Family Estrangement and the Weight of Loyalty
In Jamaican culture and across the Caribbean, not speaking to a parent is treated like a moral failure, because family loyalty is tied to identity, religion and community standing. The result is often silence, politeness, and passive aggression instead of honest repair. Soni shares how estrangement can be both love and distance at once: stepping away from a harmful relationship for mental health, not because affection disappears, but because contact keeps reopening old wounds.
Drawing on her essay “Wash Belly,” Soni shares what it meant to care for her mother through dementia after years of her mother’s abandonment and harsh parenting. She share how caregiving can become a complicated “duty” and describes hoping that care might bring reconciliation, only to learn that real life rarely offers the tidy closure we see on American television.
Instead of portraying estrangement as trendy “no contact” discourse, the episode treats it as a lived reality shaped by migration, poverty, shame, and long-standing cultural rules about what can be spoken aloud.
Connect and read:
- Soni Brown: https://www.sonibrown.com/
- No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, including Soni’s essay “Wash Belly”: https://books.catapult.co/books/no-contact/
- Mentioned in the conversation: How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir by Camille U. Adams: https://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/p/how-to-be-unmothered
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