the hummingbird's tongue is forked. My father is dead.These two things I know to be true - the rest is speculation. Fortunately, as a writer of speculative fiction, I am accustomed to using my imagination to fill in the blanks, and my generalised anxiety disorder prompts me to endlessly ask, What if? For over a year I have been formulating an experimental memoir on memory, migration, and mental illness, but I have struggled to find a form that will lend coherence to the complicated history that led my father to leave the Caribbean following his mothers alleged death in an Antiguan asylum in 1956. My goal in writing my planned memoir The Hummingbird's Tongue is to map my father's journey as well as my own; there have been times in my life when I have followed closely in my father's footsteps, yet I have also tried to open some of the doors he closed as I reverse the migration I suspect he meant to be final.Since I am not yet ready to write this memoir, I instead have been thinking about islands and the different archipelagos to which I have been drawn over the years. My first overseas trip was to Jamaica when I was fifteen, and five years later I left Canada for England, the island - for better or worse - to which I am most drawn. I currently live in New York City, which is another archipelago, and from here I have started to build relationships with the people in Nevis that my father loved but left behind. When I sit down to write and no words appear on the page, I wonder if my psychic distance from the Caribbean is to blame. Antiguan author and avid gardener Jamaica Kincaid began to dig flowerbeds in her Vermont backyard and did not realise until she put the shovel down that her chaotic design resembled an archipelago. I am unlikely to have such a lucky accident, so I must find or develop a form for prose that reflects the separateness and the unity of a chain of islands.In 2005 I wrote my first memoir, Stranger in the Family. Following the death of my father and the unexpected termination of what was supposed to be a year-long teaching assignment in East Africa, I moved back into my childhood home in Toronto and wrote a series of essays in order to make sense of my grief and rage. Unable to find a Canadian publisher, I returned to the USA, set the manuscript aside for three years, and then chose to selfpublish it as a mixed-media memoir that examines the shifting terrain upon which we negotiate race, kinship, and identity. A couple of years before his death, in the heat of an argument, my father said, You're a stranger in this family. I decided to use his accusation as the title of my memoir since it also accurately reflected the feeling of alienation I experienced in Djibouti and within my country of origin, Canada.I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, dreaming of magical wardrobes and secret gardens. Doors figured rather prominently in my imagination, and the books I read were windows into other worlds. They were not, however, much of a mirror for my young black female self. I learned early on that only white children had wonderful adventures in distant lands; only white children were magically transported through time and space; only white children found the buried key that unlocked their own private Eden. Looking back on those days now at the age of forty, I marvel at the girl I once was. Why would a plump, brown-skinned girl with an Afro embark on a quest to read all the books she could find by C.S. Lewis and Frances Hodgson Burnett? Was I an Anglophile in training, or was my taste in books inevitable given the lack of multicultural literature available in Canada? Up until grade three, I started each school day by singing God Save the Queen, so perhaps my taste in literature was the inevitable result of Canada's colonial legacy.Whatever the reason, I have since made peace with my past self - or at least I have tried. In his unfinished memoir my father wrote, Deep underneath may be the desire to break out of who we have been made [into] and create a new me, but we can't, and on this one point, at least, we agree. …