In 2018 a fellowship took me to France, a trip I’d always dreamed of taking. In the archives in Quimper, I found the marriage document of my sixth great-grandparents, Pierre Vergos and Anne Madec, 1720. I also found the birth certificate of my fifth great-grandfather, Jacques Alexandre Vergos, 1722, who was a surgeon with the French East India Company.

Near Plougastel-Daoulas, I walked the Route du Vergoz, a road which ends at the Bay of Brest, the waterway leading to the Atlantic Ocean. In Limoges I met Yannick Vergoz, a French cousin who looks, wonderfully, like my father. 

While I discovered a strong sense of freedom and identity in France, recent research I’ve done in the French Colonial Archives confirms that some of my French ancestors, who lived on Île de France (Mauritius) and La Réunion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were involved in the slave trade.

My current book project focuses on themes of collective memory, predation, identity, place, and language. My poems explore my complicated relationship, as a survivor of domestic violence, with facts and stories from my family’s eighteenth and nineteenth century past.