Off-the-Grid

Off-the-Grid Bénédicte Boisseron (bio) When my brother Luc Junior was two years old, dad took him along with mom to Guadeloupe for a visit. It was the late sixties, I wasn't born yet, neither was my sister Sophie. Dad wanted to introduce his native island to mom, and he also carried the hope that Junior would connect with his roots at an early age. Dad was quite detached from his culture in his daily life in France, he didn't even speak Creole at home, so it was never too early for Junior to start bonding with the island. In a picture I recently found in the family album, you can see dad in a dark pair of trunks walking down the beach showing off his toned body. With a large smile on his face, he is holding Junior by the hand while walking towards mom who is immortalizing the moment behind the lens. In another picture, dad is sitting on a chair and holding, with one hand, a coconut fruit cut at the top in the shape of a bowl. Mom is standing behind him smiling down at him while Junior is standing in front of him, visibly eager to grab the fruit. The three look like the perfect family. I don't know if connecting with one's roots follows the same rules as taking up a sport or learning a language, namely the sooner one starts the better one will be at it, but I was already twenty-seven and my sister Sophie thirty years old when the two of us went to Guadeloupe for the first time. We had been kept out of touch with our Caribbean roots, and it showed. Landing in the Pointe-à-Pitre airport felt nothing like a homecoming—Sophie and I looked like random tourists. Junior, on the other hand, reconnected with the French Antilles much sooner. In his late teens, he had found a way through an internship to spend the summer in the French Caribbean Island of Martinique, Guadeloupe's sister island. At [End Page 61] the end of the summer, as he headed back to the mainland, he vowed one day to move permanently to one of the two islands. My brother was the real deal. He had always had this Caribbean je-ne-sais-quoi that would eventually morph into a pressing need for an Aliyah, a spiritual move back to the roots. Once Junior moved permanently to Guadeloupe, he took this calling very seriously. He went back to basics and embraced everything that didn't scream French, western, and White. Junior knew that the traditional Afro-Caribbean population preferred rivers over the ocean, so he claimed not to care much for beaches. He discovered the unique pleasure of soaking his lean brown body in the icy cold water of rivers nearby, flipping his drenched dreads away from his face as the water dripped down his face. My brother made sure that locals didn't mistake him for one of those Guadeloupeans who had spent too much time on the French mainland, the "metropole." He didn't want to come across as a Europeanized Guadeloupean, what they call mockingly in Guadeloupe a "négropolitain." Though none of us grew up speaking dad's native language, Junior was catching on fast with French Creole, throwing a Creole word here and there in the conversation. In Guadeloupe, my brother rented a small house where papayas, passion fruit, and guava grew in the backyard; those were fruits he had never heard of growing up in the Parisian suburb. He also made sure to buy mostly fresh produce straight out of the nearby fields from street vendors, as he loudly rejected supermarkets that offered overpriced French imports and processed food. As a culmination of his new lifestyle, he started adding roots to his diet. He learned how to cook ignames, malangas, madères, and poyos, traditional vegetable roots eaten by our ancestors. I marveled at his transformation and commitment. He was geographically, spiritually, and gastronomically Black to the roots. Junior was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer in 2006. The news came out of nowhere. He

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