of resources to flourish and generate. My grandfather, a farmer, worked the land/his farm

"Oh, let's go back to the start." We are, and have always been, on African time. The practice of mourning infused with the celebration of life is a divinely African notion experienced throughout the Diaspora. Consider the sometimes months-long tradition in Luoland, Kenya, for example, called 'tero buru', a ceremony that tends to both the deceased and the bereaved; bridging the distance -- if only temporarily -- between this world and that of the ancestors. It's essentially ab

My mother’s family hails from Bois Content, Jamaica in the hills north of Old Harbour Bay, on the South Coast of the island. My father lives in Linstead – of “Linstead Market” fame – an outlying lowland suburb, of sorts, to Kingston. My own house in the “land of wood and water” is 1.5 miles up a winding incline in the Prospect hamlet of the St. Mary parish, on the north coast. Jamaica is home. If you keep driving east along the coastline, you’ll soon bend the curves of the li