“Call You By Denise, My Mother’s Name…”

My mother once said, “Rise up and make a difference. You are in this country. Now act like you are free.”

My work is focused on the power of the diasporic memory of immigrants and its effects on identity within the family structure, particularly those who came after. The unpacking of this unveils those distant and absent attributes that reside within the home. As a second generation from a family who migrated to the United States, there was little room for a binary identity. For myself, this constant state of in-between-ness from both spectrums, Afro-Jamaican and American, later brings further questioning of selfhood outside this maintenance of a Caribbean identity through generations in the family space, that is not just transnational. There is something deeper to be said about the internal actions of alienation, assimilation, and authenticity that are never mentioned. Through lens-based practices married with textiles, I question the conversation of the universal message of a shared interconnectedness with the immigrant experience that potentially could be borderless and blur the lines of what constitutes a transnational identity, particularly Black/Brown groups. We are all connected to one another by complex common threads found within our family memories.