Eena Mi Saal

The Joy of Uncovering My Caribbean Culture Through the Curatorial Process

What does it mean to be eena dem saal?

I asked my mother who referred me to my grandmother who referred me to my great grandmother.

“Eena dem saal?… Mi neva hear dat one before,” my great grandmother told me.

She was my last hope, the oldest Jamaican I know, the last bearer of Jamaican history, but she didn’t know what it meant.

Jamaican patois, like most creole languages, does not have an official dictionary. Instead, it relies on oral traditions to ensure its survival. So when my great grandmother told me she did not know what the line “eena dem saal” meant, I knew it would be a challenge to find someone who did.

I analyzed the phrase for days, discussing it with other Jamaican elders to get the best translation possible. Afterall, I would be sharing this poem with the Harvard community, most of whom had never been exposed to the works of the great Jamaican poet Miss Lou. I finally decided on a translation minutes before reading the poem at the Houghton Library’s 10th annual Emily Dickinson birthday party/holiday celebration.

Case displaying Caribbean dance and fashion traditions

Just like the line from the poem, the Emily Dickinson birthday party held a piece of forgotten Caribbean history. For eight years, the Houghton Library staff marked the beginning of the holiday season by celebrating Emily Dickinson’s birthday–which falls in early December–and baking her black cake recipe. The staff didn’t realize black cake’s Caribbean roots, however, until it was time for their 9th annual celebration. When they did, they invited members of the Harvard Caribbean Club (HCC) to try the cake, along with black cake made by a Barbadian baker in New York, and to share some more of our holiday traditions.

I was a First-Year Representative for HCC when we had our first joint celebration with Houghton Library. I loved the event and was excited to see Caribbean culture: black cake, steel pan music and the Miss Lou poem, “Hula Christmas,” which I recited in Jamaican patois, enjoyed by people in one of Harvard’s most important libraries.

At the celebration, I also met Anne-Marie Eze, a librarian at Houghton Library who is of Jamaican descent. She, along with Emily Walhout, another Houghton librarian, invited the HCC board members to view some of the items of Caribbean origin in their collection, an opportunity we could not pass up.

HCC’s second visit to Houghton was very different from our first. Instead of gathering in the main exhibition area or the reading room which are open to the public, we were led up the stairs and into a small windowless room. Laid out on the table before us was a variety of old manuscripts, books and images. We all got the chance to parse through the objects, asking the librarians questions and vice versa, before naturally finding ourselves seated around the table telling our own stories. The items left us with many questions, but they also provided context for some of the history we already knew.

When we returned to school in the fall, Anne-Marie and Emily reached out to HCC to invite us to the next Emily Dickinson celebration. They also wanted to see if anyone would be interested in helping to curate an exhibition of their Caribbean materials. Of course, I jumped at both opportunities, remembering the pride I felt sharing our culture at the last celebration. An exhibition on the Caribbean would not only introduce our culture to more people but it would also validate the region’s contributions which are too often overlooked. I had my first curatorial meeting with the Houghton librarians in early October.

Although other HCC members expressed interest in helping with the exhibition, they were not able to fit it into their schedule. So I entered that first meeting with the understanding that I was not just there for myself. I was there as a representative of HCC and my entire Caribbean community.

Case featuring the Haitian Constitution, a letter signed by Tousaint Louverture, and a photo of Nonice Wilkinson, a soldier in Tousaint’s army

Like on our previous visit, I was brought upstairs but this time into a larger room and introduced to Peter Accardo, another librarian. I would spend the next few months working alongside him and Anne-Marie. But the most important figure in the room was the cart next to the table at which Peter, Anne-Marie, Emily and I were seated. The three librarians proceeded to explain the exhibition to me. They had been inspired by the meeting we had in the spring to do a full exhibition of some of their Caribbean materials and wanted HCC to be a part of the curatorial process. All items needed to be selected by the end of the semester, then labels would need to be written and finally the case layouts and backdrops would be designed.

The process sounded simple enough to me. I explained that I would be the only one from HCC who could work on the project with them but that I was all in. Little did I know that the project would span over the rest of the academic year. I had no idea that I would spend up to 12 hours a week scouring through Houghton’s catalog with Anne-Marie and Peter or whole days writing a 150-word label.

After explaining the exhibition to me, Anne-Marie and Peter pulled two items from the cart: an original letter written by Christopher Columbus during his first voyage to the Caribbean and annotated drafts of Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Colombe.” Anne-Marie and Peter then posed the question: should the exhibition focus on colonial history or on modern voices? The answer was obvious: both. The Caribbean would not be where it is today without its past. However, its past was also an ugly one. So, to fully understand the strength and beauty of Caribbean culture, it made sense to display colonial documents with modern critiques, putting them in conversation with one another and the viewers. Peter and Anne-Marie liked the idea so we decided that we would try our best to match older objects with newer ones that offered different perspectives on similar themes.

Not long after the first meeting we got to work, deciding which objects to include and searching for objects in the collection that could be paired together. This was the most challenging part and ended up taking much longer than we initially planned.

The Caribbean is home to 13 independent countries and 17 territories, but the exhibition would be limited to only 10 display cases. Ensuring that everyone was represented would be near impossible. However, the challenge pushed me to explore materials from and the histories of nearly all the countries so that I could find objects that represented our commonalities.

By the beginning of the spring semester, the hard part was done. We had finalized selecting all the objects to be shown in the exhibition and determining which ones would be paired with each other. The next step was for me to write the labels. Since each label had to be under 150 words, I figured that the task wouldn’t take me very long. Once again, I was wrong.

Crucian Creations exhibition case

The label writing process proved to be another challenge but also my favorite part of the curatorial process. To ensure that I understood the contexts of all the objects so that I could best describe them, I took my time diving into their histories. One case, which I entitled “Crucian Creations,” contained a book Maufe, quelbe, and t’ing: A calabash of stories by Crucian author Richard Schrader. Never having heard of Maufe nor Quelbe, I spent nearly a week researching Crucian culture. I watched Schrader’s interview on PBS’s The Bookcase, watched videos of and read recipes on how Maufe—which turned out to be a traditional Crucian dish—is prepared and fell down the rabbit hole of listening to different Quelbe–which turned out to be St. Croix’s traditional music–bands.

As I was writing the labels, Anne-Marie, Peter and I also met with the conservation team to decide on the layouts of the different cases. We spent three hours in Houghton’s stacks determining the order in which the cases would be presented, the heights at which the different items would be placed and what images would be presented on the backdrops.

Once the labels were complete, and the layouts decided, the materials were sent to a graphic designer to design the backdrops. Luckily, this step did not require too much tweaking as the graphic designer had a good sense of our vision and finally, during the first week of May, the exhibition was installed.

Chloe McKain in the Houghton Exhibition (Photo by Scott Murry)

The translation I had landed on for eena dem saal earlier that academic year was “in their merriment.” A true translation does not exist, however. To be eena yuh saal means to put forth your best self. To be proud. To be overjoyed. The only way to describe how I felt when I first saw the exhibition was that I was eena mi saal.