Governor’s Beach, S. M. B.
Georgetown, Grand Cayman W. I.
The great ‘British Summer Time’ is random at best: one week you’re in a puffer, next week you’re sweating, and then it rains. Hence why I usually return to my native Caribbean region for the entire July/August vacation, so I can reliably cook myself every day in the hot sun whilst drinking rum, eating roti, and praying the Leeward thunderstorms don’t coalesce into yet another hurricane. (Which is a story for a future release of the Studio Diary, but I digress. Trust me when I say there’s nothing that makes the woes of the world seem insignificant like enduring a natural disaster.) On the island of Grand Cayman, I stay with my Caymanian family and sink myself into a routine consisting of endless days of beach and more beach. During which I also spend my time jostling with pale-skinned tourists and Afro-Caribbean locals alike for the basic right to simply lie on said beach.
The former set? They always give off an air of, “You look like the waiters, so why you are lying on the sand next to me?” Conversely, the latter bunch are deeply affronted by the sight of another Afro-Caribbean person daring to enjoy sections of the region that are still reserved for the foreigners. Their stance is understandable, given the socioeconomic disparities on island between us descendants of the enslaved and everyone else who migrated to the region with their cultural and/or generational wealth intact. Depressingly, reductive value systems around worth continue to reinforce a deeply colonial-era conditioning which equates anything ‘foreign’ with being inherently better than whatever is local. A foreigner enjoying themselves on the fancy local beach? Good! A local like yours truly doing the same on the fancy local beach? Not so good.
