# Liminal Spaces

**Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora**

GRACE ANEIZA ALI (ED.)

**EDITED BY GRACE ANEIZA ALI**

**Liminal Spaces**

**Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora**

to their reunion with Guyana.

and grapple with ideas of place and accountability.

and scholars and students of diaspora studies.

at www.openbookpublishers.com

a focus on her homeland Guyana.

e

book ebook and OA edi� ons also available

*Liminal Spaces* is an in� mate explora� on into the migra� on narra� ves of fi � een women of Guyanese heritage. It spans diverse inter-genera� onal perspec� ves – from those who leave Guyana, and those who are le� – and seven seminal decades of Guyana's history – from the 1950s to the present day – bringing the voices of women to the fore. The volume is conceived of as a visual exhibi� on on the page; a four-part journey naviga� ng the contributors' essays and artworks, allowing the reader to trace the migra� on path of Guyanese women from their moment of departure, to their arrival on diasporic soils,

Eloquent and visually stunning, *Liminal Spaces* unpacks the global reali� es of migra� on, challenging and disrup� ng dominant narra� ves associated with Guyana, its colonial past, and its post-colonial present as a 'disappearing na� on'. Mul� modal in approach, the volume combines memoir, crea� ve non-fi c� on, poetry, photography, art and curatorial essays to collec� vely examine the mutable no� on of 'homeland',

This volume is a welcome contribu� on to the scholarly fi eld of interna� onal migra� on, transna� onalism, and diaspora, both in its crea� ve methodological approach, and in its subject area – as one of the only studies published on Guyanese diaspora. It is essen� al reading to those studying women and migra� on,

As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found

**Grace Aneiza Ali** is a Curator and an Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her curatorial research prac� ce centers on socially engaged art prac� ces, global contemporary art, and art of the Caribbean Diaspora, with

*Cover image: Grace Aneiza Ali, The SeaWall, Georgetown, Guyana, 2014, digital photography. Photo by Candace Ali-Lindsay. © Grace Aneiza Ali. Courtesy of the art st, CC BY-NC-ND. Cover design: Linda Florio and Anna Gat .*

**Liminal Spaces**

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# LIMINAL SPACES

# Liminal Spaces

*Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora*

Edited by Grace Aneiza Ali

#### https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2020 Grace Aneiza Ali. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters' authors.

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Grace Aneiza Ali (ed.), *Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora*. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0218

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0218

Cover image: Grace Aneiza Ali, *The SeaWall*, Georgetown, Guyana (2014). Digital photo by Candace Ali-Lindsay. Courtesy of the artist, CC BY-NC-ND. Cover design: Linda Florio and Anna Gatti.

# Contents

#### **for our mothers, and their mothers**

*Ingrid Ali Christina Elizabeth Baird Dina Sheridan Benn Khira Binda Carmen Noreen Brewster Doris Evelyn Brewster Adelaide Aleta Bullen Angela DeFreitas Cita DeFreitas Mae Gajee Joyce Norma Greenidge Grifth Patricia Kingston Gaskin Greenidge Gertrude Elizabeth Henry Hopkinson Aldora Hunter Lorraine Hunter Agatha Mewlyn Kennedy Alma Patricia Kennedy-Scarville Stella Knights Enid Lewis Lucille Badoura Mackhrandilal Vijaya Lorna Mackrandilal Anarkalia Mattai Subhadra Mattai Rita Mohamed Rosamund Neptune Iris Worrell-Nichols Sara Persaud Inez Persaud Sarawsati Singh Ameena Swain Doreen U. Wilkinson Miriam Angelina Wilkinson Pearlene Vesta Wilkinson*

# Notes on the Contributors

## Grace Aneiza Ali

Grace Aneiza Ali is a Curator and an Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in New York City. Ali's curatorial research practice centers on socially engaged art practices, global contemporary art, and art of the Caribbean Diaspora, with a focus on her homeland Guyana. She serves as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York. She is Founder and Curator of *Guyana Modern*, an online platform for contemporary arts and culture of Guyana and Founder and Editorial Director of *OF NOTE Magazine*—an award-winning nonproft arts journalism initiative reporting on the intersection of art and activism. Her awards and fellowships include NYU Provost Faculty Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She has been named a World Economic Forum 'Global Shaper.' Ali was born in Guyana and migrated to the United States with her family when she was fourteen years old.

## Khadija Benn

Khadija Benn was born in Canada to Guyanese parents and currently lives and works in Guyana as a geospatial analyst. She is a faculty member of the Department of Geography at the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Guyana. Her research focuses on digital cartography, community development, and place attachment. As a self-taught photographer, her practice is formed around portraiture and documentary work. Her images have been exhibited at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art (USA), CARIFESTA XIII (Barbados), the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (USA), and Addis Foto Fest (Ethiopia); and featured in *ARC Magazine* and *Transition Magazine*.

## Sandra Brewster

Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. Her work explores identity, representation and memory, and centering Black presence. The daughter of Guyanese-born parents, she is especially attuned to the experiences of people of Caribbean heritage and their ongoing relationships with their homelands. Brewster's work has been featured in the Art Gallery of Ontario (2019-2020), she is the 2018 recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize and her exhibition *It's all a blur*  . . . received the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition at the CONTACT Photography Festival 2017. Brewster holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. She is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects.

## Erika DeFreitas

Erika DeFreitas was born in Canada. Her mother migrated from Guyana to Canada in 1970. As a Scarborough-based artist, her practice includes the use of performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, works on paper, and writing. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, she works through attempts to understand concepts of loss, post-memory, inheritance, and objecthood. DeFreitas' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was the recipient of the TFVA 2016 Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

## Ingrid Griffith

Ingrid Grifth, writer and actor, migrated to the United States from Guyana as an adolescent in 1974. Her experiences as a child in Guyana and an immigrant in the United States have formed the wellspring of her creative inspiration. Grifth has appeared in Of-Broadway theatrical productions in classical and contemporary roles. In 2014, she debuted her frst solo show at Manhattan International Theater Festival. The award-winning and internationally successful, *Demerara Gold*, is about a Caribbean girl's immigrant experience; *Demerara Gold* was published by NoPassport Press in 2016. Grifth's recently crafed solo show, titled *Unbossed & Unbowed*, explores the life of Shirley Chisholm, the frst Black Congresswoman in US history. In March 2020, *Unbossed & Unbowed* debuted at Hear Her Call Caribbean-American Women's Theater Festival where Grifth won an award for Outstanding Playwriting. Grifth teaches Public Speaking and Theater History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The chapter included in this anthology will be part of her soon to be fnished memoir.

## Natalie Hopkinson

Natalie Hopkinson, PhD, is the Canadian-born daughter of Serena Hopkinson. She is an Assistant Professor in the doctoral program of the Communication, Culture and Media Studies department at Howard University, a fellow of the Interactivity Foundation, and a former editor, staf writer, and culture and media critic at *The Washington Post* and *The Root*. Her third book of essays, *A Mouth is Always Muzzled* (2018) is about contemporary art and politics in Guyana. She lives with her family in Washington, DC.

## Serena Hopkinson

Serena Hopkinson is a retired accountant and arts administrator, and a graduate of Florida Atlantic University. She grew up on the Pomeroon River in Guyana. She is a mother of four, grandmother of six, and a ferce competitor on the tennis court.

## Dominique Hunter

Dominique Hunter is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Guyana, where she was born. Her artistic practice critiques the (non)-representation of Black female bodies in art history and stereotypical portrayals in contemporary print media. Her recent work has expanded to include strategies for coping with the weight of those impositions by examining the value of self-care practices. Hunter has exhibited both in the Caribbean and in the US. She has been an Artist-in-Residence with Caribbean Linked IV and the Vermont Studio Center, where she was awarded the Reed Foundation Fellowship.

## Maria del Pilar Kaladeen

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen was born and currently lives in London. She is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London working on the system of indenture in Guyana and its representation in literature. Having lef school at ffeen and returned to education as an adult, she went on to receive a PhD in English Literature from the University of London in 2013. She is the co-editor of *We Mark Your Memory* (2018), the frst international anthology on the system of indenture in the British Empire. Her life-writing has been published in *Wasafri* and the anthology *Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children* (2018), which was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize in 2019.

## Maya Mackrandilal

Maya Mackrandilal is an American-born transdisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Mackrandilal holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a BA from the University of Virginia, where she was a recipient of an Auspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship. Her artwork has been shown nationally, including the Chicago Artists Coalition (where she was a HATCH Artist-in-Residence), Smack Mellon, THE MISSION, Abrons Art Center, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Armory Center for the Arts. She has presented artwork and research at national conferences, including the College Art Association, Association for Asian American Studies, the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, and Open Engagement. Her writing, which explores issues of race, gender, and labor, has appeared in a variety of publications, including *The New Inquiry*, *Drunken Boat*, *contemptorary*, *Skin Deep*, and *MICE Magazine*.

#### Suchitra Mattai

Suchitra Mattai was born in Guyana in 1973 and frst migrated to Canada with her family in 1976 before they came to the US. Mattai received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art, both from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications such as *Hyperallergic*, *Document Journal*, *Cultured Magazine*, *Wallpaper Magazine*, *Harper's Bazaar Arabia*, *Entropy Magazine*, *The Daily Serving*, and *New American Paintings*. Mattai has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Sharjah Biennial 14, *State of the Art 2020* at Crystal Bridges Museum/the Momentary, Denver Art Museum/Biennial of the Americas, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Center on Contemporary Art Seattle, and the Art Museum of the Americas, among others.

## Christie Neptune

Christie Neptune is an interdisciplinary artist working across flm, photography, mixed media and performance arts. Her family migrated from Guyana to New York. Neptune holds a BA from Fordham University, New York City. Her flms and photography have been included in shows at BASS Museum, Miami (2019); the University of Massachusetts Boston (2018); Rubber Factory, New York (2017); A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2016); and Rutgers University (2015) among others. She has been featured in publications including *Artforum*, *Hyperallergic*, *Juxtapoze Magazine*, and *The Washington Post*. Neptune has been awarded the More Art Engaging Artist Residency, The Hamiltonian Gallery Fellowship, The Bronx Museum of the Arts: Artist in Marketplace (AIM), Smack Mellon Studio Residency through the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship, The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, and The NXTHVN Studio Fellowship. Neptune is currently an Artists Alliance Inc. LES Studio Program Artist-in-Residence.

## Grace Nichols

Grace Nichols was born and educated in Guyana. Since migrating to England in 1977, she has written award-winning poetry collections and anthologies for both adults and children. Her frst collection, *I is a Long Memoried Woman* (1983) won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Other poetry collections include, *The Fat Black Woman's Poems* (1984), *Sunris* (1996)—which won the 1997 Guyana Poetry Prize—and *Startling the Flying Fish* (2005), are all published by Virago. Her adult novel, *Whole of a Morning Sky* (1986) is set in Guyana. Her poetry collections *Picasso, I Want My Face Back* (2009), *I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems* (2010), *The Insomnia Poems* (2017), and the most recent, *Passport to Here and There* (2020), are all published by Bloodaxe Books. Nichols was the Poet-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados and at the Tate Gallery, London, 1999-2000. She received a Cholmondeley Award for her work and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Hull. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

## Keisha Scarville

Keisha Scarville was born to Guyanese parents who migrated to the US in the 1960s. She is a photo and mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, New York and Adjunct Faculty at the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Rush Arts Gallery, BRIC, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in *The New York Times*, *The Village Voice*, *Hyperallergic, Vice*, and *Transition*, among others. Scarville has been awarded various residencies, including from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Baxter Street CCNY.

## Michelle Joan Wilkinson

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, PhD, is a writer and curator of Guyanese descent. As a Curator at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, she works on projects related to contemporary Black life and architecture and design. In her previous roles, she curated over twenty exhibitions, including two award-winning shows: *For Whom It Stands: The Flag and the American People* and *Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists*. Wilkinson holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD from Emory University. In 2012, she was a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, for which she completed a short-term residency at the Design Museum in London. From 2019–2020, she was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

# Introduction: Liminal Spaces

*Grace Aneiza Ali*

——

How was it that till questioned, till displaced in the attempt to answer, I had scarcely thought of myself as having a country, or indeed as having lef a country?

Vahni Capildeo, 'Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere'1

I n 1995, my mother, father, older brother, younger sister, and I migrated from Guyana to the United States. We became part of what seemed like a *mythical diaspora*. It is estimated that more than one million Guyanese citizens now live in global metropolises like London, Toronto, and New York City, where they are the ffh largest immigrant group.2 Guyana itself has a modest population of approximately 787,000.3 Yet, for a country of its small size, it has one of the world's highest out-migration rates.4 Having gained independence from the British in 1966, Guyana has spent the last ffy-four years trying to carve out its place on the world stage. Yet Guyanese people have long known migration as the single most defning narrative of our country. We are lef to grapple with the question: When we have more Guyanese living outside the country than within its borders, what becomes of our homeland?

Since its independence from British colonial rule, the last fve decades in Guyana have been defned by an extraordinary ebb and fow of its citizens.5 In an episode of the BBC Radio series *Neither Here Nor There*, host David Dabydeen, the British-Guyanese writer who lef Guyana and migrated to England in 1969, examined the tremendous growth of the Guyanese diaspora since its independence. He remarked that Guyana 'is a disappearing nation' that has 'to an unrivaled degree, exported its people.'6 The young nation continues to grapple with the remnants of a colonial past and a postcolonial present: entrenched poverty, political corruption, repressive government regimes, racial violence, lack of education, unemployment, economic depression, and a withering away of hope for a thriving future for the country.

For those who leave one place for another, impelled by choice or trauma, remaining connected to a homeland is at once beautiful, fraught, disruptive, and evolving. Making the journey with my family when we lef was a handful of photographs. For many

Figure I.1

My mother Ingrid (center in foral pink dress) poses with her mother, aunts, and sister at Timehri International Airport, Guyana in the 1970s, as she bade farewell to a sister who was leaving for Barbados. Persaud Family Collection.

Courtesy of the author, CC BY 4.0.

families like mine who were poor with few possessions, owning photographs was a privilege; they were among our most valuable things.

We had no negatives, no JPEGs, no double copies—just originals. Decades later, these photographs serve as a tangible connection to a homeland lef behind. In her novel *White Teeth*, the British-born writer of Jamaican heritage Zadie Smith writes, 'The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.'7 Indeed, the family photograph (Fig. I.1) taken at Guyana's Timehri International Airport in the 1970s captures a moment in time between concluding an old life and preparing for a new one. In the photograph, my mother (center in foral pink dress), in her early twenties at the time, poses with her mother, aunts and elder sister. They are bidding farewell to her sister (back row) who was leaving for Barbados, and who would later embark on a second migration to Canada. For the next two decades, as she grappled with a stifing poverty gripping many Guyanese, as well as the loss of her parents, my mother watched as her brothers and sisters, one by one, boarded planes to leave Guyana for neighboring Caribbean islands, and then later for Canada and the US, using student visas, work visas, marriage visas—whatever it took. The photograph reveals movement and transition as the constants in our lives where airports ofen served as sites for family reunions. Before I too boarded my frst plane at age fourteen to depart Guyana on a one-way fight bound for New York's JFK Airport, I had long resented planes as the violent machines that fragmented families and broke friendships. When in 1995 the immigration papers fnally 'came through,' as we say in Guyana, afer a decade of waiting, it was our turn to be the ones leaving. We followed the blueprint that my mother's family had mapped in their departures from Guyana. We made our way to North America to join her siblings who were now split between the US and Canada.

While witnessing the exodus of her entire family from her homeland was unbearable, nothing prepared my mother for the trials of being a new immigrant in the 1990s in the Washington, DC suburbs where we eventually settled. There she transitioned from a housewife in Guyana to a mother supporting three children on foreign soil with nothing available to her but minimum-wage jobs. When my mother got on that plane with her children and lef for the unknown, did she think of her act, and the acts of what so many Guyanese and Caribbean women had done before, as brave or remarkable or necessary? Did she understand at the time how mythical the 'American Dream' was, deciding nonetheless to go afer it? Was she prepared for the disappointment? What I do know for sure is that, like so many Guyanese women, my mother single-handedly rerouted the course of her children's lives, forever changing who we would become in the twenty-frst-century world.

Since leaving Guyana at fourteen years old, I've now lived in the US longer than I've lived in Guyana. I am no longer confned by the term 'Resident Alien,' as my American green card frst branded me. I have other labels now: Naturalized Citizen. Guyanese-American. Immigrant. I am deeply unsettled about how our global society regards the immigrant. Where some see autonomy, others see dependency. Where some see courage, others see weakness. Where some see a desire to take charge of one's destiny, others see a threat. Where some see dignity, others see failure. And at times, we are simply *not seen*. In an interview for *The Atlantic*, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat poignantly steeps the *activism* of the immigrant within the poetics of an *art* practice. She writes:

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires—risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.8

Danticat's reading of the immigrant's journey as akin to art-making was inspired by a passage she read in Colombian-American Patricia Engel's memoir *It's Not Love, It's Just Paris*, in which the author's father says: 'All immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant's life is art in its purest form.'9 It is with this beautiful spirit of creativity and imagination that *Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora* gathers ffeen women of Guyanese heritage to explore their relationship to migration through the literary and visual art forms of memoir, creative non-fction, poetry, photography, curatorial and art essays. These women are artists, activists, scholars, teachers, photographers, poets, writers, playwrights, performers, journalists, and curators. The Guyanese women whose stories are laid bare in *Liminal Spaces* reinforce Engel's notion of *the immigrant as artist*. These women remake, reinvent, and rebuild their lives, as many times as needed. Collectively they reveal that we are all, in some sense, immigrants, embarking on the constant work, the hard labor, privately and publicly, of dismantling one life to make a new one.

\*

The word 'liminal,' from the Latin word *limens*, means 'threshold'—a place of transition, waiting, and unknowing. It is to be caught between worlds—one known and one to come.10 In tandem, the title *Liminal Spaces* refects the ways in which Guyanese women bear witness to what drives them from their homeland as well as what keeps them emotionally and psychically tethered. It is a title meant to encapsulate how they examine the notion of homeland as both fxed and unfxed, a constantly shifing idea or memory, and a physical place and psychic space.11 *Liminal Spaces* also underscores how these women trouble and redefne ideas of migrant, immigrant, and citizen. Some directly engage with present global migration debates while avoiding the vitriol those debates are steeped in. Others challenge the labels of alien, foreigner, and outlier. Many poignantly and apolitically shine a light on the universal themes of departure, arrival, loss, up-rootedness, persistence, and faith. Collectively, the women in *Liminal Spaces* represent two spectrums of the migration arc: the ones who leave and the ones who are lef. Some have stayed rooted in Guyana even as they watched their loved ones leave, year afer year, for both neighboring and far-of lands. Some, although born in Guyana, maintain the rituals and traditions on the diasporic soils they now call home. Some return to Guyana ofen, and some rarely. Some never.

*Liminal Spaces* traces seven seminal decades of Guyana's history, ofering a portrait of a colonial and postcolonial nation continuously evolving. The ffeen intergenerational cohort of voices range from women in their twenties to their seventies. Their personal and political histories are rooted in Guyana's multi-cultural heritages—Amerindian, British, African, Chinese, Indian, and Portuguese. Their frst-person narratives span the 1950s through present day, mirroring Guyana's journey from a British colony to an independent republic to a 'disappearing nation.'12 For some women in this book who were born in British-ruled Guyana, bearing witness to the tumultuous birth of an independent nation and a simultaneous struggle to shirk a colonial past catalyzed their departures. The younger women, who have only known their homeland as an independent nation, still made the difcult decision to leave it. Other women who contributed to this collection have never lived in Guyana and connect only through their parents' migration narratives. As frst-generation citizens of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, they grapple with what survives and what is mourned once their Guyanese-born parents, their direct ties to Guyana, are gone. Some of these women once lived in Guyana, and later migrated to the country's largest diasporic cities of New York, Toronto, and London. All in all, *Liminal Spaces* centers the narratives of grandmothers, mothers and daughters, immigrants and citizens—women who have labored for their country, women who are in service to a vision of what Guyanese women can and ought to be in the world.

Guyana's legacy of migration mirrors the broader emergence of Caribbean people around the globe. The narratives featured in *Liminal Spaces* counter a legacy of absence and invisibility of Guyanese women's stories. This collection—the frst of its kind—is devoted entirely to the voices of women from Guyana and its expansive diaspora. Although the contributors share experiences specifc to Guyana, their stories speak to migration as the defning movement of our twenty-frst-century world and the tensions between place and placeless-ness, nationality and belonging, immigrant and citizen. Etched throughout the book's literary and visual narratives is the grit, agency, and artistry required of women around the world who embark on a new life in a new land or watch the ones they love do so. Within these beautiful, disruptive stories lies a simple truth: there is no single story about migration. Rather, the act of migration is infnite, full of arrivals, departures, returns, absences, and reunions.

One of the most defning movements of the twenty-frst century is global migration. Few of us remain untouched by its sweeping narrative. In its *World Migration Report 2020*, the United Nations reported, 'The number of international migrants is estimated to be almost 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds being labor migrants.'13 Equally important, forty-eight percent of those migrants are women. In other words, women comprise almost half the people migrating globally.14 As more women migrate, it means that a growing number of them are also migrating independently and becoming the breadwinners for their families. Each day, more women like my mother do whatever they need to; they board planes and boats and

\*

ships and make-shif rafs, or walk across borders, fences, and walls to carve out a better life for themselves and their families. Yet, where do we fnd their real stories?15 Where is the poetry of their lives? Can we turn to art, to language, to poetry, to the image to fnd their voices? How can the photograph map the emotional terrain of separation from a motherland? Instead of narratives that allow us to see the real lives and dignity of these women—now in the millions—their stories of migration are ofen hijacked by politics, policy, sensational headlines, and data.

For the past ffy years, women have been the driving force in migration from Guyana as the UK, US, and Canada looked to the Caribbean as a source for blue collar, domestic, clerical, and healthcare workers. In 'Caribbean Migrations: The Caribbean Diaspora,' Monica Jardine writes that the pivotal role of women served as a catalytic shif in contemporary Caribbean migration:

[I]n the Anglophone Caribbean world, in particular, modern migration became identifed with women's labor and women's risk—that is, with the decision of women to internationalize their labor, to migrate alone in the frst instance […] and […] to more clearly expect that their household and legal status would become more equal to that of men afer migration.16

In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave 'full citizenship' to all people living in its commonwealth countries and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many ambitious dreamers in then British Guiana and from other British colonies throughout the Caribbean took advantage of the 1948 Act and made their way to England.17 They became part of what was known as the 'Windrush Generation,'18 named afer the SS Empire Windrush, the inaugural ship that brought a total of 492 Caribbean immigrants to Tilbury Dock in Essex, England on June 21, 1948. Fourteen years later, a backlash against the increasing number of the colonies' Caribbean-born workers and their families moving into Britain's neighborhoods led to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which would overturn the Nationality Act of 1948, condemning it as an unregulated approach to immigration. Most recently, in 2018 as the British marked the 70th anniversary of the Windrush Generation, the 'Windrush Scandal' erupted leaving many Caribbean immigrants wrongly detained, denied legal rights and benefts they were entitled to as citizens, and threatened with deportation or wrongly deported from the United Kingdom.19 In *Liminal Spaces*, contributor Maria del Pilar Kaladeen writes of the racism she endured growing up in England as a daughter of immigrants, and the pressures, including from her parents, to shirk her cultural identity to be monolithically 'British.' Born in London to a Guyanese father who was part of the notable Windrush Generation, Kaladeen shares in her essay, 'A Daughter's Journey from Indenture to Windrush,' how mythical the promises of citizenship were for those who migrated from Guyana to England. She explores the impact a vitriolic culture of racism had on Caribbean immigrants and their descendants:

[I]f I wanted a role model in un-belonging I needn't look any further than my father the progenitor of my incongruity. Yet everything I knew about my father's background was fragmentary. He was from a country called Guyana. It used to be a British colony. Inexplicably he was both Indian and South American. And this meant that the children who pelted the word 'Paki' at us in the streets were essentially correct. Correct in the sense that this word was used in the UK, as a derogatory term for anyone of South Asian origin.

Further, the newspaper stories of the inaugural '492 West Indian' migrants, as the British headlines boldly declared, who frst arrived on England's shores via the Empire Windrush, has largely minimized the experiences of the Caribbean women who embarked on the thirty-day voyage. For example, the opening paragraph of a 1948 article, in *The Guardian*, entitled 'Why 492 West Indians Came to Britain,' leads with the question: 'What were they thinking, these 492 men […] as the Empire Windrush slid upstream with the food between the closing shores of Kent and Essex?'20 In 'How Many Women Were on the Empire Windrush?' Mirko Casagranda writes:

In its monadic and monolithic characterization, the all-inclusiveness of the fgure '492' excludes women from the founding myth of arrival, as in the accounts of the time and in many subsequent recollections of the event, the passengers are homogenously defned as black male economic migrants from Jamaica, which reinforces 'a patriarchal model of travel' and enhances the stereotype of the male explorer looking for new places to settle in and form a new family as soon as *his* woman joins him in the new country.21

In fact, what the ship's data from the Empire Windrush passenger log does reveal is that of the 257 women aboard, 188 were traveling alone. Casagranda continues:

It is no surprise that in the British national consciousness and collective memory of this symbolic moment, there is no space for women as they have been rather considered as a consequence, almost an appendix, of the arrival of *their* men.22

[The number] '257' […] challenges the idea of an exclusively male migration from the West Indies. […] Although the majority of the passengers were adult males (684), these women, especially those who made the crossing alone, question the cultural assumptions of the time about gender.23

In the Passenger List of the Empire Windrush (Fig. I.2), the names of six British Guianese women are listed as traveling alone to England. They are summarized in the records as follows and checked under the passenger log's subcategory of 'Female' and 'Not Accompanied by Husband:'

Mary Forbes, 41 years old, 'household domestic' Muriel Fraser, 39 years old, 'bank teller' Edna Thompson, 32 years old, 'servant' Phillis Teesdale, 35 years old, 'household domestic' Ivy Wcolley, 53 years old, 'household domestic' Marie Worley, 54 years old, 'household domestic'

The stories of Guyanese women like these from those early decades who migrated to the UK—and those of so many others who migrated later, uprooted their lives and bravely embarked on unchartered territories—remain mysteries. In a 2018 essay I wrote, titled 'Unfxed Homeland: Artists Imagining the Lives of the Guyanese Women of Windrush,' for a special issue of London's *Wasafri Magazine* marking the 70th anniversary of the Windrush Generation, I could only pose questions about the women listed on the ship's manifest:

How did these women end up aboard the SS Empire Windrush—travelling accompanied by neither family members nor husbands—and what were their lives like once they arrived in England? Who were these women? What were the circumstances that led to them to travel by themselves unaccompanied? What were they feeing in British Guiana? What future were they hoping to build once they arrived in England?25

What happens when the archives fail us? Where do we turn when their limitations can only take us so far in excavating the lives of these women?26 When confronted with the absences in the archives, the women writers and artists in *Liminal Spaces* must rely on their creative imaginations to tell Guyanese women's stories. The essays and poems of British-Guyanese contributors like Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and Grace Nichols reconstruct the narratives of Guyanese women in the United Kingdom and counters their invisibility in the records. Their artistic and creative imaginings echo a call to action to look beyond the archives. Their compelling work serves as a balm for the longing that still haunts many of us who want to know how these British-Guyanese women navigated an unwelcoming place and rose out of hardship to make their way.

In a similar way as in the UK, over the past fve decades, Guyanese women increasingly began to make their way to the US, particularly New York City, as they saw migration as a means to improve their economic and social status and the educational opportunities of their children. The majority of the contributors featured in *Liminal Spaces* are women who live in New York City—a refection of how the city has framed the landscape of Guyana's migration narrative. One only need walk through Flatbush and Crown Heights in Brooklyn and the Ozone Park and Richmond Hill sections of Queens (the latter afectionately known as 'Little Guyana') to witness an abundance of Guyanese 'Bake Shops' and 'Roti Shops.'27 As the Guyanese community grew to be

#### Figure I.2 **Passenger list of the SS Empire Windrush** *June 1948*

The National Archives, Public Domain.24

the ffh largest immigrant group in New York City, Guyanese women emerged to claim, 'one of the highest rates of female labor force participation among New York City immigrants.'28 Underpaid or paid under the table, Guyanese women found jobs that were domestic in nature or in food service, healthcare, and hospitality industries. They were ofen part of an invisible workforce as private household workers—nannies, housekeepers, and home care aides. In *Liminal Spaces*, many essays acknowledge the Guyanese women who took on such jobs. In 'Memories from Yonder,' artist Christie Neptune features Ebora Calder who lef Guyana in the 1950s as a young woman to work as a home care aide in Brooklyn, New York City where she remained until she reached retirement. In 'Concrete and Filigree,' curator Michelle Joan Wilkinson writes of her mother's arrival in the late 1960s to work in Manhattan's Garment District. And, in those frst years in the late 1990s, I write in my essay 'The Geography of Separation,' about the minimum wage jobs my mother took on including as a college cafeteria server and nursing home assistant. These experiences are not unique to Guyanese women; they are a common refrain of many immigrant women in search for a better life for themselves and their families.

Along with London and New York City, the city of Toronto possesses one of the largest and oldest Guyanese populations outside of Guyana. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Guyanese became part of a larger trend of Caribbean people shifing to Canada and specifcally urban cities like Toronto.29 The West Indian Domestic Scheme (1955– 1960), which allowed women from Guyana and the neighboring islands of Jamaica and Barbados to immigrate as domestic workers, paved the way for a second and larger wave of Caribbean migration in the 1970s. In her essay for *Liminal Spaces*, 'A Trace | Evidence of Time Past,' artist Sandra Brewster, who is Canadian-born, reminds us that the frst Toronto Caribbean Carnival in 1967, also known as Caribana, took place during the second wave of migration to Canada. Brewster notes:

[It] was a gesture of generosity—a gif from the Caribbean community to Canada on its 100th birthday. I see this gif as an action that permanently transferred the community's existence onto the city, creating an undeniable presence in Canadian history.

As the testament to that abiding gif, today the Toronto Caribbean Carnival is regarded as North America's largest street festival, with over one million global visitors a year. The Canadian Immigration Act (1976) further allowed more people from the Caribbean into Canada and, coupled with Canada's increased need for labor from developing nations, the Caribbean community thrived. By the early 2000s, Toronto emerged as, and remains, a prominent node in the Caribbean diaspora where Guyanese in particular are the city's third-largest Caribbean-immigrant community.

As Guyanese women continue to drive migration to the UK, US, and Canada, they have in turn ushered in a new kind agency. As early as the 1960s, Caribbean women immigrants were increasingly regarded as 'principal aliens' allowing them to sponsor visa applications for family members. In her essay, Brewster explains the pivotal role her aunt played, serving as the catalyst for bringing almost her entire family from Guyana to Canada:

Auntie Gloria being the eldest, lef Guyana frst to fnd a place for everyone to live and to fgure out the lay of the land so that when the others came she could direct them on what to do and where to do it. She was basically their orientation guide[.]

In New York City, in particular, women of the Guyanese community, more than any other immigrant group, utilize family sponsorship visas to bring members of their family to the US. However, a 2017 article in *The New York Times* reported that with the current US administration's proposed immigration policies to severely curtail family sponsorship, Guyanese women 'could lose the most from a new federal efort to cut legal immigration in half.'30

\*

I n her widely celebrated 2009 TED Talk, 'The Danger of a Single Story,' Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares the constant indignities of having to encounter and absorb the dangerous single story of Africa as 'a single story of catastrophe.'31 She cautions us of the consequences when we are complicit in promoting a singular destructive narrative of a place:

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story […] The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difcult. It emphasizes how we are diferent rather than how we are similar.32

Like Adiche's Nigeria, so too has Guyana been subjected to a dangerous single story rooted in catastrophe. On the world stage, Guyana has largely been portrayed in a complicated light. One need only browse the global headlines over the past ffy years. From the ethnic violence between Africans and Indians that stained Guyana's struggle for independence from the British; to the tragic Jonestown mass murder-suicide in 1978; to the revelation that by 1980, Guyana's economic situation was so dire that it was ranked as one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere; to widespread political corruption during national elections in the 1990s (and currently in 2020) that required the former American president Jimmy Carter to preside; to the World Health Organization 2014 report naming Guyana as the country with the highest suicide rate in the world; to the 2017 data declaring Guyana with the highest out-migration rate in the world—the majority of the global reporting on Guyana has centered on violence, political corruption, poverty, trauma, and mass exodus. Furthermore, in the past decade, the major reporting targeting the Guyanese diasporic community abroad has been prone to negativity. Stories have focused on the lure of oil prospecting, the fragmenting efects of migration on families, political unrest, death and violence, and even unhealthy food habits. This is how the world sees and hears of Guyana. These are some of the dangerous single stories and headlines dominating international perspectives on Guyana and infuencing a global understanding of who Guyanese people are.

More recently, the reporting on the promising yet tumultuous discovery of ofshore oil and a chorus of viewpoints by international experts on why Guyana is 'unprepared' or too 'corrupt' or 'ill-equipped' to navigate the ensuing billion-dollar potential windfall have dominated the headlines. Notably, an extensive article in *The New York Times* in 2018 received severe backlash afer its writer indulged in representations of Guyana that were dismissive and ofensive. The *Times* lead paragraph in the article, 'The \$20 Billion Question for Guyana,' portrayed Guyana as the impoverished tropic:

There are a few dirt roads between villages that sit on stilts along rivers snaking through the rainforest. Children in remote areas go to school in dugout canoes, and play naked in the muggy heat.33

Later in the article, the reporter characterized Guyana as 'A vast watery wilderness with only three paved highways' whose economy is 'propelled by drug trafcking, moneylaundering and gold and diamond smuggling.'34 The Guyanese diaspora united in an uproar against this reductive characterization. Dr. Oneka LaBennett, Guyanese-American scholar and professor, harshly critiqued the portrayal, writing on Twitter:

Misrepresenting Guyana as a place 'forgotten by time' where children 'play naked in the muggy heat' denies its complexity. Dangerous distortions like this inform the perilous trajectory of my homeland's oil boom. Do better @nytimes.35

Guyana, like all nations, is a complicated place with its unique struggles. Nevertheless, it remains a beloved homeland for many of its citizens and those in its wide diaspora across the Caribbean, North America and Europe. The spotlight will continue to grow on Guyana as its future is now entangled with oil production. The world is now invested in how things play out in what the media is already framing as Guyana's 'rags to riches' story. Yet, it continues to be a global malpractice that the majority of the stories told about us, are not by us, which in itself is its own kind of unique danger. Furthermore, as the 2018 *New York Times* article refected, what the global public ofen sees of the visual culture of Guyana still centers on the exotic, tropical, colonial, and touristic. In response, the artists and writers in *Liminal Spaces* are part of a contemporary movement to challenge and disrupt the reductive narratives ofen associated with the region. While the ffeen contributors in *Liminal Spaces* are honest about the hard truths of a country grappling with violence, poverty, and constant departure, they simultaneously ofer, eloquently and unabashedly, restorative narratives of their homeland. In doing so, we see the persistent role of women in countering the dangerous single stories of Guyana through their frst-person narratives and their art-making.

## Chapters

*Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora* is organized into four parts: 'Part I: Mothering Lands,' 'Part II: The Ones Who Leave . . . The Ones Who Are Lef,' 'Part III: Transitions,' and 'Part IV: Returns, Reunions, and Rituals.' Conceived as a visual exhibition on the page, the ffeen contributors' essays and artworks are curated as a four-part journey—one that allows the reader to trace the migration path of Guyanese women from their motherlands, to their moment of departure, to their arrival on diasporic soils, to their reunion with Guyana, and all that fows in between.

'Part I: Mothering Lands' engages the tensions between *motherland*, the place of birth; and *otherland*, the space of othering. The essays take us through the voyages undertaken by mothers born in Guyana and their daughters born in the diaspora. Artists Keisha Scarville (United States) and Erika DeFreitas (Canada) and journalist Natalie Hopkinson with her mother Serena Hopkinson (Canada/United States) reveal how their mother-daughter relationships serve as a metaphor for their relationship with Guyana—a space frequently wrestled with as a mythical motherland.

In Part II, there are two spectrums of the migration arc: the ones who leave and the ones who are lef. Yet, too ofen the narratives of the latter are constantly eclipsed. 'The Ones Who Leave . . . The Ones Who Are Lef' counters the discourse and creative representations on migration that are overwhelmingly focused on the ones who leave. Through travelogue, memoir, art, and photography essays, I, Grace Aneiza Ali (United States), Dominique Hunter (Guyana), Khadija Benn (Guyana), and Ingrid Grifth (United States), center the stories of those who remain.

 Poet Grace Nichols (United Kingdom) and visual artists Suchitra Mattai (United States), Christie Neptune (United States), and Sandra Brewster (Canada), detail the transition from citizen to immigrant. Their stories implore us to ponder: How do we hold steadfast to our dreams, when in order to survive we must diminish parts of the self? Revealed throughout these essays is a commitment to use their artistic practices as spaces for Guyanese women to speak, to be heard, and to be seen.

For those of us who have lef one country for another, how do we return and how do we stay connected? What tangible things do we cling to? In 'Part IV: Returns, Reunions, and Rituals,' Michelle Joan Wilkinson (United States), Maria del Pilar Kaladeen (United Kingdom), and Maya Mackrandilal (United States) write about their returns to Guyana and the ways in which they are tethered to the houses, lands, and sacred heirlooms embedded within their family legacies. They explore how daughters of immigrants rekindle, restore, and repair frayed bonds and illuminate how we lose, rediscover, and reunite with a place.

While, the voices of Guyanese women remain under-the-radar in literature, the women in *Liminal Spaces* are shining ambassadors of Guyana's multiple stories. Our literary and artistic practices function as declarations that the women of Guyana will not disappear into history. What bonds us is a profound love for Guyana. With that love comes responsibility. What does it mean to love a place? How do we express that love, especially if we no longer live there? What is our accountability to this place? As I've poured over the work of these Guyanese women with multiple hats on—curator, editor, daughter of Guyana, immigrant—I see love embedded in the essays and art so generously ofered throughout the pages of *Liminal Spaces*. I am moved by their brilliance and innovation, by the thoughtful and provocative conversations and challenging and disruptive questions their work allows us to have. We remain ever so grateful for a homeland that continues to shape all of our lives.

## *Bibliography*

Wang, Vivian, 'In Little Guyana, Proposed Cuts to Family Immigration Weigh Heavily,' *The New York Times*, 11 August 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/in-little-guyana-proposedcuts-to-family-immigration-weigh-heavily.html

## *Endnotes*

## *About the Art, Photography, and Curatorial Notes*

*Liminal Spaces* is a visual feast of the art and photography of migration. Many of the contributors are contemporary visual artists who accompany their essays with compelling bodies of work informed by their unique experiences of migration. This collection is also teeming with photographs from the contributors' personal collections: treasured and sacredly guarded images—family albums, archival images of British Guiana, contemporary photography on Guyana, passport photos, and scans of letters.

As the editor of this collection, I turned to my curatorial practice as a blueprint for its organization. Instead of walls, I conceived *Liminal Spaces* as a visual exhibition on the page. I open Parts I, II, III, and IV with 'curatorial notes' on each Chapter. They are meant to serve as brief introductions and to provide biographical and historical context where needed. They are invitations to the reader to delve deeper into the essays, poems, photography, and art. These curatorial notes are culled from my collaborations with the contributors, correspondences and conversations between us that have unfolded over a period of time, exhibitions I've curated, and my published writings on their work.

*—Grace Aneiza Ali*

## PART I MOTHERING LANDS

The mother's body is the country of our earliest memory, the soil from which we are formed. Our lives are an arc of fight: *away, toward, away.*

Shara McCallum, 'From the Book of Mothers'1

*Mothering Lands* engages the tensions between our place of birth (*motherland*) and the space of othering (*otherland*). For artists Keisha Scarville (United States), Erika DeFreitas (Canada), and journalist Natalie Hopkinson (Canada/United States), all frst-generation daughters, their relationships with their Guyanese-born mothers serve as a metaphor for their relationship with Guyana—a space frequently wrestled with as a mythical motherland. They illustrate how their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and oldest mothers are their deepest and most tangible connection to their ancestral land.  They each mine their family archives—photo albums, letters, clothing, oral stories, sacred rituals, and recipes—to shepherd us through multiple migrations and returns.

Artist **Keisha Scarville** spent her childhood raised in Brooklyn where her parents, along with so many other Guyanese immigrants, migrated and settled afer leaving Guyana in the 1960s. In her photography essay, 'Surrogate Skin: Portrait of Mother (Land),' Scarville refects on her portraiture series, 'Mama's Clothes,' an homage to her late mother. In the portraits, Scarville embodies her mother's dresses to evoke her connection to Guyana. In both her prose and portraits, Scarville grounds herself in her mother's place of birth of Buxton (Guyana) and her neighborhood of Flatbush (US). The lush, organic landscapes in these images, shifing between Guyana and the US, hold emotional and geographical signifcance: they capture the artist and her mother's dance between transient spaces. Grappling with 'a sense of displacement and an internal fracturing' afer her mother's passing, Scarville looked to her 'mama's clothes' of bright colors, strong prints, and long fowing fabrics for meaning. She drapes and layers her body in her mother's clothing as well as fashions masks and veils to cover her face, which is always obscured. In merging her body with her mother's clothes, Scarville marries both time and space—two generations, two homelands, and the complexities in between.

In an artistic practice steeped in process, gesture, performance, and documentation, Canadian-born artist **Erika DeFreitas** generously mines her family archive of photographs and letters throughout her oeuvre. In her art essay, 'Until I Hear from You,' she turns to old letters and photos sent from Guyana to construct memories with a grandmother she's never met and to piece together a motherland she's never known. Her grandmother, a skilled baker in British Guiana in the 1950s, passed down the practice to DeFreitas' mother who then migrated to Canada in 1970. In sharing her family album, DeFreitas illustrates how the act of passing on sacred crafs through two geographies and three generations of DeFreitas women has shaped her connection to Guyana. In her essay, she expands on how she uses cake icing—perfected so beautifully by her grandmother that she taught classes in cake décor to the women in her neighborhood—as an important symbol in her work as well as in her poetic language. The icing is both material and process—meant to decorate and to preserve. DeFreitas leaves us to ponder the question: Even when we commit to preserving a motherland's memories, rites, and traditions, how do we navigate the inevitable loss that pervades?

In a series of letters that read as intimate journal entries, letters that could easily belong to familiar collections like 'Letters to My Younger Self,' letters that unveil deep untold secrets and desires, mother and daughter **Serena Hopkinson** and **Natalie Hopkinson** reveal the great love and admiration that abides at the core of their relationship. It is a mother-daughter bond that has seen several migrations across three countries: Guyana, Canada, the US, and many returns and reunions in between. Guyanese-born Serena Hopkinson migrated to Toronto in 1970 as a young bride who would soon embark on building a family of her own while navigating the terrain of being an immigrant in Canada and later the United States. The Hopkinson family life was one in constant transition, defned as being 'on the move.' The letters the Hopkinson women write to each other in 'Electric Dreams' are symbolic postmarks of the places they have borne witness to, survived, and thrived: Pomeroon River, Guyana; Edmonton, Canada; and Florida and Washington, DC, United States. Like so many immigrant families who have lef Guyana, a series of arrivals and departures in search of 'a better life,' took its toll on Serena's marriage and on Natalie, her Canadianborn daughter's identity and selfood. What this duo brings to light is that despite the emotional toll migration takes on families, their relationship has been a constant driving force. It continues, to this day, to sustain, inspire, and buoy them as they chart new paths and adventures in their roles as women, daughters, wives, mothers, grandmothers, teachers and life-long learners.

While they share the great losses within their maternal histories, revealing how migration, death, and loss are inextricably linked, Scarville, DeFreitas, and Natalie and Serena Hopkinson unpack how Guyana continues to be a land that mothers. Their essays in *Mothering Lands* are poignant examples of how as daughters of Guyana we can reach to and rely on our mothers as constant collaborators and co-authors in both our lives and in our art.

## *Notes*

1. Epigraph from 'The Book of Mothers' in *This Strange Land*. Copyright © 2010, 2011 by Shara McCallum. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of the author and Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org

# 1. Surrogate Skin: Portrait of Mother (Land)

*Keisha Scarville*

——

#### Figure 1.1 **Keisha Scarville, 'Afer (Mom and Me)'**

*2015, watercolor in archival inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

 The sof morning rain soaks through her nightgown. The weight of the water compels the thin pink fabric to cling to the fullness of her skin. It's been ten years since my mother's feet have touched the feshy soil of this land.*

*If only time could unfold the labyrinth of the history of this land—before the rumors and crime, before my mother was a little girl coming home for her noon day lunch, before my grandfather looked at my grandmother, claiming her sixteen-year-old body as his woman. If only my mother could touch rock and sand to see into the past to when this place was once an abandoned plantation called New Orange Nassau. If only she could see how it forged a new center of existence, purchased in 1840 by 128 emancipated Africans who renamed it in honor of the British Parliamentarian who advocated for the gradual liberation of African slaves—Thomas Buxton.*1

*Now my mother has returned, positioning herself near the slowly dying tamarind tree that my grandfather used to climb, about a quarter mile away from the endless sea wall, and just a few yards from the upstairs bedroom where my grandfather quietly closed his eyes to this world for good. The air is diferent and familiar, flled with the smell of freshly cleansed leaves, sweet saltwater, and the faint sound of crowing.  My aunt yells out to her, but she does not respond. She lifs her hands, rubs the rain deeper into her skin and smooths the silken water like lotion over her body.  I sit tightly packed on the worn wooden steps and bear witness to this ad hoc baptism. Slowly my mother walks back to the elevated house. Each footstep leaves a moist trace of her hardened soles. As she gets closer, I focus on the drips of water collecting like beads on her feet. I am transfxed. This is the last time my mother and I would be together in Guyana. In a few hours, the sun will push its way through the clouds, transforming all of this into a dry landscape of memory.*

My mother lef Guyana in 1967. She was the oldest of fve and the frst in her family to travel to the United States. Her motivations for leaving Guyana were an unequivocal certainty. 'I had to leave,' she would say when refecting on that moment in her life. 'I couldn't stay.' My mother was one of many Guyanese citizens who lef during the late sixties, driven by a promise of opportunity and a new narrative to be unearthed within foreign landscapes. My father and several friends preceded her arrival. Though my mother chose to emigrate to the US, she maintained a connection to the land of her birth, frmly planting one foot under a tamarind tree in Buxton and the other, rooted on the roofop of an apartment building in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York. When I was a child, Guyana was a place that existed partly in my imagination and partly in my memory—stitched together like patchwork by what my parents carried with them and reassembled here in America, and my own experiences during short visits to see my family who remained. However, as the years went by, those visits became less frequent and Guyana lived mostly within my mind as a growing myth of what I regarded as a form of home and motherland.

On 13 August 2015, my mother passed away, taking with her a treasure chest of stories and deep knowing. Like how to properly clap a roti skin, or how to speak the vegetal language of soil and plant life, or how to clean and prepare your house so that good luck will come in the new year. In the months leading up to her passing, we ofen talked about the idea of home. I wondered whether she would ever return to Guyana. Or, like so many immigrants who moved to the States, let time and distance alter her relationship to the land. Did she now consider America her permanent home? In recounting her experiences when she arrived in the US, she ofen discussed the frst sensation of real cold, the strange taste of American chicken, and overcoming the embedded alienation of this place.

I became curious as to how my mother's presence within this American landscape infuenced her sense of belonging. How had the process of becoming an American citizen afected her? What was the impact of her shifing relationship to Guyana? Even now, I fnd myself lef with more questions than answers.

The death of my mother lef me with a sense of displacement and an internal fracturing. Her friends, most of whom also made the journey from Guyana to plant seeds in the US, would comfort me by saying, 'Alma is going home.' The word *home* became both a troubled and expansive concept—more amorphous than concrete. I started to realize that an element I regarded as home—my mother's body—was now missing. In her place were all that she accumulated as an American.

I was inundated with remnants of her existence, specifcally her clothing. My mother's closets overfowed with bright colors, strong prints, and long fowing fabrics. When I was a little girl, I would ofen play dress up in my mother's clothes and imagine the day I would fll her dresses and assert my body as a woman. Her clothes would hang of my small skinny frame, loosely encasing all my prepubescent delights and aspirations. I reveled in this form of role-playing. I found both amusement and comfort in my mother's clothes, where her scent seemed to linger and cling to each fber.

As an homage to my mother, I decided to photograph myself in her clothes. I wanted to fnd a way to ease the anxiety of separation by conjuring her presence within the photographic realm. I allowed the assemblage of clothes to drip of my body as though it were a residual, surrogate skin.

#### Figure 1.2 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #2'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2015, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

Transient borders and undulating lands speak of histories that have long past. I stood on the shores of a beach in New York and looked out to see myself walking along the Sea Wall in Guyana.

## Figure 1.3 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #1'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2015, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

#### Figure 1.4 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #3'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2015, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

Beneath the weight of her clothes, I exist as beneath a veil. I breathe my mother into me and feel her presence in my body.

#### Figure 1.5 **Keisha Scarville, 'Veil #1'** *from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2015, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

Absence is a space flled with desire. I became interested in the experience of absence and the camera's role in visualizing that which cannot be seen but felt.

## Figure 1.6 **Keisha Scarville, 'Veil #2'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2016, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

The presence of the landscape became an important factor in the images I created. I chose locations that held emotional and geographical signifcance to be read as echoes of my mother's body. In early 2016, I returned to Guyana—this time alone. I chose to investigate the terrain from a diferent point of view—a frst-generation Americandaughter searching for home. I wanted to peel back the ancestral layers and examine my own sense of belonging. I brought a suitcase of my mother's clothes and returned to Buxton. I photographed myself in and around my grandfather's house and along the Sea Wall. It was a process of repositioning and reconstitution for both my mother and myself.

#### Figure 1.7 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #5'** *from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2016, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

#### Figure 1.8 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #4'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2016, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

## Figure 1.9 **Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #8'**

*from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2016, archival digital inkjet print.*

© Keisha Scarville. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

I ofen think about why my mother chose to bathe herself in the rain that day. I wondered what it meant for her to return and how her identity became subjected to shifing landscapes. I tried to fnd the place where my mother stood that day, but the ground was not the same. I cannot cleanse myself of the loss I experienced. I can only fnd a new name for a new place and for a new body.

## *Notes*

1. 'Buxton, Rich in African Cultures,' *Kaieteur News*, 1 August 2016, https://www.kaieteurnewsonline. com/2016/08/01/buxton-rich-in-african-cultures/

# 2. Until I Hear from You

*Erika DeFreitas*

——

#### Figure 2.1

My mother Cita DeFreitas and grandmother Angela DeFreitas (nèe Vieira) in their home in Georgetown, Guyana, then British Guiana, ca. 1965.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

## On Imagined Geographies

My mother, Cita DeFreitas, was born in her family home in Alberttown, Georgetown, British Guiana on 10 December 1951. She was the youngest of three siblings. She lef Guyana for Toronto, Canada in July 1970, citing political and economic reasons for her departure. She was eighteen years old.

*You're growing up in a country as a young girl [where] there wasn't much opportunity […] It's hard to even imagine my mother letting me go, at that age, as a young girl, growing up in a sheltered life.*1

She returned ten years later with me in tow a month afer my birth in 1980, when her mother, Angela DeFreitas (nèe Vieira) lay in a comatose state between white sheets. What she remembers is what I remember. It is all fragmented and disjointed and pieced together in ways that may or may not make sense to those who are living in the land in the present. What I remember of these geographies can be found in a particular set of ink drawn landscapes that were mass produced in Guyana. They are framed and hang on a bathroom wall in our home. They, too, have migrated. My grandfather, Carlos DeFreitas, co-owned a store on Holmes Street that framed paintings in wooden frames. My mother lived on First Street, moved to DaSilva Street, then to Hadfeld Street, and to Cowan Street—in homes that housed up to seven people at times.

From my mother, I heard of Stabroek Market, Kaieteur Falls, and jungles where large snakes traveled in pairs. I heard of homes that stood on stilts. My mother talks about back home but has never been back since her own mother's passing in 1980. She does not want to see how it all has changed. Change changing changes. It must be better than having to stand in line for a loaf of bread. Rations: cheese, milk, four, and sugar. Yet, no matter how hard one may try, some things just don't change. Like the cadence in her speech, how pepper becomes peppa and daughter becomes daughta. This is how I know that we both imagine.

## Figure 2.2 A portrait of my grandmother Angela taken in British Guiana (year unknown).

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

 Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

## On Migration

These notes written over the course of three years, between 8 November 1973 and 15 October 1976, in cursive, have crossed borders and exchanged hands. They were written by my grandmother to my mother afer she lef Guyana. These sentences, extracted from several letters (Fig. 2.4), have been examined and rearranged by me.

Just a few lines to let you know, we are all o.k. I am told it is getting very cold. Don't worry, I will keep you posted, remember you are as near to me as the phone. I hope you get your passport soon. Things are just the same here, with a few more shortages every now and then but we can get by somehow. I have not heard from you since my last letter, I hope you are well. Just a few lines to let you know both dad and I are still alive. I myself had to see the doctor on Monday before you phoned. Dad wants you to apply to immigration for himself and me, I know this is going to be a surprise, but he has fnally decided to make a move. But on Saturday morning I began to feel faint again so I decided to see the doctor and of course he ordered me to the hospital right away as he suspected I had a slight heart attack. Everything is just as you lef it, only for some robberies at a few pawn shops and jewelry shops with masked bandits with guns, cutlasses, and knives. Plenty of rain is still falling, and now we expect to have high tides next week, so everybody is preparing for foods. I dreamt last night of you and I had a feeling I would have heard from you. I am working on a wedding cake for Saturday. I had it framed and have it on my glass cabinet, so that you are looking over everything that goes on in the house. Everything around this time as you would know is centered around Mashramani, the tenth anniversary of Independence. Let me know if you need anything in particular, besides pepper sauce, guava cheese, guava jelly, cassareep, and thyme. I am sending you two pairs of slippers, a bottle of pepper sauce, some dried sorrel, and some thyme. I am moving from there and I am going to live on Murray Street out very far from where I am. About your invitation to dad, nothing doing, he says you can come home instead. Until I hear from you.

Figure 2.4

Undated letter from my grandmother to my mother, sent between 1973 to 1976.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

## On the Time Before Us

**Erika:** There was a time before us; a time when we were strangers.

**Cita:** There was?

**Erika:** Yes.

**Cita:** When was that?

**Cita:** Ah, okay.

**Erika:** You didn't always know me, you know!

**Cita:** Yeah, okay.

[laughter]

This is how our discussion begins before I open the spiral bound, tan colored almost deceivingly gold–photo album that sits precariously at the edge of the table where we sit.

There she is (not as she sits before me). Newspapers strewn on a table in the background and on the foor at the base of the wooden rocking chair she leans back in (Fig. 2.5). Those lines have also been read, but by her? Are her fngertips blackened with ink? There she sits with the book open hovering above her lap between pinching thumbs and closed fngers. I imagine she is ever so gently balancing on the tips of her toes. Geometric shapes mirror the windowpanes making patterns on her hand-sewn skirt, the hem of which, when seated, meets the edge of the chair. Perhaps in red, orange, yellow, and green threads? She corrects me. In mustard yellow and beige. Legs long. Her hair neatly pinned up with a handful of black bobby pins. There she was. In a room of windows. There is a solitude. I could ask and should ask and must ask questions and I do, and she answers, but these aren't the questions nor the answers I want to ask and know. I want to know about all that is lef out of the frame. I want to know which word her eyes rested on when this moment was seized and what imagery sat behind those eyes.

She looks up from her book. I have never seen her before. Never before with a smile somewhat unburdened. Who stole this moment from her? Her lef hand, fngers spread on her lap.

There is a comfort in all this looking back at what was and will never be again except for in the faint remnants; the residue that stains. This comfort. It's deceiving. I can look back and speculate. I can look back. But there is a depth. One too entrenched in the *then* I am not privy to. Only so much. Over there in that photograph where I have never been and cannot gain entrance.

When she is looking of to the side with hands clasped below her right knee, it is then. This expression is one that I recognize. She has gone inside herself. She is looking at nothing and something and everything. The nylon webbing on the folding chair leaving imprints on the tanned skin of her thighs. I once thought that there was a time when she was most present to herself. This was what I thought of the time before us; the time when we were strangers.

**Erika:** Were you happy then?

**Cita:** Looking back at it, I don't think I was totally happy. I always felt like something was missing.

Figure 2.5 Cita at a bed and breakfast in New Amsterdam, Guyana, ca. 1965.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

## On Pre-Mourning

I t is what composes the essence of being. Having done it on many occasions, I should have a greater understanding of the diferences between being and having been, and the never going to be of human being human. It is not an understanding of it all that I have, but an awareness of its insistence. The way it sits and rests and threads itself. The way it kneads and punctures and erupts. Deep within this cavity. Derrida has whispered to me. First about the politics of friendships and then about this. He has said to me that in all friendships one will be lef to mourn the other. We know this yet we keep it as murmurs in hushed tones and low voices until there is a fssure and it becomes.

I don't have to close my eyes to recall this. This that exasperated my fear of the void that loss carves. The rain was sudden. Everything was tinny and heavy and dank. My chest tightened. I could see it. I could see the rain falling with little to no space between each drop and the street fooding. My mother levitated higher and higher. On her back. Arms and legs choreographed gracefully failing as the water quickly, yet simply, swept her away. This time I was certain that it could be this rain that would take her away from me.

What I wrestle with is the preparation. The anticipation of the unpredictability and its permanence. All before it happens. Before it happens without repetition.

It is our names that will survive us.

## On Death

The photograph is an odd size, rectangular in shape with curved edges, aged. The face of it is faded and all colors look to be muted, bleached. She lays there still, unmoved. When we see people laying with their eyes unfinching like that with their hands folded like that, we know. Call it to mind. The last time my mother returned, she returned to cicadas' warning from trees, to that natural dampness of fesh, to bananas that are as sweet as they are yellow, to pulpy genips picked, to tamarind trees, jack fruits, sapodillas, paw paws, and mirrors covered when lightning strikes. The last time my mother returned, I read in the letters on lines that remain straight that she, my grandmother, wasn't feeling well, wasn't feeling right, wasn't feeling like herself. That last time she returned she believed that her presence wasn't known. I question that. An unarticulated distance emerged in a shared space where breaths were taken, held, and exhumed from the body. It, the body, becomes slightly smaller, lungs no longer stretching. With slender fngers she fxed her mother's hair while she lay there unmoved, still.

It pervades. It conjures itself without permission. It incites fear and held tongues. When I look at that photograph, I see my grandmother as my mother as myself. There is a truth. Each one before is a rehearsal for the next. And so, I must prepare. And so, I must work towards making the impermanent permanent, with death masks made from icing and tears caught in lachrymatory bottles and stitches recording time. The crux of it all are those moments spent together making all previous eforts futile. Or so one would think. It produces an unyielding echo.

## On Memory

The photographs behind plastic sleeves serve as traces. She remembers being no older than six years old. Hand washing her brother's socks in buckets and sweeping wooden foors. Dragging her tiny fnger along the insides of big, of-white enamel bowls lined with white icing. Inscribed measurements of raisins and prunes soaking in a large earthenware cork topped jar, which now sits in the corner of our kitchen. It, too, is a trace. The sweet smell of rum. Egg whites, icing sugar, almond essence, freshly squeezed lime juice. My grandmother, her mother, made and decorated cakes as a way of earning money.  Pink. Blue. Green leaves were always green. Yellow. Orange. To prepare. To keep. To keep alive. To maintain. To make lasting. To preserve. To make this, us, me and she, tangible and permanent. Absurd growths of fowers and leaves arranged on our faces in purple and yellow. Hardened powdered icing sugar. These masks as sculptural objects—substitutions for the real—embed a timelessness in the moment afer one's death. The unpleasant reminder of the persistence of impermanence. The fowers and leaves eroding, sliding, slowly down our faces from the heat that escaped our bodies.

And so, the repetition continues.

#### Figure 2.6

My grandmother teaches women in her neighborhood in Georgetown the art of baking and icing cakes, ca. late 1960s.

© DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

#### Figure 2.7

My grandmother in Georgetown poses with a wedding cake she made and decorated, ca. late 1960s.

© DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.

*In this work, 'The Impossible Speech Act' (Fig 2.8 and Fig. 2.9), my mother Cita is both subject and collaborator. Drawing on the teachings of my grandmother Angela, my mother and I take turns to hand-fashion face masks out of green, yellow, and purple icing. The diptych featured here is the fnal two portraits of the process. These repeated actions situate my mother psychically closer to her homeland as she remembers it, but only places me further away.*

Figure 2.8 and Figure 2.9 **Erika DeFreitas, 'The Impossible Speech Act' (detail)** *2007, archival inkjet print.*

© Erika DeFreitas. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

## On My Mother, My Mother's Mother, and I

I t is in the way that the gathering of these letters cannot encapsulate each and every thing, yet I, we, continue to try for the sake of remembrance and the act of archiving. Commemoration. I think it is in the banter. It is in the way she will cook pepper pot, salt fsh and bakes, beef curry with both chickpeas and potatoes, fried plantain, and black-eyed peas, just because she knows. It is in the way we silently exchange glances with eyebrows that gradually rise. The way she still braids my wet hair, strands clinging to her fngers. The way we dispute to repute what may have been hinted at with said eyebrows. It is in the laughter that ensues. It is in the listening, the participating, the engaging. The way the veins in our hands mirror the other. It is in our hands. It is in the way our voices merge and become indecipherable to those on the other end. The way she says in jest you (I) will miss me (her) when I'm (she's) gone.

Her and I and those who came before and will come afer us continue to develop this matrilineal consciousness consisting of singularities and multiplicities that have woven themselves, presented themselves. The past and present self (selves) contains the other (others). There is a matriarchal lineage that endures and rejects omission despite memories that may be pieced together with inaccuracies, illusive details, unintentional omissions. Collectively writing and rewriting unwritten narratives. They are ever present. They are in the darkness below my eyes, the bridge of my nose, the slight curve in the nape of my neck, the length of my fngers, the pain in my joints and in the crevices that are etched into, mapped onto my skin.

All that I have is tucked into my pockets. Some of it lingers in my clenched fsts. Some of it is hushed in the pleats near my eyes. Kept between toes and under nails. Some of it is intertwined with strands of my hair conceiving tight curls. In the thick of. Under. In the alcove below my tongue and in the seams between my teeth. Yes. Most of it. Most of it nests itself in my bones. All biding time. All taking form.

#### *Notes*

1. Interview between Erika DeFreitas and Cita DeFreitas, Toronto, Canada, 12 June 2016.

# 3. Electric Dreams

*Natalie Hopkinson and Serena Hopkinson*

——

#### Figure 3.1

Serena Hopkinson on a class trip to Trinidad in 1966 while she was a student at St. Joseph's High School in Georgetown, Guyana.

© Hopkinson Family Collection. Courtesy of Serena Hopkinson and Natalie Hopkinson. CC BY 4.0.

## *On the Move*

Mom, these days when I see all the xenophobia and nastiness in the United States, I am overwhelmed by an urge to pick up and move. Growing up, you and dad were constantly on the go. I think I counted eighteen addresses in two countries and three states before I fnished undergrad. That you and dad could both come from the humblest of Guyanese families, land in North America with no visa, and then sail into an upper middle-class life is pretty amazing. Our family's migrations speak to the choices we can all make as educated people with skills in demand, and as global citizens.

You and dad never settled. You never stopped moving, exploring, hoping, dreaming, and demanding something better for yourselves and for us. You never really got comfortable. You fell—a lot. But you never seemed to spend a lot of time on regrets. You were always on the lookout for a new, better thing.

Mom, I am so proud that you have gone back to undergrad at Florida Atlantic University to study sociology and Spanish. You are always talking about ways to improve your oral fuency. At sixty-eight!  When you walk across that stage to collect your undergraduate degree this year, no one will be cheering louder or longer than me.

*Natalie*

## *Bush People*

Natalie, I have spent so much of my life building, and then starting over again. Moving is awful. It's a pain. But it is so thrilling. Each time, I feel reborn. I started out in the country on the Pomeroon River, moved to the city of Georgetown where I married your dad, lef Guyana, became a Canadian citizen. I had you four kids in Canada and moved to the US. I had careers in banking, accounting, computer tech, and real estate. I rebuilt our family afer divorce. I had to rebuild my body from cancer twice. But when I consider where I draw my strength, who I am deep inside, I know I can face any difcult situation in life because, as I proudly say, 'I am from the Bush!'

My mother, Christina (Tina) Elizabeth Baird, was primarily Arawak and my dad, Millington Benn, was African. I am their second child of nine children. I was born in 1948, at home near the river with the help of a midwife. Until I lef in 1960, we never had a motorboat, so we always paddled wherever we wanted to go. Each Monday, there was a passenger launch that picked up people on both banks of the Pomeroon to go to Charity—a big market where everyone took their goods to sell. Charity was also the connecting point to a road that took people to other places in Guyana. It was a special hub flled with laughter and friends.

The Pomeroon River was ominous at night. It was usually dark by 6 p.m. and bright with sunlight by 6 a.m. We were very close to the equator. We had no clock. We estimated the time by the position of the sun during the day. We looked on the steps of the house to see where the shadows were. When it rained and there was no sun in the sky we had to guess. I can still smell the river at night. It is a moldy, haunting, muddy, deathly smell. Pitch black. There were small kerosene bottle lamps around and ofen a big fre to send swarms of mosquitoes away.

At times when I used to smell the river, I would wonder which person it might have claimed that day. Seventy-fve feet deep, the Pomeroon River had no mercy. It didn't matter how much of a great swimmer you were, when it was ready to take you, it did. One time, my brother Ovid had to rescue me when I panicked attempting to swim across it. As children, we paddled for two or three miles on the other side of the river to the Marlborough Roman Catholic School. How long the trip took depended on the tide—whether it was coming in or out, whether it was stormy or not, whether the waves were high or low. Some of our schoolmates did not make it. Their boats capsized and they drowned. That all nine of us survived our crossings of that river for so many years, still surprises me.

But the Pomeroon River also provided our transportation and sustained our lives. We drank the brown water. We bathed in it. We swam in it. We fshed in it. It fed us: dried, curried, stewed, and fried fsh for school almost every day. The mighty, mighty Pomeroon River was home until I was twelve.

*Serena*

## *Snow White*

Mom, I remember my frst time visiting the Pomeroon was the frst time I saw you scared. In 1984 all of us—Michael, Denise, Nicole, and Dad—were all packed onto that tiny speedboat on the Essequibo River on our way to your childhood home. I was eight years old and all I had known was Edmonton, Canada. We got our hair braided in cornrows. Someone put a fower in my hair. I don't remember wearing any life jackets.

All that we saw and experienced in Guyana was so diferent from our lives in Canada. We got to taste what were mostly rare treats in Edmonton. We ate lots of cassava bread, plantain chips, pepper pot, garlic pork, and curry chicken. In Georgetown, city buses were packed with people moving and speaking fast. Rasta hairstyles, thick and matted, stretched down to people's waists. I learned to chew on a sugarcane stalk and saw it cut fresh with a cutlass. We learned where our family's accents came from. You and dad were so jubilant and at ease, enjoying a triumphant return 'back home.'

We arrived so pasty pale because we got little sun in Canada. For us kids, it was a strange new experience. But as I started to grow older and more aware of race, Canada was also beginning to feel a bit strange, too. In Edmonton, we were born into constant snow. We lived in our boots and ski pants and some of our time on the playground during recess was for skating. The Edmonton I remember was flled with ballet classes, badminton practice, tennis, gymnastics, the Royal Glenora country club, and lots of travel. It was a cold city flled with warm, friendly people. I can't say I feel the same connection to Edmonton as you do to the Pomeroon River. But, I, too, love the city of my birth and am grateful to be born there.

*Natalie*

## *Daddy's Girl*

Natalie, to me my dad will always represent 'home.' He was very serious, quiet, and hardworking. I adored him. He was what Guyanese call the ultimate 'sweetman.' He loved the ladies. But he was also a thirty-something-year-old married man when my mixed-race and Amerindian mother, at sixteen years old, became pregnant with my older sister Lynette. My mom grew up in an environment where it was normal to violate young indigenous girls. My dad had two children from his marriage and numerous others outside his marriage. At last count, the number was twenty-two children with multiple women. When he died in 1988 at age seventy-four, he had a four-year-old son with another indigenous woman. When we lived in the Pomeroon, my siblings never wanted to talk to him. They were intimidated. I was not.

In 1960, when I was almost twelve, the teachers of the Marlborough Roman Catholic School told my parents to send me to take an exam far away. Details were scarce. My dad arranged it. Aferward, we learned that students who passed it were allowed to go to secondary school in the capital, Georgetown. And so, my journey away from the Pomeroon River began. Dad decided he would do whatever was necessary to keep me in school. He became the most important person in my life. I bade farewell to my river home and went to St. Joseph's High School in Georgetown, a Catholic girl's convent school with 600 girls. It was a brand-new beautiful school located in a very prime and fancy stretch of real estate. Everyone wore blue and white uniforms. I was totally out of place. I was not accustomed to wearing shoes.  My fellow schoolmates were children of wealthy parents—business people, diplomats, and educated expats.

My end-of-school term trips home from Georgetown took me twelve hours: a bus to Stabroek Market, a ferry to Vreedenhoop, a train to Parika, a steamer to Adventure, a bus on an unpaved road for forty miles to Charity, and fnally a passenger launch to Grant Strong Hope on the bank of the Pomeroon River. There were no roads.

Going to St. Joseph's pushed me into another world. Dad was always proud to introduce me to people who didn't know me as 'my daughter who is away at school.' I was a celebrity. It was dad who agreed to send me on a feld trip to Trinidad with my rich schoolmates in 1965. At home mom, dad, and my eight siblings farmed coconuts, oranges, limes, cucumbers, rice, and corn on about fve acres of land. To pay for the trip, my siblings had to harvest more produce to sell at the market. Back then, I felt entitled to the trip. Now, I cringe at my lack of self-awareness, and how I must have seemed to my siblings. They had to sacrifce to give me an opportunity they never got.

British Guiana had always been a country with conficts over race. It mattered whether one was African, Indian, or Portuguese. Your race determined your status. I am one of those mixed-up ones—split between my mom's mixed Amerindian heritage and my father's African ancestry. In the Caribbean caste system, African ranks higher than indigenous Amerindian, who were ofen exploited. My mom, my siblings and I were never really accepted. We were referred to as 'buck children.'

*Serena*

Figure 3.2

Serena Hopkinson (far lef) in 1967 with her fellow students at St. Joseph's High School, Georgetown, Guyana. © Hopkinson Family Collection. Courtesy of Serena Hopkinson and Natalie Hopkinson. CC BY 4.0.

## *Daddy's Girl, Part II*

Mom, we have this in common: we both spent the frst decade of our lives in our birthplace before we made our frst migration—when everything changed abruptly. For you, it was leaving 'Bush life' on the Pomeroon River for the big city Georgetown. For me, it was leaving Edmonton, Canada for a whole other country— Indiana, United States.

Growing up in Edmonton, most of my playmates were white Canadians, but a good number of the kids were also the children of immigrants from diferent countries— China, Pakistan, Thailand, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Italy. I remember one solitary Jamaican but no other Blacks in our school.

Canadian manners dictated that it was rude to mention race. I started having questions as I approached puberty. In *Études Sociales* class, we talked about the 'White Man' who conquered and oppressed the First Nation indigenous Canadians. I wondered, 'Where did I ft?' Didn't our family come here to inhabit their land, too? We must be considered the 'White Man!' I was happy at this thought.  When eyes stopped at me, I shyly spit out the name of a white boy in our class. Everyone smiled politely, and then a silence hung two beats too long. Weeks later, I daydreamed. Who *would* I marry? For the frst time, I felt my diference. It was a bit lonely.

It helped to be part of our large family. The four of us were like a gang. Michael and Nicole—so smart, athletic, artistically talented, and popular—blazed the path for me and Denise. But in 1986, in fourth grade, dad took the job in Indiana installing a new computer system for the Department of Motor Vehicles. Everything changed for our gang of six. I watched you cry as dad few back and forth weekly from Edmonton and Indianapolis. Dad's absences also hit me hard. I ofen could not hold back my tears in school. I, too, was a 'Daddy's girl.' Of the four of us kids, I looked the most like him. I loved to snuggle underneath him. I was always sad when he commuted to his job in Indiana and cried at school sometimes. A school counselor put together a calendar to count the days when he would be coming back home. Like anyone else, he had his faws. He could occasionally be cruel. Things only got worse when we moved to Indiana.

*Natalie*

## *'Black Bitch'*

I n 1963, when I was ffeen years old, tensions over race and politics boiled over. In Georgetown where I went to school, there were ferce riots and violence between Africans and Indians who were vying for political power as we approached independence from Great Britain. The whole of downtown Georgetown was burnt to smithereens. I had to miss school for months while things simmered down. Because I looked ambiguous—I was brown-skinned but wore my sof curls blown straight—I didn't know whether I would be attacked in the streets by Indians or Africans.

I had a major crush on an Indian boy—Bishnue. He was forbidden by his parents from speaking to me. We found a way though. His family had chosen an Indian girl for him. She lived not far from me in a large fancy Georgetown home. One day, she called me a 'Black bitch.' I attacked her and threw her of her bicycle. She was hurt. Her dad was a sherif. He went to my very prestigious school and demanded I be kicked out. I was so scared. I don't really know how I was spared.

*Serena*

## *'Martian'*

Beech Grove, Indiana in the 1980s was a strange and intense place.  Everywhere we went in the neighborhood, hateful stares demanded answers I did not have. I sensed the Hopkinson family had caused the people of Beech Grove a great ofense. No one told me what. We spoke English, so people expected us to know and understand things. We did not. Like: if you are the only Black family, there is probably a reason for that. Each time I opened my mouth, it was so obvious how diferent I was from white kids who were our neighbors in Beech Grove. I was a Martian to the Black kids bused in by desegregation court order from inner city Indianapolis. Instead of speaking in the wrong accent and being outed for not knowing the slang or music, I chose silence. Michael and I had a job delivering newspapers as we did in Canada. We had to go door-to-door to collect our payment. I could never predict what level of disgust fung open on the other side of the door. I remember when teenagers chased Michael as he walked home, screaming at him, '*KKK is gonna get you, nigger*!'

Compared to the bright whiteness and cheer of Canada, Indiana was heavy and dark. I tried to make myself small. I strained to avoid drawing attention to myself. I wanted to stay of the streets. But home ceased to be a refuge as we turned our frustration and anger inward in our too-tiny apartment.  You and dad fought constantly. My daily wish was to turn invisible and thus never anger anyone inside or outside our house. I dreamed of running and foating far away.

*Natalie*

## *Torn Asunder*

Natalie, those were hard times in Beech Grove. I can relate to the alienation you felt. I don't know how I held on to my sanity. My marriage did not survive. Living without friends and family in Indiana, I turned inward for peace. As my marriage crumbled, I continued running and playing tennis every day. In these activities, I challenged myself physically. I entered my frst half-marathon, training weekly with my new white friends in this suburb. We had absolutely no Black neighbors. When our constant and increasingly vicious fghts became too much to bear, I calmly called a sharp young attorney from the yellow pages. He advised me that in Indiana, no woman should take it for granted that she will get custody of the children.

 I proceeded anyhow with the divorce, praying feverishly that I could convince the judge that I could care for four children even though I was not working at the time. What optimism! My huge character faw—but it ofen worked. The judge gave me full custody. I am so sorry for the pain these years caused you.

*Serena*

## *Finding Home*

Mom, I don't like it when you blame yourself. Beech Grove was an outlier. In general, people have treated me well. You and dad divorced, and we moved to Indianapolis into an excellent and racially mixed school district. I can't say that the white kids on the north side welcomed me with open arms, but they were not hostile. And to this day my oldest and dearest friends are Black friends I made in Indianapolis. School was always a refuge for me. It was a place that was orderly, not messy. So, I am grateful to you for making sure we lived in the very best school districts available, even if at times we did not live in the grandest house.

In the years you worked as the business manager at the historic Black Madame C.J. Walker Theatre in Indianapolis, I started to come out of the shell I had erected around myself. While dad was focused on Michael becoming the next tennis superstar, you signed us girls up for all of the theatre's 'Youth in Arts' programs. We did dance, drama, creative writing, and visual art. And for the frst time in my life, I was around a lot of other Black people. It felt like I was able to exhale afer holding my breath for years without realizing it.

When I got the opportunity to go to Howard University in Washington, DC on a journalism scholarship, I was happy to continue my journey of exploring identity, understanding my place in the world, and fnding out 'what is home.' I met my future husband Rudy McGann there. I stayed and built my family. I have now lived in Washington, DC longer than I have lived anywhere else. It has been the closest thing to 'home' for me. In 2008, I voted for the frst time, for Barack Obama. Those eight years in America and in Washington, DC have been a fairy tale. With that beautiful Obama family in The White House, I allowed myself to fully exhale: to believe that yes, this was my country; I belonged here; this *was* home. For now.

*Natalie*

## *Finding Love*

Natalie, I am so proud of what you have done as an academic. It is maybe what I would have done if I were born at a diferent time, when the options and expectations for women were diferent.

In 1965, I managed to fnish high school at the top of my class and St. Joseph's ofered to extend my scholarship to do advanced level subjects for the next two years. By 1967, I had graduated from St. Joseph's High School and found my frst job at a Georgetown accounting frm as an audit clerk. A year later, I moved on to Barclays Bank. At that time the banks only hired Portuguese or 'high-colored' people—meaning light-skinned. With my curly hair and my rich brown skin, I became the frst Black teller there.

Around that time, I met your dad. Terrence Hopkinson graduated from the top high school for boys, Queen's College. He was tall and good-looking with a mischievous dimple in his chin. It was 1969 and he was just back from traveling overseas, working for IBM in Trinidad and Barbados and in Texas and New York. He was the best player on the badminton courts. I was one of three girls who played, and I was an in-your-face kind of player. We played as doubles partners until we won the national mixed-doubles championship the next year and represented Guyana in tournaments abroad. We did not have a winning record, but we did win at our relationship. We got married in 1970. Terrence wanted to go to Canada to continue school. He made a lot of connections working for IBM maintaining computers throughout the Caribbean and training in the US. But he knew he could not advance any further at IBM if he did not get his college degree. He did not like what he was hearing about the draf to fght in Vietnam in the US, so we chose to move to Canada.

I had no money. He had some. Neither of our families had money to help. I approached my bank manager and asked to borrow \$3,600. I had no collateral, but I assured him that I'd pay it back. He wrote me the check on my word. We lef Guyana in 1970 and paid back the loan four years later.

Afer our airfare and other expenses, Terry and I landed in Toronto with \$103. Immigration asked us how long we wanted to stay. We said we would be going to the

#### Figure 3.3

Serena and Terrence Hopkinson on their wedding day in 1970 in Georgetown, Guyana.

© Hopkinson Family Collection. Courtesy of Serena Hopkinson and Natalie Hopkinson. CC BY 4.0.

#### Figure 3.4

Serena and Terrence Hopkinson in their frst year in Toronto, Canada, 1970.

© Hopkinson Family Collection. Courtesy of Serena Hopkinson and Natalie Hopkinson. CC BY 4.0.

University of Toronto. They gave us ninety days to get our student visas. We went to the University, found out about the high fees and realized that going to university was not going to happen that year. Instead, we petitioned the Canadian government for 'landed immigrant status' to allow us to stay and work.

Between your dad and me, we had no doubt that all of it was going to turn out as we planned. He had the ideas and the suggestions, and I worked on making them happen. Immigration ofcers asked whether we had any family or friends out west. We said yes and we used our last dollars for airfare to Edmonton. We got our Canadian resident status within three months. I eventually got a job with the Alberta government. Your dad fnished his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Alberta, then went on to do his MBA while working at major companies and owning his own business. During those years we also sponsored my mother and three brothers to join us in Edmonton. I worked to support your dad's studies, went to college in the summers, and raised you four children. We became popular for our parties and hangouts for our club friends, college friends, and Caribbean friends. We acted in plays as a family. It was a good life in Edmonton.

*Serena*

#### *A Return to Guyana*

Mom, you were with me in 2010, at Mrs. Hing's funeral in New York at the moment my interest in Guyana was rekindled. I hadn't been back since that childhood trip. I was so intrigued by the conversation we had with Uncle Ovid afer the funeral at a restaurant in the Little Guyana part of Queens. Of course, we talked about Mrs. Hing, the beautiful Chinese-Guyanese matriarch whose home you boarded at during your studies at St. Josephs and who taught us all how to make fried rice and stir-fry. Uncle Ovid was missing Guyana bad. He reminisced about his old life and adventures he had hunting gold and diamonds as an underwater miner. I loved his stories of diving underwater for hours and camping in the forest with makeshif gold-mining villages deep in the interior hinterlands. It brought back memories of my frst visit to the Pomeroon. Uncle Ovid was one of the last siblings to migrate to North America and he was already in his ffies. He was living in New York and working as a security guard. He complained that he was 'gettin' fat' due to this new sedentary lifestyle, and not enjoying America at all. He told me he was biding his time until he could go 'back home.' This was very odd to me. To hear most Guyanese, the only direction there was supposed to be in Guyana was 'out.' You and dad sent for everyone who wanted to make the crossing. Dad never had any desire to return. He always used to say he had no friends in Guyana because everyone lef. 'Brain drain,' he called it.

Uncle Ovid's melancholy surprised and intrigued me. I was determined to go to Guyana and learn more about this place that so tugged at him. I wanted to see the beauty and adventure he could not wait to get back to when he retired.

I was very happy to be able to plan a month-long trip in 2011 with four generations of our family in Guyana. Gramma Tina (who came to Canada in 1979), you, Rudy, and the kids joined us. Our kids Maverick and Maven, eleven and eight years old at the time, were able to participate in a children's heritage camp sponsored by the Guyana National Trust. We stayed in Uncle Richard Hing's apartment, which had no TV or air conditioning. We visited the gold mines and stayed in a country home like the one you lived in on the Pomeroon River. I made some local research contacts for a project I was working on art and public policy.

In the last six years, I have since returned to Guyana on my own and reconnected on Facebook and in person with my frst cousins who still live there. I got a publishing contract for a book about artists set in Guyana. In my readings, travels, and interviews, I've learned so much about our idiosyncratic ways. So much is explained by tracing Guyana's jagged path of colonization and globalization, like why we have fve continents represented in our food and culture. I learned so much about these historic, economic, and cultural clashes that shaped who we are. I'm happy to be able to pass these experiences on to my children and their children, and for posterity through my writing about Guyana. It is wonderful to hear about how you, too, have returned.

*Natalie*

#### *Electric Dreams*

On 12 May 2016 I arrived in Guyana for the 50th Anniversary of Independence celebrations. The pomp and ceremonies were fne, but I was very antsy about leaving to go 'down to the Pomeroon' as we say. My boyfriend (also named Rudy) took the trip with me. We took a crowded minibus downtown and then another one that took us to Parika where we hopped into a speedboat with forty other passengers. Today we have life jackets; it is now a law to provide them. Traveling close to the mouth of the Essequibo River, which at its widest is nineteen miles, the trip took us about forty-fve minutes. The river was choppy. The waves slapped the bottom of the boat. I thought, *this frigging boat is going to disintegrate at any time*. I breathed deeply and calmed down, remembering these waters were familiar to me since birth.

We sped by the islands of Leguan and Wakenaam. For a brief moment we could see no shoreline. We were at the mouth of the Essequibo River as it fowed into the Atlantic Ocean. We arrived at Supenaam, and my brother sent transportation for me. By car we traveled forty miles to Charity on a single road. Both sides were flled with rice felds, coconut felds, and stores. There were very large beautiful homes situated on many acres of land. It was dreamy. It would be so lovely to live in this area again.

At the end of this road was Charity. The market was busier than I recalled. We got into my cousin Roy's speedboat, fueled up, and drove towards Marlborough Roman Catholic School, my old primary school. I got out of the speedboat and walked toward one of the buildings. There was no guard there. I approached the headmistress. When she told me there was no power in the school that was serving over a hundred beautiful children, most of them indigenous, I was appalled. There was no electrical power when I lef nearly sixty years ago. And there was no electrical power now. No electricity means no plumbing, no stoves, no computers, no phones, no printers, no copiers, no Internet. There are still no paved roads. The closest hospital is about six miles away and you can only get there by speedboat or canoe.

When I returned to the city, I realized that in part the reason Marlborough was forgotten was because they are out of sight, out of mind. I visited my nephew Carlos, a civil engineering student at the University of Guyana, and we talked about solar energy. Together, we met with the Departments of Education and Public Works. They accepted my ofer to underwrite the cost of wiring the Marlborough school buildings. Carlos became my project manager. We hired an electrician to wire the main building. The Department of Education delivered donated solar panels and two computers. The work continues to move forward via email, Facebook, Western Union, and telephone. The next step is to train the staf and students on how to use their new technology.

I hope they keep celebrating the 'Bush' culture that makes us special, too.

Between my busy tennis schedule, fnishing coursework for my bachelor's degree in sociology and Spanish, and bringing electricity to my elementary school in Guyana, I have been thinking about what is next. I have dreams of spending a year in Barcelona to improve my Spanish fuency. I hope you and the family will come and visit me there, too.

*Serena*

## PART II THE ONES WHO LEAVE . . .  We made our home among strangers, knowing no one but ourselves.

Meiling Jin, 'Strangers in A Hostile Landscape'1

There are two spectrums of the migration arc: *the ones who leave and the ones who are lef*. The act of migration is an act of reciprocity—to leave a place we reconcile that we must leave others behind. Yet, the narratives of the ones who are lef are constantly eclipsed. Part II, *The Ones Who Leave . . . the Ones Who Are Lef*, counters the discourse and creative representations on migration that are overwhelmingly focused on the ones who leave. Contributors Dominique Hunter (Guyana), Khadija Benn (Guyana), Ingrid Grifth (United States), and I, Grace Aneiza Ali (United States), center the stories of those who remain.

In 'The Geography of Separation,' I, **Grace Aneiza Ali** write about women and girls who have known both spectrums of the migration arc: to leave and to be lef. The essay is a travelogue, composed of four vignettes, each focusing on a woman or girl I've encountered in a precise moment in time and in a particular place—Guyana, India, and Ethiopia. Each abstract is framed as an 'Arrival' or 'Departure' to situate my accountability to these places and to the ways I've entered into or departed the lives of the people who live there. Twenty-fve years afer my frst departure from Guyana and many miles circling the globe since, all roads still seem to lead back to Guyana. Whether I am in Hyderabad or Harrar or Harlem, I fnd myself weaving the stories of these places and the people I've encountered with those of Guyana. For now, this is how I psychically return. And yet I know it is not enough. In her collection of memoiressays, *Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work*, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat examines what it means to write stories about a land she no longer lives in. 'Some of us think we are accidents of literacy,' she says.2 Each time I board a plane for another far-of land, I grapple with the guilt that it is not bound for Guyana. I am haunted by the what-ifs. What if I had stayed? What kind of stories should I be telling of Guyana? What do I owe this country? Am I guilty, too, of forgetting?

Guyanese-born artist **Dominique Hunter**, based in the nation's capital city of Georgetown, moves in and out of several geographic spaces within the Caribbean and North America for various artist residencies and opportunities. They are what she calls 'mini migrations.' Yet, she is vocal about rooting her artistic practice in Guyana, even while it is subjected to the ebb and fow of departure. In her art essay, 'Transplantation,' Hunter tells us that from a very young age, the Guyanese citizen is indoctrinated with the charge to leave their country. 'There is an expectation once you have reached a certain age: pack what you can and leave. I am well past that age, yet I remain, stubbornly rooted in the land my parents spent their lives cultivating,' she writes. What a spectacular thing for any citizen of any place to grapple with—to be, from birth, dispossessed of one's own land. As both artist and citizen in Guyana, we are shown how she shoulders the personal, political, and economic consequences of Guyanese leaving their native land in droves. In her essay, Hunter uses a dictionary defnition of 'transplantation' as a metaphorical device to engage ideas of migration and rootedness. She shepherds us through what she deems, 'A guide to surviving transplantation and other traumas.' In both her words and collages, Hunter layers organic imagery reminiscent of Guyana's lush vegetation found in its interior Amazon as well as on its riverbeds and the famous Sea Wall on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Embedded in her visual imagery is a silhouetted self-referential fgure. Its haunting presence among the fora and fauna thrives amidst Guyana's extreme elements of temperature, wind, water, and sand. In this symbolic artistic gesture, Hunter insists that the act of staying, of being rooted, of choosing not to be transplanted, is its own kind of agency.

Like Hunter, **Khadija Benn** is among the few women photographers living in Guyana and choosing to forge an artistic practice. As a geospatial analyst, Benn ofen journeys across Guyana to remote places where most Guyanese rarely have access.  However, as she emphatically notes in her portraiture essay, 'Those Who Remain,' these are not invisible women. Benn's adjoining excerpts from her interviews with the Amerindian elders illustrate how essential they are to Guyana's history and its migration stories. These women, whose dates of birth begin as early as the 1930s, have witnessed Guyana evolve from a colonized British territory, to an independent state, to a nation struggling to carve out its identity on the world stage, to a country now burdened by its citizens departing. They have also been the ones most impacted by serious economic downturns over the past decade where the decline of mining industries, coupled with very little access to education beyond primary school, have lef these communities with few or no choices to thrive. These elder Amerindian women are mothers, grandmothers, and greatgrandmothers whose descendants have migrated to border countries like Venezuela and Brazil in South America, to North America, and to nearby Caribbean islands. Yet, these women have made the choice to stay. While their children go back and forth between Guyana and their newfound lands, many of these elders have never lef Guyana, some have never lef the villages they were born in, and some have no desire to leave.

At the age of seven, **Ingrid Grifth**'s parents lef Guyana for the United States, leaving their children in the care of their grandmothers. Grifth's experience is common for many Guyanese as well as Caribbean families where parents must make the difcult choice to migrate and leave their children with extended family members or caregivers. It is indeed a noble agenda, as Grifth writes about her parents' goals to work hard in a foreign land so that they can acquire the funds, passports, and visas to have their children join them later in the United States—a process that took years. Told uniquely through Grifth's perspective as a young girl, 'When They Lef' ofers a glimpse of how a child struggles to reconcile her parents' love with their simultaneous departure. In her moving memoir essay, Grifth explores the rupture migration enacts on families when children are split apart from their parents and how that separation reverberates years afer the frst moment of departure. It is the narrative we rarely see—what the act of leaving means for a child and how it becomes an open wound of abandonment.

Collectively, the essays in *The Ones Who Leave . . . the Ones Who Are Lef* underscore that with both ancestors and descendants long gone, the women and girls who remain in Guyana bear witness to the personal damage and the larger political consequences when a citizenry leaves its country. As migration swirls around them, Hunter, Grifth, Benn, and I, acknowledge leaving and being lef as the great tension that twists all of our lives.

## *Notes*

# 4. The Geography of Separation

*Grace Aneiza Ali*

——

Figure 4.1

Grace Aneiza Ali at the Sea Wall, Georgetown, Guyana, 2014, digital photography. Photo by Candace Ali-Lindsay.

© Grace Aneiza Ali. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.

## The Things We Carry

On the eve of our 6:30 a.m. one-way fight bound for John F. Kennedy Airport, New York City, my mother called us into her bedroom for a family prayer. My little sister was only six years old at the time so she would remember nothing of the weightiness of that night. Because we were older, fourteen and ffeen, my brother and I understood the urgency of the moment. We sat on the bed, holding each other's hands with our eyes closed—like we always did in this ritual—as my mother prayed. It would be our last family prayer in Guyana. When she was done praying for our safety on the journey, she told us, 'When we get to America, nothing changes. We will still be who we are.'

By 10 p.m. our house had been gleaned of its remaining furniture, knick-knacks, linens, and kitchen wares—all the things we could not carry. The state of my mother's bedroom—ground zero for where our family had been packing fve large suitcases for the past month—was relatively calm, considering this was the eve of our departure from our homeland. My mother was thankful that it wasn't one of the scheduled blackout nights in our part of Georgetown. At least there was electricity as she fnished packing. The suitcases were zipped up and padlocked, except for hers. The jars of wiri wiri pepper sauce and mango achar, sealed in their thick masking tape, had already been weaved into the nooks between her clothing. My mom had one major problem lef to solve. The large cast-iron karahi bulged under the layers of clothes she had carefully swaddled it in. There was no minimizing its presence in the suitcase. She knew with it the luggage would be over the weight limit. She also knew that to take the pot, she had to leave something behind.

A staple in every Guyanese kitchen, the karahi is a thick, circular, and deep cooking pot that originated in the Indian subcontinent. It was frst introduced in Guyana by the Indian indentured servants who were brought by the British, beginning in 1838 and throughout the early 1900s, to work the sugar plantations and rice farms in then British Guiana. Our karahi—aged, scratched, chipped, nicked, scraped, and blackened—had hit its sweet spot. Over decades, it had absorbed into its pores the perfect medley of oils and spices, which it now infused into whatever meats, vegetables, and sauces were poured into it. My mother had grown up as a young girl watching her mother cook for her family in the same karahi. Daily, it produced curries or stews or an occasional chow mein or fried rice for my mother and her siblings. In her suitcase bound for America, there was no prized jewelry, no priceless antiques, no precious silk saris. There was only the karahi—the sole possession she had afer her mother died. It was not going to be lef behind. It was coming to America with us.

On 8 April 1995, my mother departed Guyana and took her entire family with her. A singular document transformed my family from citizens in one land to aliens in another. Yet, it had taken ten years for our visas to be approved. My mother had spent a decade of her life in limbo between present and future, between living in one land and making plans for an uncertain one. As she prepared for that early April morning fight, a decade of waiting, of not knowing when we would leave, had come to an end.

At thirty-nine years old, my mother started over in a foreign land. She was leaving a homeland where the tragedies ofen eclipsed the joys. She was leaving a country she saw violently transition from a colonized territory to an independent republic. She was leaving a place where her father, haunted by the demons of alcoholism, took his life, adding to the statistics of Guyana's high suicide rates among Indian men. She was leaving a country where, just a few years afer her father's death, her mother too would pass away at the young age of forty-eight afer an aneurism gripped her brain. With her father's suicide and her mother's death, my mother was orphaned by nineteen years old. She was leaving a country on whose soil she buried her mother while still in mourning for her father. It was then her fear began: she too would not live past the age of ffy, as none of her parents did. The loss of her mother and father ushered in a series of constant departures. Beginning in the 1970s, her six siblings joined the exodus of Guyanese leaving Guyana. They moved on to Barbados, Canada, and the United States, without her.

My mother was leaving a country where, despite the constant companions of death and departure, she forged a family of her own. She was leaving a country that had seen her evolve from an orphaned daughter, to a wife, to a young mother. She was leaving a country where, like her mother and father, she too struggled to keep her children from the deep abyss of poverty. She was leaving a country where she had no infant formula for her babies because the government had banned foreign imports. 'Let them eat cornmeal,' they said. It was then that she began to understand the demons that plagued her father were not only of his own making. The failure to take care of his family ate away at him too. She was leaving Guyana with no desire to return.

Despite all of these things, or perhaps because of them, it was non-negotiable for my mother that the karahi come with us to America. It carried within its pores her memories of her mother. Twenty-fve years later, it is the object that bridges my mother's past with her present, her homeland with her new land. Afer all these years, it survives. It is now over sixty years old. Oceans and lands apart from its origin, the karahi continues to nourish my family.  She is among the many daughters who carry our mother's things across borders.

ARRIVAL 24 September 2003 Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh, India

#### Indra

I ndra sat cross-legged on the linoleum foor with her plate and cup centered neatly between her knees. She didn't have a spoon or fork. She ate with her hands. No kind of pleading, begging, hand gesturing, or angry faces I made to show my disapproval, would get her to move from the foor to the chair to eat at the table with me. Ofen, in an act of resistance to her act of defance, I would take my plate and cup and sit on the foor with her. I would eat the rice and dahl with my hands, too. She would frst laugh, then yell at me in Telugu, 'Pāgala!'

 Indra didn't speak my English and I didn't speak her Telugu, the regional language of the state of Andhra Pradesh. We managed to meet in the middle in Hindi, the national language of India, because of our mutual attraction to Bollywood flms. Indra was addicted to the love stories and the ballads. I used them as a Hindi language immersion course. Or so I pretended. Indra knew I was just as enthralled by the plots of forbidden love that always led to predictable happy endings. Life, and love for that matter, as depicted by Bollywood, was blissfully simple.

Indra spoke more languages than I did. In fact, while she spoke three Indian tongues—Telugu, Urdu, Hindi—my Telugu was non-existent, and my Hindi was severely limited. I couldn't utter a complete sentence or express a full thought in Hindi. What I knew were single words and could string together elementary phrases to ofer to the city's rickshaw drivers to get me from point A to B on the Hyderabad streets. When I frst arrived in Hyderabad, I tried taking Hindi lessons. The school taught Hindi by way of Telugu. In other words, you had to frst know Telugu to learn Hindi. I lasted one week, never making it past 'Mera nam Grace.' It was pure magic that Indra and I were able to communicate at all.

It was September, the height of monsoon season. I was defated by daily trips throughout known and obscure parts of the city, dodging the heavy rains, looking at apartments, and negotiating the rental price with landlords, only to have them turn me down in the end. I had thought that my American dollars, and the fact that I could ofer three months' rent in advance, would be enough. I was wrong. Landlords didn't want to rent to me—a single woman, in her twenties, with no family attachments in sight. 'You're suspicious to them,' I was told one night by well-meaning Indians at a dinner welcoming me and other Fulbright Fellows to India. 'You're a young Indian woman, you have no husband, no father, no male relative with you, and you're asking to rent an apartment for yourself. Women just don't do that here. Women don't live alone here.'