The three sisters refer to my father’s maternal family from Mandeville, Jamaica. In the green hills of this town on an inland plateau a hundred and three kilometers west of the capital of Kingston, my family cultivated their land full of plants, vegetables and medicinal herbs. My great aunt Ena kept it going as she stayed living in Mandeville the entirety of her life, while her two older sisters, my grandmother and her sister, my great aunt Wynn emigrated to Harlem, New York.

When I moved to Kumasi from my other homeland, the island of Puerto Rico, I cultivated a garden. Following the tradition of my family having gardens wherever we were, we always cultivated the growth of plants, it helped us be rooted in who we are, and it nourished our humanness. Medicinal plants - a.k.a. weeds- vegetables, art materials and knowledge all grow in my garden.

The Three Sisters, my plant induced memories: the evolution of a void, speaks on the personal and the terrestrial, speaks on my family, speaks on my roots, speaks on the idea that plants are what keeps us in our human bodies; they nourish the earth, regulate the temperature and the air and feed our systems, their being allow for our existence. They also induce memories, when I see violets I think of my grandmother whose name was Daisy. Memories of our broods’ care are evoked through plants and the alchemical processes transforming these seemingly eternally growing multicellular eukaryotics, into food that comforts us and medicine that heals.

The healing transcends the biological nurturing the void.

The Caribbean, brims with people like my family whose lineage does not end there but continues across the Atlantic to the African continent. The Atlantic ocean becomes akin to a void between the continents and the archipelago that once were one landmass but broken apart by the tectonic plate movement induced by volcanic action long ago. This divided the flora families to be isolated from each other as was done a few centuries ago of human families. Those taken from their lineage were sent across that great void to the remnants of the lava that hardened into islands and from that void a new evolution began…