Heads or Tails?

Neil Watson


DTS403


April 2011


995989015


Prof. Ken MacDonald

The objects that surround us at every turn can take a variety of roles in our lives. We’ve studied them in the background, in the foreground and somewhere in the middle. This “stuff,” as I so commonly refer to, is all around us at all times. So what of the ones we actually pay attention to? Why do I care more for a particular charm than, say, my best friend? Differences in class, individuality, diasporic identity, a collection of meaningful nuisances in one’s past that allow them to connect and reconnect with physical representations of those pieces of themselves? The objective of this semester long study was to try and stay in tune with the course’s aim at exploring how these things we call objects connect us, through community and experience, within the framework of a diasporic and transnational identity. Within this framework, I was able to further develop my own identity as a member of strongly identifiable cultural groups. I mean to say that I was able to map out all the things that came together to make up my cultural experience(s), which would have been much harder without these objects that surround me. However, out of all these pieces of my past, I chose to focus on this one, tiny, almost un-noticeable piece of my family history that tells a story much bigger than itself.






My understanding of my great-grandmother’s pendant, that I have been researching these past few months, has now come full circle, no pun intended, as it is a gold coin. This is a culmination of said research, and I am omitting much of the past 4 posts, which were descriptive and delved mainly into the physical aspects of my object. At the beginning I didn’t know what to think of it. I knew that it had a particular historical weight to it, as produced by the American mint, and a part of American history. I never understood how that history could be re-imagined and reshaped into our family. I had so many questions about where it came from, but more importantly where it went and who had it. My initial research questions were pretty simple:




1. Why was it converted into a piece of jewellery? Did it have something to do with my great-grandmother’s need to flaunt her wealth?




2. The refashioning of the coin was once again done over by my grandmother, who sought to undo what her mother had done, and in doing so, did that reshape its meaning?




3. How did the coin(s) play along, or against, the normative constructs of what:




a) Currency was used for




b) Jewellery represented




c) Gender




These questions are actually anything but simple. They required a fair amount of thought and insight into my family’s history and how that history was carried on through these things that were being passed down to us. What is to follow is my attempt at answering those questions and figuring out just what, if anything, this coin has come to mean to not only me, but also a part of my family history.







Fig. 1 Heads







Fig 2 Tails








To begin, I have begun to see how not only the community, but also the objects that they interact with in that community shape one’s diasporic life. In turn, those interactions are part of what shape the object itself. I say this to address my first question. Why my great grandmother decided it was to her benefit to convert this piece of gold into a pendant on a silk rope was, initially, beyond me. After speaking to my aunt about something completely unrelated, she explained to me that women tend to display their heritage much more strongly then men do. My argument was that generally speaking, this isn’t true…what I failed to garner from her comment was that she was referring to women of wealth in Jamaica, particularly of Indian decent. This whole notion of heritage plays a strong role in Jamaica, especially in the context of Indians.




As most of us have witnessed, there are class and race divisions everywhere, Jamaica was not immune, particularly when my great-grandmother was living. In her world, it was more than important to maintain the continuity of her heritage as an Indian woman who was born into an aristocratic family. Once she had been taken to Jamaica as a child, from her home in Shimla, (Himachal Pradesh region in the North of India) she was taught from then to never forget her family’s history. As the divide between blacks, who were mostly decedents of slaves, and the Indian population, widened, my great-grandmother did not have much choice in the matter of keeping that division alive.




As mentioned, she came from aristocracy, a fairly wealthy family with means. Once they were brought to Jamaica, much of that power and wealth was lost. There was very little they could do to maintain it, but saw that my great-grandmother would prosper, along with her remaining 13 siblings. Fast-forward approximately 20 years after they’re arrival, and they had a major stake in sugar cane estates all along the countryside. The re-location to the parish of St. Thomas and Clarendon meant that they could procure mass amounts of sugar cane.















Fig. 3 Shimla, Map of India












*To put it in perspective, today’s Appleton Estates, which is a world-renowned rum manufacturer, is located on the same 6 acres as my great-grandmother’s plantation. Seen here in Fig. 2

















Fig. 4 Clarendon Parish, Map of Jamaica






Coupling this with their contacts abroad, they developed a trading agreement with companies in the United States and England. With this newfound prominence, they were able to amass quite a bit of wealth, and with wealth came the urge to display the spoils. This is where the coins and jewellery come into play. My great-grandmother was not about to let such opulent objects as gold coins from America be hidden away in a box somewhere, she was adamant on displaying them where everyone could see them in awe, on her neck. This object, once a gift, was now being used as a tool to selflessly display the ‘ostentatiousness’ of her family and wealth. It was almost as if she was making up for 30 years of being part of the regular class of immigrants to Jamaica. It was a re-assertion to everyone around her that, through these things she displayed proudly, she was being re-defined. As everyone interacted with her, they were indirectly interacting with her jewelry first, and by that effect, would see her as part of that image.






In order to answer my second question, I took a look at the notion of memory and objectification of those memories. *I use objectification here in the sense that we use objects to act as representations of those memories.




We’ve seen in our discussions that there is a deepened sense of memory in objects, especially within the context of a diaspora. Every individual is a part of a bigger community, but takes away a unique feeling on objects that have been passed down, shared or created within that community. From what I see, Tolia-Kelly makes a good entry point into this notion by stating, “solid materials are charged with memories that activate common connections.” Even within the commonality of said objects, everyone takes away something different and yet shared because that object is a representation of something bigger than just the individual…it is a representation of the collective.






I bring memory into the equation because it is the next part of the story of why my grandmother decided to dismantle the necklace made up of these coins. My grandmother comes from a torn family, one that was stuck between my great-grandmother’s idealist views on wealth and power, and the harsh realities of living in Jamaica despite that small fortune. From an early age, I’ve been told that my grandmother never put herself above anyone else, and was always in tune with what was happening to the people around her. To paint a bit of an image for you, she took in the homeless every night and fed them, even when she had children of her own to tend to, and of course a dying husband. She was not a woman of wealth and prominence, but one of respect and kindness. When she decided to take apart that necklace, she wanted every coin, given to each of her children; to represent a life full of greed and materialism… this was to remind them never to follow in those footsteps. My grandmother had a great amount of distain for her heritage and those people tied to it. This is the stark contrast I never had the chance to see before taking on this project. I had always been under the assumption that this coin was a representation of our lost wealth a long time ago…forgotten and only kept in these pieces of gold. My guess was very wrong. I never saw that perhaps, in my grandmother’s attempt to ride herself of her past, she was creating a new one, for future generations of her family to take with them. This piece of jewellery was now being used, by my aunt, to reconnect to her mother. No longer did it represent all those things it did when it was first fashioned in the United States.




It is almost as if, the journey my family has taken to Canada is close enough to bringing the coin back from where it originated. That statement might not make much sense; however, look at it from this perspective:




The idea of an imagined homeland gets created once a diasporic community makes that journey and begins to live away from where they once called home. The generations that come to follow them are only told of their past heritage, and seldom ever see it for themselves until much later in life. Even if those parents do make a return to their homeland, it is usually only for a short while. One thing does remain the same for every one of them, the places they visit, are never the exact same as what they have come to imagine in their minds.




I make this statement because I believed that these objects that travel with us never truly make it back to their homeland once they have left. If we are to agree that these objects, carry with them more than their intended purpose(s)…that they in fact embody fractions of time, people, culture (etc.) then they are pieces of memory. They are physical pieces of memory that travel with us. These memories get re-imagined. When you take me for instance, someone with 4 degrees of separation from the first owner in our family, I will only be able to create a feeling of what this object/memory was like based on what I have been told… the story comes from my imagination.






In a way, I am trying to get at my third and final question regarding normative constructs. If we are to look at the physical pendant itself, it resembles any American 5 dollar coin of its time, but it was cast in gold. It is quite simple and yet marvellous at the same instance. It is, in fact, a piece of American history. Throughout the length of my research I always focused on what this piece of gold meant to my family… I really never took the time to think about what it meant to anyone else. Perhaps, this would have lead to such a tangent in my research that I would have run a muck of the whole undertaking and focused too heavily on the coin’s past…but what I failed to realise at first was that it was NO LONGER a coin. It was physically altered to not only change all those things it represented, but also how it was used. We have often used the idea of the chair in our discussions to illustrate how the simplest everyday object can be looked over. It is intended and was created for sitting, and yet, somehow, some chairs are thrones and some are baby seats. This coin, was just a piece of currency, and even so, was not put into public circulation. The instant the clasp was fused to it, it ceased to be a coin and began a new life as something else. To actually define what this ‘something’ else might be is somewhat of an enigma to me. Yes, we can assert that it, in its present state, is a pendant. What if the clasp broke off? Would it digress back into its role as a coin?




The importance of it as jewellery is almost as defining as who wore it. My great-grandmother chose to change it, and because of that singular decision, many more were made henceforth. My grandmother’s decision to dismantle it, my aunt’s decision to pass it on to me, as she had no girls in my family to give it to… all these decisions made as it passed hands, at every checkpoint in its existence. So will I, decide who it will live on through. However, what story will I attribute to it once I give it to one of my children?






While I try to answer these questions I bring myself to think about what would have happened if it had not ended up in the hands of a woman? This coin, as a piece of jewellery, was intended to be worn by a woman; once it was refashioned as a necklace of course. So what of the men who received parts of it, men like me? I do not wear the pendant publicly anymore; rather I keep in a safe, bolted to the ground in a room in my basement. This is a far cry from where my great-grandmother had intended it to be kept. As Neil Carrier’s posits, in his work on Khat, objects carry with them more than just face value; they represent the people that use them as well. This is quite fitting considering what this pendant/coin does not represent me at all. It doesn’t really represent much as a pendant that I do not wear, and chose to interact with very rarely. Which begs the question: if I do not wear it, if I do not use it, and if I do not think that it is an accurate depiction of who I am as a person, then why did I chose to study it? For one reason… women have been the driving force of my family, men have only played side roles to them. Even if I feel that the pendant does not represent me in my journey to manhood, it surely carries with it a bigger story of the women who helped get me there. It is a stark reminder of every woman in my family who made the sacrifices necessary to allow for us, the children, to be who we are in this new world. My family is part and parcel to the diasporic identity that I have garnered these past few years. The more I learn about what the word diaspora means, the more I realise the only way to really get to the root of home, is through that family chain that connects you back there.






In order to actually get at this ‘root of home’ I felt that comparing the pendant within 3 categories would allow me to get a better understanding of it. I chose to look at firstly as simply a coin, then as only jewellery and lastly, I tried to amalgamate these two, and form what, in my mind, was a pretty accurate description of this ‘thing.’ Here was the problem, as much as I’ve been able to articulate how this object, this ‘thing’ functions within the context of my family, I have yet to look past the physicality of it and really delve into its symbolism. I understand that this might be confusing, given the 12 previous pages or so, however, I have come to learn a few things over these past few months about ‘stuff.’




I felt that although we have been talking at great lengths about these things that surround us, there is still this notion, of symbolism in the absence of those physical objects, which has been gnawing at me. I mean to say that when I put the pendant away, and never took the time to really use it, did that change the role it played in my life…or in my family’s history? Even though physically, it is meant as a reminder, and as an embodiment of all those aforementioned facets of my family that are tied into it, but would it continue to live on in memory, if it were lost? We have been through the journey of trying to figure out what, if anything, objects do to us, and of course we have asserted many things about them, but I think that, in this particular case the pendant itself, (as either jewellery or a coin or both) is only a catalyst for the much bigger reaction that comes from me interacting with the stories tied to it. 

I have come to the point where I have realised that perhaps, these stories and this object, are actually independent of each other. I could simply show someone, just as I have shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 what the coin looks like, but it is just a piece of gold (with its own separate history) that has no way of tying itself to me, unless the story behind it was told. This kind of thinking got me to wonder if these stories that symbolize the attachments we have to these objects, could in fact be objects themselves; of course not in the strict definition of the word object, but more of a hybrid.  When I began to see that this coin was only a piece of the puzzle that was my family’s past, I thought what of all the other diasporic communities that have lost objects over the years? How does one make up for this loss, this void in the physicality of displacement, within the context of themselves and the objects they carry/carried with them? The answer was plainly laid out for me to see, they use every other means possible to fill that absence. 
 



This journey has taken me through a series of questions, and places that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get to without peeling back the layers of my past. As much as this is a study on one object, it was, in retrospect, a study into how that one piece of my family’s history travelled with us, and through that voyage, recreated the fuller image of who we are as a piece of a larger diasporic community. We share much more with each other than I had initially understood, or was willing to understand. All this stuff, as I keep calling it, is only part of the story, and these stories are only one part of these objects. 

Even though I’ve stated their independence from one another, I still maintain that they NEED each other to validate one another. Without the coin, sure, the story of my great-grandmother would be quite interesting to me, but to physically hold it in my hand… there’s a sort of novelty to knowing that I am holding a piece of history.  

There is no real way to close all this, I say that because this is living history, there isn’t some grand exit I can make and wrap it all up neatly. This is my family through objects, none of it is neat, none of it is tidy and easy to shelve and say that no more questions are going to be asked. If I am forced to find some closure to this, perhaps I will find it in knowing that I can part with a lot of stuff…the unneeded amount of objects that circle me, that take up space. I don’t need them anymore because I have their stories, I have the memories of them, which, to be honest is sometimes better than trying to figure out how to clean and organize them in my house.