Mimi Sheller - Island Futures

My mother traveled frequently to the Caribbean, but it is only now, when she is no longer here, that I realize how much her interest in the region influenced my pathway. I have been cleaning out her apartment, an archive of her life. Each picture, letter, and object brings back many memories. I pick up a framed Caribbean postcard: a small painting of a tropical rural scene showing a house surrounded by flowering trees and a figure walking up a winding lane. Tucked behind it I find a letter that I wrote to her in 1990, on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, when I was twenty-three years old. Among other things, it says: Our interests and beliefs have converged at so many points that even while we may be separated by space, you always walk together with me in my heart. Your life will always be a guiding light for me, the finest example I can emulate as I make decisions in my own life. I am thankful that I had the maturity to write such thoughts at that age, and that she saved it in a place where I would find it now; did she know I would keep this picture and discover the letter, when I too am around fifty, just in time to read it at her memorial service?

Thinking back to that year, I realize that it was the moment I made the decision to return to graduate school after a gap year living in Hackney, London. I moved back to Brooklyn and enrolled part-time at the New School in two classesan economics course on women and development, and a politics course on state terrorismbefore deciding to enroll full-time in an MA/PhD program there. Why those classes? Surely it was my mothers guiding light. She had been a political activist throughout her life and in my teenage and college years she was deeply involved in the International Womens Movement, the Central American Solidarity Movement, the Sanctuary movement helping refugees resettle in Philadelphia, the anti-Apartheid movement, and the Nuclear Freeze, Antiwar, and Peace movements. For her seventieth birthday she created a display titled My Life in T-Shirts which consisted of a laundry line hanging all the political T-shirts that she had collected from dozens of marches and demonstrations over the years, with slogans like these: