I’m sure that in my parents’ minds there was such a thing as table manners. They talked about the proper way to hold a fork and knife, the polite way to eat soup, and so on. But my father, a doctor, set fire to the rules more often than he enforced them. His preferred way of ignoring etiquette was to bring his medical magazines to the table and, while we were eating, show us pictures of diseases and bodily damage. I first saw gunshot wounds one day over a lunch of macaroni and cheese. I remember this specifically, because I have never since been able to eat mac and cheese without a slight revulsion.

If I don’t hold my aversion to mac and cheese against my father, it’s because I came to love being at table with my family. And The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, was not entirely out of place, because our dining room was the family souk, a locus of exchange and argument. The subjects were diverse and unpredictable: Dickens, the Mighty Sparrow, snow, scabies, the existence of God, stenography, whether Caribs (“our” tribe) had ever eaten Arawaks, et cetera.

As important as the variety of things discussed was the fact that all were encouraged to speak. My mother and father wanted to hear what those around the table thought, and it didn’t seem to matter whether the quality of thought was high or low. I remember, during one meal, my uncle Charles arguing that, since different bodies react to alcohol in different ways, it was government overreach to designate a blood-alcohol level of .08 as the standard for drunkenness, and that drivers themselves were better qualified to judge when they were too drunk to get behind the wheel.

Fifty-five years later, I still remember his argument, the loud derision it elicited, and the defiance with which it was defended. I remember the house (on Neil Way, in Ottawa), the dining room, the table, and what we were eating: buljol with hops bread. It was my first inkling that being wrong, when with one’s family, is sometimes as vital as being right, because it keeps the conversation going in a way that rightness does not. (I have no doubt that those dinner conversations influenced the way I approach writing. Heterogeneity feels familial and inviting; I’m drawn to the appearance of the unpredictable, a startling image or idea that, taken out of its original context, brings light to an emotion or a situation or, simply, to itself.)

Of course, the liveliness of immigrant-family mealtimes is a commonplace, a cliché, the stuff of dull stories, moldy jokes, and so on. If I cherish the cliché, it’s because it contains a mythic sense of communality, which, as a child, I experienced as a duality, almost a contradiction.

My parents had left Trinidad when I was a year old, in order to prepare a home for us in Ottawa, and entrusted me to my grandmother. When I arrived in Canada, three years later, I was not at all certain that I wanted to stay with them. For a time, I would have happily given up my mother and father for a chance to be back in Trinidad, the only world I had known. The love I felt for the island of my birth—my grief at its loss—was primal, while the feelings I had for my parents were tentative, uncertain, and often hostile.

It was cruelly ironic that, in my earliest years in Canada, the people who had severed my ties to Trinidad were my only channel back to it. My land was embedded in my parents’ accents, in the food they made, in the Anansi stories they told, in their pride in Eric Williams and C. L. R. James, their jokes, their arguments, their songs, and, most poignantly, in their anecdotes about people I longed for: my grandma Ada, in particular.

The dining room was where I sifted for material about Trinidad. It did not occur to my five-year-old self—how could it?—that my parents were as desperate to narrate Trinidad as I was to listen for it. For them, time around the table eating the food of their home and retelling the stories they had heard there was a necessary reconnection with what they had lost—and they had lost more than I had, having been in their twenties when they left. Nor did I understand how much of themselves they added to the Trinidad they were passing on to me, bending the land toward them as they spoke.

These days, when I’m asked what Trinidad means to me, I usually speak about the wound that is emigration and the balm that comes from talking a place back into existence. Trinidad and Tobago—the actual country—ceased to be my homeland long ago.

My homeland is the table around which we talked about home. ♦