Written piece
Pardner
Nadine Tomlinson
Jamaica
About this piece
In late 1974, while on a school excursion, a 12-year-old Indo-Jamaican girl meets a mysterious woman who introduces her to the power of intentional human connection and collective care through a familiar creative medium.
Click-clack.
Miss Caldwell warns you, except your sleek-haired, first-form art classmates, not to touch anything or roam in the recently-opened art gallery at Devon House, but you rarely do as you’re told, like not colouring within lines. So when you hear that sound, it pulls your curiosity until you reach an end room, the door ajar. Inside, a woman, plump and indigo-black like you, with a moon face and salt-and-pepper Afro, is sitting on a stool before a painting on an easel, working. She stops, notices you.
Click-clack. Her hardwood-and-shell bracelets strike a rhythm as she beckons you to enter. You step over the threshold.
Up close, she smells of khus khus and acrylic paint. The traditionally-clothed women in her painting know something you don’t. Something not taught in schools. Certainly not at the prestigious all-girls high school you attend. You recognise one word in the painting. Pardner.
As if reading your mind, the lady explains that the word each woman holds is from her culture and similar to ‘pardner’ in the Jamaican woman’s cupped hands.
“Did you know it comes from the West African ‘susu’?”
“No, Miss.”
She points. “Korea has ‘geh’; El Salvador, ‘cuchubale’; Indonesia, ‘arisan’; and Malaysia, ‘main kutu’.”
Her painting is a tribute to the women she met, here and abroad. Women who are a part of survival programmes that raise up people whose faces are on the ground.
“A united front can withstand what’s to come. Keep on painting, dear. Miss Aditi is showing omens in your dreams.”
Goosebumps pepper your arms. How she know?
The clonk of Miss Caldwell’s shoes approaches like doom.
The lady resumes painting.
Linking each woman, the sea drapes around them like your late great-grandmother Aditi’s turquoise saree, the rolling call of its lacy waves echoing in your heart.
Click-clack.