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I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about intergenerational connection, building on our conversation for your interview last spring. Perhaps we can start with some of your experience growing up in Dominica?
A big part of any culture is storytelling – how traditions have been handed down from one generation to another. Before my time growing up in Dominica, storytelling was more prevalent, but I still did get to experience it.
I heard stories of what they used to call “full moon nights.” In the night of the full moon, the villagers would gather and the elderly would tell stories to the younger generation. Those stories were sometimes mythical, fictional, and some of them were true – it was a combination.
The storytelling aspect was for entertainment to some extent – back then there wasn’t much television or movies. But it was also an opportunity to connect; for grandparents to connect with grandchildren. And it was an opportunity to be a community.
Along with the storytelling, there were also ring games – active games, clapping, singing, dancing, sometimes drumming.
Is it called ring because everyone stands in a circle?
Right, it’s a circle. And you have different ones. There are ones where you are in the middle, you go up to someone in the circle and dance with them, then they come in the middle, and so on and so forth. There are call-and-response ones; you sing, and the circle responds back to you.
We grew up playing those games as children, we learned those games over time, passed down from one generation to another.
Are there certain family or community elders who stand out in your memory of those times?
My grandmother was very inspirational to me. She taught me a lot of things. I grew up spending summers with her, and eventually she moved to the village that I was living in.
I was fortunate that she did. It used to be that there were multiple generations living in a house. But then, here comes capitalism, and says: ‘You know what? Don’t do that – you need to build your nuclear family, and focus on your kids, and that’s it.’
Some of us have listened to that aspect of things. And in the process, what we have done is we have destroyed intergenerational connectedness. The grandparents are not there to teach all these vital skills and tell those stories that they would have been able to if they were in the same household.
Spending time can make up for some of that, but it’s different from the day-to-day, when the grandmother is gardening, or cooking, the grandchildren are watching how she’s cooking, so on and so forth.
There were many benefits of that extended family structure. The parents were able to go to work, and the grandparents would take care of the children. The grandparents were spending more time with the grandchildren in helping to raise them, so the grandchildren were picking up all these skills. And the parents were able to save money for child care.
Today, we’re dropping our kids off to day care and strangers instead of grandparents, we’re putting our elderly in homes to be cared for by strangers. That’s not to say that these resources are not needed, and that they’re not good. But it’s to recognize that it wasn’t like this, it has changed. Recognizing the impact that that change has had on us as a community.
It’s amazing to watch the ways we’re re-creating things that community used to offer naturally. I think about it every time I watch a cooking show –we’re watching whichever celebrity is cooking on tv, but I think it’s a way of simulating those extended-family kitchens in our own homes.
Wow, right. And elderly people will say, ‘you call it organic food, we just call it food.’ There were no chemicals back then, nothing else was in it. You just cook it, you don’t put anything else in it.
How do you think your grandmother impacted the work you do today?
I’m into environmental education now. But when I think of it, that’s where I got my environmentalism from. I remember, she would cut up provisions – fruits and vegetables – and the waste, she put in the banana trees. I used to say, “Granny, why don’t you just throw that in the trash.” But she would say, “well, that gives the plant more energy.” She was composting – she didn’t say the word compost to me, but that was composting.
When rain would fall, I’d collect all the rain buckets and she would harvest water from the roof. And after I was done with that, she’d say, “hey, take a shower while you’re at it.” [laughing] So that way, we don’t have to use water from the pipe. Little things like that make me realize I got my environmentalism from her.
She used to give me the newspaper to read, just to stay current, and then she would ask the questions: “what did you read, what did you think about this?” That was very instrumental in my learning. She taught me to speak French creole, which we also speak in Dominica, and she would correct my English.
Now, here’s the thing about it – I’m very reflective about that process because I’m also thinking of all the things that I did not learn from her while she was here. All the things I could have taken more advantage of in terms of the knowledge that she had. She could sew very well, she had knowledge in agriculture, in taking care of animals and all these other things.
There was a lot that, due to time and due to her passing away, I was not able to capture.
Have you seen the same breakdown of the multi-generational family culture in Dominica?
Yes, definitely. Dominica is a lot like the ‘western world.’ It is on par with a lot of the technology, and I think heavily influenced by things that go on in the media in America and England.
Even the whole ‘village to raise a child’ thing has changed. Parents feel like, this is my child and I will take care of my child. They’ll say, ‘if you see my child doing something wrong, come and tell me, and I will address it; you don’t have the right to do that.’ Before, it wasn’t that way; everybody was able to check everybody.
So now, I am intentional about trying to create spaces for intergenerational connection and learning – because we are lacking due to that impact. I think it’s very important we are building intergenerational connectedness, and recognizing the importance of it. Not just on a family level, but on a community level.
Amen. How do you pursue it in your life or work currently?
One of my most recent experiences with intergenerational connectedness is doing work with Connecticut Center for Nonviolence. Seeing people like [founder, director] Miss Victoria and [founder, Advisory Board member] Pastor Lane, and learning from them, and also having the youth coming up. All of us in the same space at the same time, doing the same work.
Bernard Lafayette told us stories that you would never read. He did write a book, but some of the stories he was telling us were not written anywhere. I was blessed to have that experience, so now I can pass on those stories to other people.
When we want to find something out, we go to Google. Before there was Google, the elderly was our Google. These were the people that we would go to and ask, “what happened then? What happened there?” They were the original Google.
We have Google now, and we have books. However, we have to understand that a book is edited. There’s only so much you can fit, from one end of the book to the other, and in-between is edited. Things are going to be left out; there’s no way it’s going to tell the full story of things.
And that is where oral history comes in. That is where creating spaces where elderly people can tell stories to us and we can tell them to younger generations, and spread it.
So, I’ve tried my best to create spaces for that kind of intergenerational learning. When I was program coordinator at Solar Youth and the New Haven Land Trust [now called Gather New Haven], I would bring the kids to gardeners. The gardeners in community gardens were elderly, and they were teaching the kids how to plant, how to sow seeds. It was beautiful to see and facilitate that, be the middle person bringing the young people to the elderly.
In the work I’m doing with high school students right now at Common Ground, I’m always intentional about thinking up ways to create spaces where they can teach the kids who are coming up, and create spaces where they can learn from us.
How does drumming connect to these themes for you?
I grew up around it. My father was a cultural activist – he used drumming, theater, poetry, and all these things. So I grew up being around him, his performances – back stage, front stage, around it all. My elementary school was a very cultural school, we always used to be playing drums.
By the time I got to high school, I was blessed to have teachers that channeled that energy I had for drumming and gave me opportunities to perform. For example, we had talent shows, and would do this marching and drilling, and the teacher gave me a snare drum to play. One guy played the bass drum, I played the snare, for the students when they were marching and drilling.
What I’m trying to do now is the same thing for my daughter; I’m trying to pass it on to her. She’s at all my performances, sometimes I give her space to perform. I’m trying to raise her in the same way that I grew up, in the culture of drumming and performing.
Do you consider yourself a cultural activist?
Not to the extent of my father – that was his life’s work. But, yes, in my own life, I do. I use culture and I promote it, I would say I use the art to foster social change and to build community and connections.
And there’s always space for it. Anywhere I go, I bring my drum with me – it’s just part of who I am. When I’m doing social-emotional work, or outdoor education, it’s a part of it in some way.
Do you see a broader hunger to return to intergenerational connections?
Yes – it is coming back. We’re creating spaces where it’s coming back. What you see happening in America right now and over the world, families are coming together, they’re creating cooperation. The generations are coming back, parents are buying houses with in-law apartments in them. People are getting organized, creating houses in co-ops, lots of community gardens, food co-ops: I buy the milk this week, you buy the eggs next week – and so on.
More and more, people are trying to figure out ways that we could cooperate and work together, build together. Because at the end of the day, we were built for cooperation. We were built to work together and live together. So we see that change coming back full circle, people are figuring out ways to help each other.
We had a system in Dominica called koudmen – it’s a French word for cooperation – everybody would come to my house one day, help me paint, or grow my vegetables, whatever. Next week we go to somebody else’s house, and so on and so forth.
That’s beautiful.
Yeah. And in America we see it happening too, people help people when they have to move, help with projects at the house. In the past we have moved away from the culture of group economics and helping each other. But it’s coming back. Let’s keep it going!
It’s a really hopeful reminder and message. Do you think the pandemic played a role in that shift back to appreciating and choosing each other?
I think absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. If you don’t have something for a while, then you realize and end up seeing the value in it. I think people were longing for that.
Imagine, when the kids came back to school completely – the first few months, there were barely any behavioral issues. Yes, there was social-emotional stuff they came back with. But in my opinion, the kids were so happy to be back in school, in that space, they didn’t have time to not listen or anything! That joy they got from coming back, I’m telling you – I barely dealt with behavioral problems.
I remember from your interview that young people give you hope and inspire you.
Exactly. I always say the young people, there’s a lot we can learn from them. This is their time – the technology, all the things, they were born in it, and they can teach us. And giving them that confidence that we need them to teach us youth culture. We have a lot to learn from them.
I always tell young people that I work with, you are the future, you are the present, you have the ability to make change now. You have the ability impact the kids who are younger than you, you have the ability to pull in kids your age, and you can pull in your parents.
I really appreciate that, encouraging and inspiring others to exercise their agency to help make the world healthier.
Right. And I appreciate that phenomenon of now being in the middle of generations; are there ways you feed that part of your soul looking up to your grandmother, looking for connection to people older than you?
When I meet people who are older than me, I ask them questions, have conversations. I set the intention to connect and learn from them, based on having respect for that person and what stories they might have to tell, what experience they might have. What things were like when they were my age, or even before that, or how were things before. The word I want to say is respect. Having that respect for that person, that elderly person, showing that respect and inquiring.
When I have that conversation, I’m showing them that there is value in that. Then, what they are sharing with me, do I take it and bring it to the kids myself? I would rather them hear it from the source. That’s where I find myself bridging, being that connecting piece from one generation to another. And I try to create spaces where that can happen.
After I connect the dots, then I’m putting it on the younger people to spread it to the younger ones now. And that is full circle.
If you helped damage the world, you should help repair it. If you’re in the middle, it’s going to be yours, and it’s yours right now. And the value of intergenerational connectedness, the different generations can learn from each other. It’s across the board.
Are there any closing thoughts you’d like to share?
I’d like to echo about us being intentional about creating spaces where we can learn from each other and increase intergenerational connectedness, recognizing the importance of it. Respecting our elders, passing that on. Let’s keep it going.
And back to sustainable development – what are you doing, what impact are you having, seven generations to come. It goes back to legacy, how do you want to be remembered, what do you want people to see you as.
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