‘Decolonise yourself, sure… decolonise yourself, depatriarchalise yourself, disarm yourself, deconstruct yourself,’ I rattle on teasingly. I stretch one arm towards the ceiling, then the other. These are the summons of youth, in the end: learning to question your customs, looking at them from all angles.

Getting rid of the inner plantation is a generational job. Learning to stop wondering about people’s colour, looking for yourself in their faces, questioning inheritance – all of it, Jaime, I tell him. It’s not enough to overlook or ignore the fact that the past has transpired in a certain way; you have to really get to know it. I look at the white walls of the house, into the other empty rooms. But you have to move past it, too.

‘Do you know how long it’s been since I was here for a storm? Oof!’ I change the subject with a sigh. Jaime laughs and tells me again, astonished, how all the passengers were soaked as they descended the stairs of the plane.

‘Back to your research question, Jaime, I think Raizal identity is a phase.’ I pause for a moment, closing my eyes. Yes, a phase of decolonisation. He switches on the recorder and I get nervous; I don’t know if what I’m saying will make any sense. But I think so.

I talk to him.

If everyone living here were a single person, if a chaotic and wounded collective could turn into an individual, we’d be a teenager. I forge ahead in my description, picture a lurching giant made of countless tiny people.

Think of the word ‘raizal’ in Spanish. Spanish is a European language, a colonising language. That’s why there are people who call themselves ‘roothians’, like these activists, because, tacitly, the name ‘raizal’ is a construction meant to confront the Colombian state, and which fails to include our relationship with the rest of the Caribbean. Although the same thing also happens with the roothians, too. Think of the Queen’s English that old folks like my grandmother and the island Afros were so nostalgic for – it’s another imperial language. Like all identities, San Andrés identity is under construction, it’s wrong-headed to think of it as something fixed. That sort of thinking denies our complexity as humans. Maybe you never end up changing anything, you just learn to express other parts of yourself. But we have to let ourselves feel. I stop.

Think of Creole, a language of resistance. Resistance! There’s glory in that resistance, isn’t there? We have a language to conserve, the legacy of part of our journey thus far. It tells us a lot about how we think, how we relate to each other. Creole itself will keep changing over the years, it can’t stay still; it’ll keep being Caribbean, mutable, open. That’s where our riches lie.