WHO? I was born in Tamale, Ghana, in West Africa to a Jamaican mother from Kingston proper and a Trinidadian father from Rousillac in south Trinidad. Yao is the first name I was given in life by the Twi nurses in the hospital. It means Thursday born, but it is now a joke to my new Chinese friends because it reminds them of Yao Ming (who appears to be, for them, the most famous person after Chairman Mao, which is, incidentally, what Derek Walcott insists on calling me). My father was driving a cane truck and weighing cane at an age which would nowadays fall foul of child labour laws, and had his first pair of real shoes at 19. My mother and her siblings at that time were rubbing bread on the glass of a locked safe containing a block of cheese that they could see through one pane.... So, I am that. My mother has traced her roots in the Caribbean to Ghana (she hadn't known about this when she first made her way there) to one sole person: someone by the name of...
