Every March, the Virgin Islands celebrates its history and culture extensively. We come together to commemorate the people, events, and traditions that shaped us into the community we are today. But more than just acknowledging the events and people of yesteryear, what can these stories teach us, and to what depth are we willing to go to find out?
One of the biggest reasons I love exploring history is because somewhere between the tattered old buildings, the faded photographs, and the newspaper pages with ripped edges, I find pieces of myself tucked between time and space.
I meet versions of myself, fragmented but alive, insisting on the power of many stories. Stories where I am both the blade and the knife, both the particle and the universe, both the villain and the victim. Within these artifacts, I uncover a compendium of human experiences — shaping all that I have ever known in this lifetime and all that I will never get to know.
I meet ancestors, yours and mine — some with monuments in their honor, others with hands still bleeding from the labor they will never get recognition for. I meet the lay people, the ones whose contributions to our community are appreciated but whose names are largely forgotten, their tombstones sitting desolate in cemeteries no one seems to visit anymore.
I confront injustice — the kind that spans centuries and the kind sculpted by the hands of a callous colonial system imposed on a people who were never given a choice. I find injustice in intimate spaces — among community members, colleagues, and within family lines. But more often than not, I find the kind of injustice we inflict upon ourselves in the quiet corners of our minds where we assert that suffering is what we deserve.
I meet unwritten stories of love and lovemaking, of joy and reckless abandon, of laughter whose echoes still ripple through time. These stories, rarely told, do not center on suffering and sacrifice but instead remind us that our humanity is more than hardship and death.
I meet the contours of the landscapes I see every day but never truly noticed. And I wonder — do others see how the distant hills are more beautiful when left alone? I meet the formidable face of Mother Nature, who has given more than she has taken, whose natural disasters implore us to remember that our personal accountability — what we do, who we become — extends to the land we inhabit.
Exploring our history through love, with love, and for love offers us a fleeting chance to straddle multiple timelines at once. In the zero-point center of real and not real, we remember: all that has existed before exists today and will exist tomorrow.
Historical research, archiving, and preservation are labors of love owed to the generations we will never meet. It is work that is most impactful when it is a collective community effort — each of us holding our own piece of the thread and weaving it forward. It is work that requires cross-generational involvement and collaboration, and it is work that requires the participation of all cultural subgroups that exist within the borders of this territory.
But more than just the physical effort of saving old photographs and newspaper clippings, historical preservation requires minds that are not married to old interpretations of events and historical accounts. Instead, this work requires malleable minds that are courageous enough to be stretched and challenged when faced with new information that reframes and reimagines the truths we were once married to about who and what we are.
This work is our responsibility — to the world we inhabit and the one we dare to dream into being.
—Gabrielle Querrard is a content creator who highlights Virgin Islands culture and history. Beyond her social media work, she cohosts and coproduces the Caribbean Mystics Podcast.
Editor’s Note: Opinion articles do not represent the views of the Virgin Islands Source newsroom and are the sole expressed opinion of the writer. Submissions can be made to visource@gmail.com.
