Kaya is the name I got – my mum agreed to it because of an ancient Sanskrit meaning: spirit made flesh, the body. It is also a name derived from ekhaya, a zulu word for home or household. Most say it is a word for “shelter,” which sounds more poetic, but I get confused when I first look it up in Google Translate because the world for shelter in zulu is indawo yokukholesa, a string of syllables nothing like my short name. I must consider whether my name is really what it is supposed to be and has a real meaning, or if it is a Western made up thing. But I find it on some website down the list, explaining the sound i-kaya, ekahaya.

There are more translations of my name in various spellings that I know; it is a common sound. Sister, stone, rich, ocean, yew tree. Really, I am called this name after the Bob Marley song, ‘Kaya,’ which is how most people have heard it – it is a word for herb, and often used to refer to ganja. My mum likes that meaning too, because it is strongly connected to our homeland, Jamaica. My mother, Tara, tells me, “Your name continues to grow in meaning for me as my own name does for me too. Our names are old old sounds that echo in various cultures around the world.”  When I look it up on the internet, the first thing I see is Marley’s face and the lyrics to his song: Got to have kaya now, for the rain is falling. I am interested to see what comes up on the image search of kaya, bob marley. I find a promotional T-shirt with my name on it, from Marley’s tour. The shirt costs four hundred and fifty dollars. I am interested so I search more and find a picture of Marley playing soccer. He is wearing the T-shirt.

I laugh a bit to myself. It seems comical that someone would sell a T-shirt for almost five hundred dollars with my name on it and nothing else. Of course, it is not about me, it is about him: Bob Marley the ever-living legend. But it’s funny all the same. Briefly, I recall that my mother met him once, in a doctor’s office. She tells me he greeted her. It was long ago, but she has not forgotten. She has not forgotten patois either, though it seems faded at times. She has forgotten French, although she used to dream in French and sing French children’s songs to me. Patois is almost her mother tongue, but not quite.

When my grandmother, Beverly Dunlop, was a young woman, Jamaica was still under firm British rule. It is still true, but it was then especially that patois, “bush talk,” the language of the people, was firmly frowned upon, and the queen’s English was the privileged standard. My mother was born seven years after Jamaica’s independence from Britain. Although my rigorously Christian grandmother did seem to love all things English, she also loved Jamaica. She has hardly ever left. She calls me on WhatsApp sometimes, and though she pretends my queerness doesn’t exist and goes on about every failure of the supermarket that week and bashes Obama for legalizing gay marriage, and though I roll my eyes and often don’t remember to return her calls, her strong Jamaican accent is a comfort of sorts on the rare occasions that we do speak.

When my grandfather, Garth Spencer, left his family – his wife and two children – my mother was only six years old. He is the one who loved English most of all – that “higher” language – so he left for good. Went to England, to speak English. He rarely speaks of the darker-skinned, curly-haired six-year-old daughter he left in Jamaica. I don’t meet my grandfather until I am sixteen years old. He is tall and elegant. He has a British accent and articulates each word in each sentence so nicely. He gives me the best gift he can think of – a set of four English dictionaries: the Oxford Compact collection, which, as he proudly notes, is not nearly enough to cover the breadth of the extensive and complex English vocabulary.

I take the set of dictionaries home to Maui, no ka oi. My parents tell me to leave it in England with a friend, but, adamant, I hold the set to my chest like a precious child. I lug it through the airport because it is too heavy to put in a suitcase, knotting my small shoulders. The dictionaries go on the short bookshelf in my room, taking up the space of ten normal sized books. The dictionaries do not do well in an island climate. The hot humid air makes them prone to wrinkling pages and developing mildew even with the dehumidifier I place in my room. A year later, at seventeen years old, I don’t take them to college with me.

At college, people think I am Latinx but are confused by my accent. I seem to switch between North American, British, and some unpinnable, Caribbean twang. Although my comprehension and learning in my Portuguese and French classes are average at best, I find that adapting accents is far less difficult for me than most. This frustrates my professors, as I can read any sentence from a piece of paper and can listen to a language fine, but cannot easily regurgitate vocabulary or practice grammar and sentence structures. Visitors in my Portuguese class think I am Brazilian; in my French class they ask if I am from Guadeloupe.

I once wanted to change my name to Kate. I adjusted my accent and straightened my hair. Refused to let my mother lay down the baby hairs on the side of my face. I liked light lipstick (though it never looked right against my complexion). I curled in the shade while my peers sunbathed. Yet, despite my resistance to my differences from the children I went to school with, I began to discover that each thing that I suppressed was something that I could use as a weapon to protect my individuality – especially when I found myself probed and questioned by those I tried to align myself with. My poorly hidden selves were indicators of my strength, of my mother’s, of our great-grandmothers’. I began to learn from my switching accent, from the waves and spirals of the dark hair I’d wanted to dye blonde or make straighter or curlier – anything besides their confusing textures. They simply needed a different comb to be untangled. My accents teach me I can find home in myself. My voice is riddled with places where I belong – places that claim me, a reminder of un-aloneness. And Kaya teaches me, too, her multi-origin sound reminding me of the commonality of humanity, and especially of the hills of Jamaica that promise to embrace me on my return home.

 

Kaya Spencer, class of ’21, is a comparative literature major interested in examining, learning, and recalling culture.  As a reader, writer, and one-day filmmaker, her interests lie in narratives that center and uplift queer Black women, multiculturalism, and self interrogation and identification.

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