Chief among Dad’s accursed heathens were my two aunties. Their livity wasn’t right, my father said, denouncing them as Jezebels who wore too much “jingbeng”—dangling gold earrings and bangles, false fingernails and bright red nail polish. They had chemically processed hair and wore makeup and tight jeans shorts. They were pork-eaters and rum-drinkers. They liked dancehall and gossiped about the men they dated. To my father they may as well have been the grand architects of Babylon. Unclean women, he called them, and skirted them with a screwface and his nose in the heavens.
