Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora

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, to their reunion with Guyana.


Introduction
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 often served as sites for family reunions. Before I too boarded my first plane at age fourteen to depart Guyana on a one-way flight 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 finally 'came through,' as we say in Guyana, after 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 left 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 after 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-first-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 confined by the term 'Resident Alien,' as my American green card first 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 Introduction Introduction 7 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 fatherthe 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 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 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 'Unfixed Homeland: Artists Imagining the Lives of the Guyanese 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 fleeing 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 five 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 reflection 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 affectionately known as 'Little Guyana') to witness an abundance of Guyanese 'Bake Shops' and 'Roti Shops.' 27 As the Guyanese community grew to be

June 1948
The National Archives, Public Domain. 24 the fifth 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 often 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 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, left Guyana first to find a place for everyone to live and to figure 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 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 difficult. It emphasizes how we are different 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 fifty 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 effects 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 influencing a global understanding of who Guyanese people are.
More recently, the reporting on the promising yet tumultuous discovery of offshore oil and a chorus of viewpoints by international experts on why Guyana is 'unprepared' or too 'corrupt' or 'ill-equipped' to  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 trafficking, money- 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. As they reflect on their immigrant mothers' journeys, their gaze as daughters is full of compassion and tenderness.
In Part II, there are two spectrums of the migration arc: the ones who leave and the ones who are left. Yet, too often the narratives of the latter are constantly eclipsed. 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 left 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 offered 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.

-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 flight: and an internal fracturing' after her mother's passing, Scarville looked to her 'mama's clothes' of bright colors, strong prints, and long flowing 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 crafts 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.   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 often 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 often discussed the first 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 influenced her sense of belonging. How had the process of becoming an American citizen affected her? What was the impact of her shifting relationship to Guyana? Even now, I find myself left with more questions than answers. The death of my mother left 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, specifically her clothing. My mother's closets overflowed with bright colors, strong prints, and long flowing fabrics.
When I was a little girl, I would often play dress up in my mother's clothes and imagine the day I would fill her dresses and assert my body as a woman. Her clothes would hang off 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 fiber.
As an homage to my mother, I decided to photograph myself in her clothes. I wanted to find a way to ease the anxiety of separation by conjuring her presence within the photographic realm. I allowed the assemblage of clothes to drip off my body as though it were a residual, surrogate skin.

Keisha Scarville, 'Untitled #1'
from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2015, archival digital inkjet print. The presence of the landscape became an important factor in the images I created. I chose locations that held emotional and geographical significance 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 different point of view-a first-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.   from the series, 'Mama's Clothes', 2016, archival digital inkjet print. I often 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 shifting landscapes. I tried to find 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 find a new name for a new place and for a new body. My chest tightened. I could see it. I could see the rain falling with little to no space between each drop and the street flooding. My mother levitated higher and higher.
On her back. Arms and legs choreographed gracefully flailing 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. To make this, us, me and she, tangible and permanent. Absurd growths of flowers 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 after one's death. The unpleasant reminder of the persistence of impermanence. The flowers and leaves eroding, sliding, slowly down our faces from the heat that escaped our bodies.
And so, the repetition continues.  In this work, 'The Impossible Speech Act' (Fig 2.8   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 fish 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 fingers. 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 after us continue to develop

3.
Electric Dreams --  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 filled with laughter and friends.

Natalie Hopkinson and Serena Hopkinson
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 often a big fire 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-five 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 fished in it. It fed us: dried, curried, stewed, and fried fish for school almost every day. The mighty, mighty I wanted to stay off the streets. But home ceased to be a refuge as we turned our frustration and anger inward in our too-tiny apartment. We wanted to rent or buy a bigger house in Beech Grove, but every single white seller or renter refused our family.
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 floating far away. 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 flaw-but it often worked. The judge gave me full custody. I am so sorry for the pain these years caused you.

Serena
Finding Home M om, 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. 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. After 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  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 officers 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 finished 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. 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. 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 flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. We arrived at Supenaam, and my brother sent transportation for me.

Serena
By car we traveled forty miles to Charity on a single road. Both sides were filled with rice fields, coconut fields, 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. 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 staff and students on how to use their new technology.
I hope they keep celebrating the 'Bush' culture that makes us special, too.   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 often journeys across Guyana to remote places where most Guyanese rarely have access.
These small villages are central to Benn's stunning black and white portraits of the elder Amerindian women who call these communities home. 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 left 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

4.
The Geography of Separation -- 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 fifteen, 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.'

Grace Aneiza Ali
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 five 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 finished 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 left 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 first 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.

The Geography of Separation 71
There was only the karahi-the sole possession she had after her mother died. It was not going to be left 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 flight, 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 often 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 after her father's death, her mother too would pass away at the young age of forty-eight after 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 fifty, 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-five years later, it is the object that bridges my mother's past with her present, her homeland with her new land. After 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. My mother still cooks her curries and stews in that karahi in her American home. She is among the many daughters who carry our mother's things across borders. there, the flat was as much Indra's as it was mine. Often, when I would leave town to attend some academic conference, Indra and her children chose to stay in the flat. I would return a week or so later and find the bed untouched. The straw mats Indra brought from her home were rolled up and set aside in a corner of the living room.
While I was gone, she and her children slept on the floor.
I never saw Indra write anything down. Never saw her put pen to paper. I suspected that she could not read or write. But I never asked as I was worried the question would invade her privacy. She would light up, however, when I brought home brown paper bags filled with notebooks and pencils for Manju, her little girl. Manju and I shared a similar love-the sacred act of opening up a new notebook and writing on its first crisp page. She greeted every new notebook with delicacy. She opened it slowly, ran her palm across the first page, and pulled it to her nose to take in the scent of its newness.
And she thought carefully about what would grace the first page. Precocious Manju talked circles around both her mother and me. At ten years old, she was learning Hindi, Telugu, and English in school. She filled up a lot of notebooks.
My relationship with Indra evolved without any direction or intent that it ought to do so. Soon, I couldn't imagine India without Indra. When, toward the end of the monsoon season, I fell dangerously ill with a tropical flu, it was she who stripped my The more I thought about our Ethiopian guide's words that these were 'forgotten people' the more it unsettled me. Far too often the narratives about women and girls in rural communities whether they be in Asia, or Africa, or South America, or the Caribbean, are centered on an urgent call to look past the proverbial courtyard, to aim for a life beyond the confines of the village, to shed the veil. And we tell them that not doing so would render them invisible, marginalized, or trapped. We're wrong. Chaffee Jenetta is not another nameless village in another ubiquitous story of poverty in Africa.
It is a unique place, a challenging place, a wealthy place-albeit not material wealth. It is not a place to flee from, but one to be nourished and supported.
The little girl I met could turn out to be a powerful voice for Ethiopia-her Ethiopia, no one else's. She might one day become a writer herself, sharing with the world its multiple stories. And to do so, perhaps she will find herself returning to those very notebooks. She could light the world. V told me that I hadn't changed a bit. I fibbed as well and returned the compliment.
We looked at each other and giggled-we were still defending each other like best friends do. We both sat on the same side of the table, tucked close, shoulder-toshoulder, thigh-to-thigh. We had put aside our grown-women selves for the moment and were back to being the fourteen-year-old girls we were when we'd last seen each other. Like me, V bounced around in dresses always bright and floral and flowing. and gone through a few passports filled up with multiple immigration stamps. V has never left Guyana. She has no passport with its pages marked with official stamps of the places she's been. A passport, or the absence of one, becomes a symbol of how two lives that begin together, diverge.
When the waitress at the café came over and asked for our lunch order, I predictably chose the chicken and potato curry with rice, and sliced cucumbers and pepper sauce on the side. V ordered a Coca-Cola in the can. I asked if she wasn't hungry. She told me she still doesn't eat restaurant food.
In a silly attempt to be funny, I said to her, 'Tell me everything that's happened in the last twenty years and start from the beginning.' This turned out to be a serious request for V. It wasn't funny to her. She left me in girlhood and shifted to womanhood.
She began with facts and chronology. She told me she married early. She was the mother of two children and had left the physically violent and abusive marriage. She and her two babies were now living back in the house on Middle Road with her father.
She told me she had no money and no job.  But perhaps they are not as disconnected as we are led to believe. Perhaps there exists a scenario in which the two are sister components, two leaves on the same branch of the same tree. Hearts, minds, souls, eyes, and feet continuously moving through real and abstract bodies and spaces that are both ours and the other. All the while tethered to our individual sources like umbilical cords.
Broken down to their most essential elements both speak of body and movement.
Consider for a moment the many implications of that juxtaposition: • What does it mean to be actively engaged in both processes of transplantation?
• How does it influence the nuances of our migration patterns, if at all?
• Is it possible to shift around parts of our bodies as needed, reanimating broken organs as we move through obscure places, fending off threats to our wellness and bias for self-preservation?
Some would call us immigrants, movers across borders that are not our own. We We imagine fantastic opportunities promising to rip us away from the poverty/ obscurity/mediocrity/lawlessness that threaten to hold hostage our potential. Tangled weeds shoot up, wild and indiscriminate, mocking that twisted nature, pushing past weary fences. We have inherited the impetus to push back long before the water and sun release us from our hardened selves.

Identify a strategic point of entry.
My own breakthrough to adulthood was marked by a contradictory sequence of hesitation and urgency. Mine was not a shell made of the same substance as my parents.
And while this 'new' national climate of opportunity that coaxed me out of said shell was far from ideal, it was, in many ways, more sympathetic to my deficiencies. My form being pliable and therefore much more vulnerable than theirs, meant that I had to adopt new ways of strengthening those shortcomings to avoid complacency.

Clear a path with a pair of long boots.
Like all good nurturers my parents toiled so that I would somehow be exempt from the jabs thrown by life in what we embrace as our 'third world' country, despite the growing global debates about this term. Admittedly, many struggles have escaped me. But the challenge of finding and sustaining a creative self was and will always be mine alone to shoulder. Many battles have been fought both on and off the field that never forgets. It was through rigorous trial and error that I came to discover my own footpath, hidden under the darkness of the Georgetown sky.
Prepare the ground for easy transition.
How much further can a potted plant grow? How many moons until we crash against the impenetrable glass ceiling of that cramped reality? How long until our own roots, too thick to be contained, choke our potential to death? We plateau, before making our way downward, forced deep into a kind of cold and indifferent new ground. We know indifference. But this is, at the same time, familiar and alien, an opportunity and an unlikelihood. Nevertheless, we push through, hoping for a better place than the one we left behind.

86
Liminal Spaces Select the healthiest candidates for the highest success rate.
Our greatest aspiration should be to leave. This is what we are told, even as tiny buds still growing in our mothers' bellies. Broken sermons recount dismal days gone and predict even darker days to come. That is our oral tradition, an enduring account of desolation perpetuated equally by those who have stayed and those who have left. Stake the young to avoid root damage.
Still, how does one not shrink in the face of ever-present poverty/obscurity/ mediocrity/lawlessness? Those who choose to stay in spite of everything must find ways to circumvent the grinding down of our resolve. We take refuge in the things and places that dull the harshness of reality, forgetting momentarily the blight of our anxieties. There is a kind of mulishness in the way we refuse to buckle under the weight of our choice to stay. We have learned to maneuver comfortably between familiarity and contempt a long time ago. Add sugar solution to prevent shock.
The way we move through various spaces is not something we are conscious of until the enlightened observer mentions it. In fact, prior to this there had been no serious consideration of my own actions, the constant advancing from and retreating to a very specific epicenter. Footprints in the earth extending a bit further each time but, ultimately, always leading back to its place of origin. How far will this magical cord extend before yielding its elasticity to overuse? What will be the coordinates of my final stop when the cord can stretch no more? Will the sun still burn my skin with the same intensity?
Spread compost around the base for additional nutrients.
It is difficult to imagine the energy required to fuel that kind of regular transplantation.
In much the same way, it is difficult for me to describe the mental and physical tax Water regularly but not excessively.
This constant extraction process, although exhausting and violent, is a necessary routine for my contemporaries and me. In response, we have learned to steel ourselves against the trauma of that ripping action in an effort to curtail the initial shock of change.
Our knowledge of trauma runs deep. How can we not know it so intimately when this land and its peoples have been forged by its ferocity? Our country has survived in spite of violent racism, dirty politics, bloody massacres, and crazed cult leaders who have stained our soil in a most tragic red the spectrum could ever generate. These are hardly new phenomena. We endure. We survive. In a rather perverse way, trauma is one of our more faithful companions.
Make available the right amount of sunlight.
We challenge ourselves to make those treks daily, weekly, monthly, determined to stave off the lingering threat of disenchantment. How easy it is to lose one's sense of direction when insularity is the very soil that holds us together. That back and forth movement therefore becomes a crucial component in the way we keep ourselves sane.

Liminal Spaces
The bigger picture is always in sharp focus even as we shift temporarily from one place to the next before eventually settling back into this contentious territory we call home.
Wait patiently for it to take.
In the end it matters not how painful a process it is. This is the price of not leaving. The cost is shouldered willingly if it means we can have it both ways. We wait in the shade of old trees for the next opportunity that would allow for the occasional dipping of our roots in a body of water that is not ours.
Repeat steps as needed.   Rupununi Savannahs. She lives there with her mother, husband, and two youngest children, and farms peanuts, corn, and bitter cassava. As is characteristic of Amerindian families, Lillian is close with extended family members. When she was eight years old, her aunt migrated to nearby Venezuela and her great-uncle moved to Brazil. They often visited Toka but age now prevents them from traveling. These days Lillian makes the occasional trip across the borders to spend time with them. She also related how one of her sons migrated in 2000 to Boa Vista, where he found work as a vaquero on a cattle ranch. Eventually he moved deeper into Brazil with his two children after his wife passed away. She explained that she lost touch with them after that move, as her village did not have telecommunication services in those days. She hasn't heard from them in many years but remains hopeful that someday they will be able to reconnect. Of Violet's seven children, three live abroad-a son and daughter live in the United States, and a daughter lives in Venezuela. Limited telecommunications at the remote Shell Beach location challenged Violet's ability to keep in touch with her children, and she has heard from her daughter less in recent years as the situation worsened in Venezuela. She is proud that some of her children had the opportunity to leave Guyana but wishes she could speak with them more. While she doesn't expect to see them regularly in the future, Violet expressed that even though migration places so much time and distance between them, she will continue to remain close with her children.  when he had the opportunity many years ago to leave Guyana and make a better life for himself. Since leaving he has only visited home twice. She no longer remembers how much time has passed since he moved away, but she still misses him daily. He continues to support her, and they share regular phone calls. Alone in her simple wooden home, Lucille says she was never inclined to leave Guyana. She now occupies her days with activities for her church, where she has found solace and a deep sense of community. Agnes Phang was born in Mabaruma and has lived much of her life there. As a mother of fourteen children, her earlier days were spent subsistence farming and caring for her children. Many of them went on to raise their own families, some doing so further away than others. Agnes related how one of her daughters migrated to Venezuela more than thirty years ago. She has visited her daughter's home a few times, but her grandchildren have never visited Guyana and she is unable to converse with them as they grew up learning Spanish. Agnes also has a sister living in England with whom she maintains a fond relationship. She has traveled to England several times to visit her, and her sister returns to Mabaruma about once a year to visit relatives and maintain the family property. Agnes says her travels to visit with family have allowed her to experience many interesting places, but she loves her home in Mabaruma above all others. she attended primary school as a child. Thirty years on, Yvonne is a farmer, tailor, and mother to eleven children. Over time her family unit grew smaller as some children went in search of greener pastures. More than ten years have passed since one of her daughters left Guyana to work in Barbados, and three sons migrated to work in Canada, Venezuela, and Suriname. Yvonne understood they needed to leave to secure better jobs, but she says it was hard to watch them go. As they are seldom able to travel home, the family now relies on telephones to stay in touch. Yvonne is open to traveling someday to visit her family members; but as echoed by other women in this narrative, she knows no other home, and is content to spend her remaining years in Guyana.  I knew the day was coming for some time now. Since my parents had gotten visas for America, they kept telling us about the plan they were putting in place so things would run smoothly after they left. They arranged for the Indian man they heard of who drove kids to schools to take Dawn and me to our schools. They arranged for Jenny, our ex-landlord's daughter, to arrive at Adda's house early on school mornings to comb our hair. They had plans to keep us from missing them too much. They said that they would write to us constantly and send pictures. In America, they said, we would have a better life than we could ever have in Guyana.
Drops of pee soaked the crotch of my panty, the wetness now sticky along the insides of my legs. My eyes stayed focused on my parents as they walked the dirt passageway below.
Others were fixed on them too. Someone leaving for America was more than a family affair; it was a neighborhood event.
'The youngest Griffith and his wife leavin' for the States. Ah hear any day now he and his wife going to America and ah hear dey leavin dere children wit his mudda.' 'Mrs. Greenidge daughter and she son-in law papers come tru. She told me the news at church last Satday.' When word got around that my parents had gotten visas, family they barely knew showed up with toothy smiles and eyes full of pride.
'How dee, family? It's me, yuh great Aunt Lily. Ah hear muh family get lucky!' They believed good luck rubs off. Most of those watching my parents had their own plans to leave Guyana. Some had a spouse who left to get settled first. Some had a son or a daughter overseas who, once they finished their studies and got a job, would send for the rest of the family. Some were biding time, waiting to get good news from the embassy like my parents, grateful that the family member in Canada or England or America who said they'd sponsor them had come through.
And there were those who were forever trying to get in touch with relatives overseas to petition them to put in the necessary paperwork and send for them even if the person was a distant relative.
As we stood on Adda's veranda, a sudden breeze off the Atlantic Ocean a few miles away lightened the air.
Daddy walked towards the rickety footbridge to the waiting taxi that would take him and Mammy to Timehri Airport. He kept tapping on the top pocket of his suit jacket pocket, probably checking to make sure he had the things he needed-his passport, plane ticket, some of his monthly teacher's salary he had converted into US dollars, the paper with his brother-in-law's information. My mother's eldest brother, Vernon, would meet them at JFK airport. Until they got on their feet, my parents would stay with Uncle Vernon and his family in Wyandanch, Long Island.
The taxi's engine hummed. The trip from Georgetown to Timehri Airport was a one-hour drive through winding, treacherous, unpaved roads and over unstable bridges.
Mammy looked more as if she belonged on a wedding cake than at the job she had at Swan's Laundry. Her A-line dress was a frosty shade of pink, her black pillbox hat matched her handbag and opened-toed, sling-back shoes.
'Earl and Gloria looking like the King and Queen this mawning,' said a neighbor.
'Yaw'll take care of yuh selves. And mus don't forget we back here.' Regardless of how poor you were, what you wore on departure day had to be the best you could afford. You had to leave Guyana looking like you were already a success story.
Daddy nodded his head and continued tapping his hand on his breast pocket as he carried the single grip over the bridge towards the waiting taxicab. Sometimes my father wore a shirt with a tie to his teaching job at St. Sidwell's; the gabardine suit he wore that morning must have been stifling. My mother tilted her head up at us; tears filled her eyes. 'Mammy loves you,' she said.
My parents said that their leaving was the beginning of more good things to come in America. Our parents had downsized to a two-room flat on Albert Street, Georgetown. I don't remember the bigger flat we lived in before. Another family rented two similar rooms on the other side of a wall separating us. I remember spending most of my time when I was not at school between our two grandparents; we came to our flat as a family in the evenings. We didn't have a kitchen or a bathroom. Granny lived in the next yard. We relied on her cooking and the makeshift outdoor shower under her house. Under two loose floorboards in our flat was a white enamel posy my parents would reach for when we had to use the potty.
In America, we would have a house with a kitchen, an indoor bathroom, maybe two. We'd have our own bedroom. We would have a television set, maybe more than one. We'd have a backyard with a swing set. Leaving us behind was only temporary. It was necessary for a better future. So, they assured us.
I went over the plan in my head.
We were to live with Adda, my paternal grandmother, until our parents returned for us. We were to visit Granny, our maternal grandmother, on weekends for church.
The fact that Adda and Granny could remain as anchors was another reason why my parents felt lucky. Both grandmothers lived close to each other in Georgetown.
We would go to the same school and church. Our parents surmised that the familiar surroundings would make us feel less like we were being ripped away from everything we were used to. 'Jenny is going to be here in fifteen minutes for hair combing. Time to bathe. Who first?' I pretended to be asleep, wanting to dream the same dream I had been having since the three of us moved into Adda's house three months earlier. In the dream, Daddy and Mammy returned to Guyana to get us and we had five minutes to pack our things to take to America. I decided to leave everything behind.
Dawn and I couldn't stop missing our parents or counting the days since they left us behind. Oliver was missing Mammy and Daddy even more. He had not yet turned school age. After our parents left, Oliver forgot all about his potty training. He would not own that he was wetting and soiling his underpants. He developed terrible allergies and sores on his legs that wouldn't heal. Adda sent him to live with Granny. We were now separated.
I wish I didn't have to be a big girl. I wish I were younger and as needy as Oliver so I, too, could live with Granny. Adda was adamant that she was the one our parents had put in charge and her job was to keep us 'whole' until our visas came. I couldn't understand what she meant by 'whole.' Did it have anything to do with the sadness I was feeling? Adda's house was much bigger than our flat on Albert Street but it was filled with grandchildren now that all of her five sons were overseas. My siblings and I had slept with our parents in the same room of our two-room flat on Albert Street. So, it felt normal that seven of us-Dawn and I, our three cousins, Lilah, and Adda-slept in one bedroom. Lilah wasn't a blood relative but she became family when Adda took her in after her parents died.
That morning without opening my eyes I knew that Adda was dressed in one of her worn-out cotton shifts. I never saw the fresher dresses Adda said she was saving.
Maybe, she didn't feel the need to wear them since she never left the house. The dresses she did wear stretched tight over the dome of her stomach and the stoop of her back, so worn that the armpits were frayed and faded. It was a safe bet that Adda was wearing the shiny black wig one of my uncle's sent from America. She never took it off, not even when she went to bed.
My sister and I had become curious about the goings-on in our new surroundings, things we had not noticed before. But looking to our grandmother for answers made us feel like pariahs and in less good standing than our cousins. I pressed my eyes closed. Awake, I was tempted to ask questions I wished I had asked my parents before they left us. Like: Where did Adda grow up? What were her parents like? Why didn't she ever go outdoors? Why was she so suspicious? I could hear my responsible older sister sigh as she climbed out of the bunk bed below. I should have felt lucky to have an indoor shower just a few steps from the bedroom where I slept now. And I did. But I couldn't just jump out of bed and into the shower. There were rules. Dawn and I had to fetch our towels and underwear that were stored in the small front bedroom. My fresh panty and singlet had to be on, and my towel must cover everything between my armpits and kneecaps before I exited the shower.
I heard the water in the shower running, opened my eyes and decided to make the trip to the small front room. On the way, I noted other predictable things about the morning routine at Adda's house. My green enamel cup was already placed on the dining room table. Flies hovered around grease spots on a brown paper bag that held plaited bread and tennis rolls; the slab of butter covered on its dish melting. One fly, then another, landed on the rim of my cup filled with milk. Adda knew I didn't like milk. Not even chocolate milk.
I moved beyond the clutter in the living room towards one of the two rocking chairs near the front windows. I often sat on the right handle of the rocking chair looking up at the sky and daydreaming about my parents. Behind the rocking chair was the door to the small front bedroom that held our belongings and where Adda piled things-old newspapers, books, scraps, broken furniture, a bicycle.
So much had changed under Guyana's new independent government. Like the perfume scented Lux soap that used to sit next to the sink in Adda's dining room.
Since my parents left, there was no choice but to purchase the locally-manufactured, thick block of beige Zex soap. It had no scent. The Trout Hall brand orange juice in the small tin cans that our parents bought if we were coming down with a cold was also a thing of the past.
Forbes Burnham insisted that Guyana be self-reliant. But there were no jobs, little food, and a downward spiraling economy. By the early 1970s, Guyana was a dismal mess. * A fter school on Fridays, as planned, we went to Granny's house for the weekend.
It was a tiny wood structure under a pitched zinc roof supported by six-foot high cinder block posts. Two parallel stairways on opposite sides of the house led to her front and back doors. Once, Granny had decided to take her eldest son's offer to go to America; but just to visit. She had her two daughters in Guyana who needed help. She said she had her 'lil house;' a community she counted on. America, she declared, was for young people.
Granny was a Seventh-day Adventist. By sundown on Friday, everything had to be in order. The radio was turned off. Chores stopped. Idle gossip ceased. Only prayers, scripture readings, and songs were allowed. We heard Granny singing through the open windows even before we bounded up the flight of stairs. The smell of the meal she prepared for lunch the next day after church was reassuring. The pan with the seasoned ground beef and vegetables and the one with macaroni and cheese, my favorite, cooled on the stove near the backdoor.

The top half of Granny's back door stayed flung open until worship ended.
Coconut trees swayed, their branches humming in the breeze. A kiskadee perched on a tree branch singing.
I looked over the zinc fence at the bottom flat in the next yard where we used to live. Jenny and her family still lived upstairs, but our downstairs flat stood empty. The white-washed greenheart wood was stripped of its paint, the grimy windows closed, the glass panes broken into pointy shards.
I pictured the room where we slept. Our bunkbed and parents' bed pressed together in the tight space. I remember how Dawn, Ollie, and I wouldn't stop jumping up and down on our parents' bed, not until one of us fell off and ended up crying. I remember the blue and white portable record player, the pickup Uncle Vernon sent from America. It stayed on the table that stood over the two loose floorboards we lifted to retrieve the posy. Mammy had a few small round records Uncle Vernon had also sent. She liked playing one by Aretha Franklin. Next to the table was the couch. It was there Daddy read us poems before we went to bed. My favorite was:

'Some like bath nights but I do not. For the cold's so cold and the hot's so hot…'
It was there he explained the letter writing plan that would keep us connected when they left for America.
But the letter writing plan was not working out on my end. Adda was censoring our letters. I couldn't tell my parents how different things were without them and why I was always sad. I couldn't tell them I hated school or that I no longer cared to eat. I wanted to tell them how much I needed to be with them. But by the time the letters were edited for proper grammar, punctuation, structure and content, all of me was taken out. Were my parents missing us as much as we're missing them? Why haven't they kept their promise? How long is 'soon' anyway? I wanted to ask my parents these questions but Adda wouldn't allow it.
At the primary school I attended, no one I knew had parents who were overseas.
When I brought photos, my parents sent to school for my teacher and classmates to see, their eyes opened wide. I had to remind myself to pretend to feel lucky that I had parents in America. was, except for the unmentioned sadness. A deep bond, though, was created with my older sister-the on-going separation from our parents pushed Dawn and I closer. We became one and the same; agreed it was best to stay mute around Adda to stay out of trouble. We no longer had to speak to each other to know what we were thinking and feeling. Gestures and codes became our form of communication.
Nothing much changed on Adda's end.
Oliver was school age and it was becoming clearer that he was not developing normally. In a blink, he would sneak out the school yard and find his way back to Granny's or sometimes Adda's house. Adda would look out the window to see him standing in the trench below. The drainage system long ago implemented was needed to collect rainfall that cokers dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Otherwise, the citizens of our low-lying country would drown.
Oliver sat in the mucky waters in his school uniform all day and despite all the entreaties, coaxing, and threats from Adda made his way indoors only when darkness fell.
Oliver was drowning. Dawn tried her best to set the right example and follow the rules; it was the curse of the oldest sibling. I had not unraveled completely like Oliver, but I too was sinking.
In those days, a telephone call to the US was too expensive. Email and the internet didn't exist. The only way to contact my parents was to put pen to paper.  their new lands, to be there, to belong, and to stay. We hear of Guyanese women who took on jobs and identities that required them to put themselves aside to be in service to others-other people's families, other people's homes, other people's empires. And, other people's dreams. In these essays, we witness how, through migration, Guyanese women are made, unmade, and remade again.
The space between departure and arrival is a terribly fragile one. As Grace Nichols pinpoints her first flight-her precise moment of leaving Guyana-she unravels how that singular moment of departure changed the course of her life forever. Her essay, 'So I Pick Up Me New-World-Self,' punctuated with poems ignited by her early years after her arrival in England, details the days when she embarked on the work of inventing the woman and writer she hoped to become. Within both her poems and her reflections, is a similar refrain for women who migrate: our acts of leaving are rarely, if ever, about desire. Instead, they are acts of necessity. Nichols likens her departure to a kind of rupturing, a severing. And then she is confronted with the shock of arrival and the stain of unbelonging thrust on her. As a Guyanese-born woman who has now lived in the United Kingdom longer than she has lived in her homeland, Nichols charts how we leave our old-world self to fashion, in her words, our 'new-world self.' Guyana as well as left her with questions. In her art essay, she generously mines those questions and offers us the stories, memories, and language of her grandmother, Transitions 121 mother, sister, aunts, and cousins whose words simultaneously trace a rupture and chart a chronology: What did it take to leave a beloved Guyana and build a life in an uncertain Canada? As Brewster documents that process, what is revealed is that it takes generations, it takes a whole family, it takes the driving force of women to get to a place of not merely surviving and adapting, but thriving.
The essays in Transitions implore us to ponder: How do we hold steadfast to our dreams, when in order to survive we must diminish parts of the self? As Nichols, Mattai, Brewster, and Neptune continue to center Guyanese women in their poetic and visual morning. Learning to dress in layers, in what the English call 'sensible clothes,' was a skill I'd take a while to acquire.
We were looking forward to being with John's dad who had migrated from Guyana and had been settled in England for a number of years. We came with the hope of becoming professional writers. John and I had met as young journalists working for one of Guyana's national newspapers, The Chronicle. John had a slim volume of selfpublished poems before we left Guyana, and I'd already written about half of my first and only novel, Whole of a Morning Sky. Apart from a government-owned press, there were no publishing houses in Guyana.
Coming to England was a big adventure-one that I hadn't even thought through.

How do you deal with living in another landscape when the older native one is so imprinted in your mind?
Going to see friends and relatives off at the airport was a regular feature of life in Guyana.

When I was growing up in Georgetown, I often witnessed people leaving to 'better themselves' in
North America and England. The 'Old Cane-Cutter at Airport' poem was inspired by an actual event-an elderly Indian man seeing his grandson off at the airport and witnessing the pain of parting, which we've come to accept as a natural part of our Caribbean experience but one that has a profound effect both on those leaving and the ones left behind.

Old Cane-Cutter at Airport
Boy going to join his mother in Canada, study bad, turn lawyer.

Advice on Crossing a Street in Delhi
First take a few moments to observe the traffic's wayward symmetry.  In Indentured II, I reconsider the power of colonialists and re-examine historical consequences. The chair-with its European design, aristocratic reference, and idyllic pastoral scenes in the fabric-is rendered useless. Its function is removed, and the historical power relations are subverted and thrown off-kilter. The thread that captures it references the domestic practices of my grandmothers, aunts, and mother.  With her legs crossed and a perfect posture, she moved autonomously, crocheting copious plains of complexed patterns with hook and yarn. After finishing one piece, she would quickly begin another. A huge yawn would bellow out from her after long stretches of time, followed by subtle twists and shifts until she found her next position.
My mother reminds me of the female genus Argiope: a precocious spider who constructs intricate stabilimentum (silk geometric structures) within the webbing of her orb. Although one might argue the functionality of the Argiope's labyrinth of webs, it is a rather conspicuous beauty to lay eyes on. Woven into its ornate structure lies a manifold of stories, mystery, and wonder; and like the genus Argiope, my mother's crocheted masterpieces beguiled me.
The art of crocheting is a popular recreational activity amongst Guyanese women.
The act serves as a prophetic mode of maintaining home and family. On the eve of new life, the women crocheted blankets for the burgeoning mother; pillows and table runners for wives to be; and hats, scarves, and socks for the winter. For most, crocheting is a way of life; an intergenerational activity woven into a myriad of traditions. My great grandmother taught the art of crocheting to her daughters; and my grandmother taught it to my mother. Although I am an avid fan of the process, it is a talent I did not inherit.
In unspoken dialogues between my mother and myself, Saturday afternoons spent crocheting illuminated the transformative nature of identity. What does the economics of homemaking mean to a first generation American?  The result of the project was Memories from Yonder, an installation incorporating distorted photography and video, where I digitally weave together the visual narratives of Ebora Calder, a Guyanese immigrant and elder, my mother, and myself, a firstgeneration Guyanese-American artist. Calder's recollections set off a memory tape of childhood experiences, which explored the socio-politics of 'self' and identity. In her, I saw my mother and generations prior.
Calder (b. 1925, Georgetown, Guyana) migrated to America, in the late 1950s, in pursuit of the American dream. She worked in homecare before retiring in the Brooklyn Gardens Senior Center. To Calder, America was a 'strange' unruly place, which held neither peace, nor order. Her fondest memory in America was crocheting by the window while watching the snow fall. Like my mother, Calder crocheted multiple hats, scarves, and sweaters for children she provided care for.
In Memories from Yonder, Calder is depicted crocheting a red bundle of yarn.
The gesture serves as a symbolic weaving of the two cultural spheres in an effort to     This was the 1960s in the midst of the great influx of immigrants into the country.
Guyana was not doing well economically, so my family took advantage of this opportunity to leave, despite how much they loved their country and their memories of how beautiful and thriving it once was. Over a period of time they organized themselves and headed north, hoping for a better quality of life for themselves and for anyone else who they imagined may come after.
My mother had always wanted to be a journalist. She has shared this with me and my sister many times. My Aunt Elo acted in the Theatre Guild in Guyana along with other members of the family. In my opinion, my father had the potential of being a really great draftsman. His desk-sized pad of graph paper was always covered with sketches of basement and bar designs and the occasional random drawing.
Sacrifices may have been made in order for these folks to establish themselves here-making choices that diverge away from their own true interests.   Mom makes the country sound like a place of great wonders of the world:

Market the best vegetables! Our wooden cathedral is the most beautiful and it is the tallest wooden cathedral in the world! Our
Botanical Gardens was the most lush! The interior is the Amazon Jungle, you know! Don't walk in alone, not even one foot. You will be lost forever! It is dense and home to wild and dangerous animals! The Essequibo and Demerara-these rivers are expansive. They flow forever and the water is a unique shade of brown, stained from the leaves of the surrounding trees.
Talking over each other, often loud, standing up with arms outstretched, motioning to demonstrate an experience, performing a scene that occurred over forty years ago! Each trying, for the umpteenth time, to convince the other that their version of the memory is correct. Each trying to convince us that they are correct. However, I recognized that they were not only attempting to one up each other; they were teaching us about back home.
They want us to experience what they experienced by flying us there, on the backs of their words. I know they believe that we've missed out on something unique and rich. Possibly as rich as the brown color of the Essequibo; as rich as the complexity of the forest full of exotic animals, insects, and vegetation. * I leaf through old photographs delicately. I am always careful not to fray the edges, crease and fold the corners, or fingerprint the surface. The ones in our family are securely arranged and gathered in photo albums, envelopes, and boxes and stashed away safely waiting for us to find them when moments of nostalgia arise.
Sharing these books with new visitors, friends, and family is always exciting-and, at times, embarrassing-as we flip through the pages, attempting to identify places and people at different stages of their life. The experience feels like tracing the past.
On every turn of a page the spine whines and creeks, revealing its age.
As I continue to scrutinize each picture, my fondness grows for these little pieces of paper memories. They are precious. When I look at the adults depicted, younger than I am now, I stare at their faces, expressions, and stances. I am so curious about what they carried with them, and what they left behind.
Over the years I've selectively lifted old photographs from various family albums.
In the pictures, young people are presented in the trendy styles of their day, wearing yellow ochre turtlenecks, baby blue bell bottoms and big afros, looking slim and fresh from the Caribbean. The pictures are, for the most part, happy-full of joy and contentment. I can feel the excitement of a new adventure and a feeling of 'bring it on!' These pictures, taken not long after their arrival in Toronto from Guyana, convey an air of preparation with a 'what is next?' wonderment flowing through each scene.
Each picture is followed by an ellipsis.
And this is what inspires me. The pictures depict people who are not familiar with this new world that they've entered. With courage and intentionality, determined to move forward, they brought their full selves-what they left behind, who they are presently, and all the while looking forward to what is to come. * . . . we come full of ourselves-who we are and will become. Within the first few years of arriving in Toronto, over forty years ago, my mother and her friends started an organization that is now called The Seniors Guyanese Friendship Association. Wanting to facilitate a feeling of comfort within their parents, they created spaces and situations of active engagement for these senior Guyanese.
New to the country and living in neighborhoods across Toronto, some did not even know that their good friends from back home were living in the same city! They reunited through weekly gatherings, brunches, dinners, dances, and excursions.
Over the years the seniors have traveled abroad and throughout Ontario, attending different events-plays at Stratford Festival, wine tasting in Niagara-on-the Lake and Prince Edward County. They experience the landscapes of places they would probably not have otherwise seen. They schedule meetings with city councilors to learn how to access services, police officers for safety tips, and health professionals for direction on good nutrition and exercise. Once a month they go bowling. And at the beginning of every Saturday meetup, they recite a prayer, then sing a song that wishes their community well. They also camp. Tug of War is the last game played before leaving the campgrounds after days of camaraderie. They pull and tug, using all of their strength, carefully, concluding their time together with this grand gesture. * T he first Caribbean Festival in Toronto of 1967, that many still call Caribana (as it was previously known before its name changed due to corporate sponsorship), was also a gesture of generosity-a gift from the Caribbean community to Canada on its one hundredth birthday. I see this gift as an action that permanently transferred My mom hustled us together and dressed us in comfortable, cool clothing; she made sure the laces of our running shoes were tied tight and our bellies full before heading out. It was the first weekend of August and like every year we were on our way downtown to celebrate in the streets for Caribana. For that entire Saturday afternoon on University Avenue people filled the width of the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.
Loud calypso and soca erupted from gargantuan speakers of sound systems heavy on top of glitter-laden truck platforms elevated up high. Many of these trucks carried live bands backed up by dancers, followed by a troop of revelers. From above I'm sure we looked like a colony of a zillion ants bouncing up and down, all heading in the same direction.
The colors were intensely vibrant, the feathers from costumes wildly swayed back and forth so high they swept the bellies of clouds above. People wore masks twisted and contorted into exaggerated expressions, and large-scale wire sculptures jookjooked upwards in rhythm to the sounds of the steel pan. We all moved together, we all moved south. The major streets had their own side movements-up . . . down . . . up . . . and down-as people entered and exited the College, Dundas, Osgoode, and St.
Andrew subway stations. If they were not exiting or entering, they were simply looking for a roti or a dish of cook-up on the sides and corners of the streets-food necessary to keep up one's energy for the jump-up that was the parade. I don't know anyone who prints photographs anymore. My mom tried to hold onto the practice. It took her a while to move on from her point-and-shoot film camera.
'It takes really good pictures,' she would insist again and again whenever we went on a trip. She still uses it at times although she has been getting used to the camera on her phone, convinced that it also takes really good pictures.
Markings from subtle creases, tears, folds, and bent corners are a result of their journey from hand to hand, box to box, house to house, and from page to page as bookmarks. I think that these qualities assist with a deeper reading of the content.
The pictures become ghostly, depicting the essence of the people in the photograph, not only their form. The physical markings of these pictures have me reading beyond the surface. Rather than simply enjoying the recognition of who is in the picture and admiring the scene, I wonder about their past, present, and future. It is as though I'm reading a story within the frame.  In the background is the work Town Girls a Top the Hill, based on the photograph above (Fig. 11.7). In the  Heirloom (Fig. 11.8) is a jar that contains the ingredients that are processing together, a form of transfer as well, to make Black Cake. Rum, wine, cherries, fruit, and currents soak for months; ingredients that have a complex history in and of themselves are still used to bring Caribbean communities together. This jar is my sister's jar (Fig. 11.9) and she is the baker of this cake. The cultural tradition has transferred down to her. I personally am unaware of anyone of my generation who makes Black Cake.
This makes the jar very special. Special in terms of its content and the importance that it brings to bonding communities and within the context of a contemporary exhibition it represents something that possibly only those who are acquainted with it would recognize. I see the jar as a symbol of presence. * N o sitter needed. We would jump into the backseat of the Malibu and ride with our parents to their basement parties. Intentional or not, these nights taught us about community and the importance of sticking together. Everyone who attended was a member of our extended family.
We grew up with aunts, uncles, and cousins who are not found in our blood line. Some cousins were called aunts and uncles because they were much older. Uncle Maxey, for example, is a cousin, not an Uncle. But I couldn't imagine calling him 'Maxey.' And 'Cousin Maxey' just seems odd, and lacks the respect that Uncle suggests.
Aunt Sharon likes to collect family. She introduces us to random people at random events with an air of absolute surprise at the discovery of their presence. Her famous method of introduction is presenting us as the child of someone 'This is Carmen's daughter!' then, turning to me, 'Mandy, this is So and So. She is the sister of So and So, your second cousin, daughter of our Uncle So and So.' There are so many of these relatives introduced to us that I can't keep track of who is who. I seldom pay attention during the introduction or I duck and escape when I see one about to happen. Aunt Sharon is excited by the vastness of our family, spread out across cities, provinces, and countries. * W e stood along the busy shoreline. After some negotiating, making deals for how much and for how many, we climbed into a small blue and white speedboat.
We were about to travel along the Essequibo River. I was disobeying my mother. 'Don't go into that speed boat,' she said waving her finger at me as I headed to Pearson Airport for Georgetown, Guyana with Aunt Joy.
My aunt was taking the trip to reunite with a friend and with home. Like most of her siblings, she hadn't been back for many years and invited me to join her.
After a trip to the Essequibo years ago, my mom returned with stories of feeling unsteady and unsafe in the boat. I understood as we were all tilted back in the tiny vessel. Mom probably felt that at any point, at any time, there may be a bump or a sharp unexpected turn that would cause her to topple over into the river. She did not want to consider the possibility of me falling in either.
The boat pulsated up and down as it sped along. The wind blew past and through us. We hung tight as the rapids grew stronger. The river is immense. At times, it was hard to take in, while teetering and tottering and struggling to steady myself. It was so loud that we were yelling at each other in order to be heard over the roar of the engine and the crash of the waves. Both at the same pitch.
I peered up and allowed my eyes to follow the flock of birds swirling together, forming an elegant 'S' again and again.
Eventually, we calmed as the river calmed, and, finally, sat in silence to experience the beauty and quiet of the Essequibo.
The color of the water has been described as café au lait. The water is stained by the tannins from the leaves that fall from the surrounding trees, the vegetation, rocks and other naturally occurring elements-sediment that travels from shore to the depths of the river. So much happens below the surface.
As we drifted in silence, our guide pointed towards a line in the river. He explained that the line divided two directions of flow. Each flow had a slightly different shade of brown. We traveled along one direction of flow, then crossed over to the other.
As we moved from one line to the other, the boat slightly shifted and eventually flowed in the same direction as the water beneath us. Tiny laps of waves hit our sides 1. Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming and Politics (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1998), p. 138. then quieted as we fell in line. Like the piranhas swimming alongside, waiting to nibble on my fingertips, and the birds flying in tandem above, we all moved from one place to the next place together.
Similar to a generation of people from the Caribbean who picked up and moved on to experience another life, an adventure that may have at times felt like a rush through rough waters. PART IV

RETURNS, REUNIONS, AND RITUALS
The joy of coming back to a country I called home was always punctuated by explaining why I deserved to call it home in the first place. They would spend over eight decades toiling on sugar plantations and rice fields. hat gets left behind when we migrate? We lose not only the spaces our bodies once held; we lose also the words to name those spaces. Words like verandah.
We make these words a language of their own, local and intimate, used when family is around because they will understand. If we write, we reclaim the lost words and put them on the page like a tally of belongings or to dos.
But memory is a rabbit hole, and once a picture appears in our mind's eye, once a word resounds in our ears, we begin to conceive again the time, the place, the feeling, the scene. We use the words we can remember to reinvent that moment. We marry imagination with nostalgia. But we also ask questions to those who were there. What do you remember? We write it down. We record them. We balance corroboration, illumination, exaggeration.
We arrange the View-Master in our minds and we rehearse the script in our heads.
We search the home videos for clues. We create again a world which we believe we knew, hoping it passes the inspection of pointed fingers and wagging tongues. Hoping its truth is one we can all live with. We wonder, what will they say of this world on the page?
We ask, who will care for these relics, the lost words, and the forgotten things they describe?
We look inwards. What can we do? Concrete Legacies: My Grandfather    . . . I find her amusing every morning I take her to the verandah and she keeps enjoying herself with the different scenes, from cart to car to bus, to man to dog and every imaginable thing . . .

-Grandfather Wilkinson to my aunt, 10 June 1972
For a later concrete home he built, Wilkinson created a verandah with a metal railing.
He used perforated walls on the ground floor to help circulate breeze through the spaces of the home. Were these differences seen as improvements upon the design of the first home he'd built, or were these specifications implemented per his clients' request? I don't know. But he did write a letter to my mother about how the government was building a new road and this house was in a path they sought to claim in 1972.
In the same letter that my grandfather recounts my escapades on the verandah, he also tells his daughter, my aunt, about his tribulations in getting an appraisal done for the land on which the family home sits. It's a tale of government run-arounds with the intent to extract money above and beyond what is entitled-not an unusual scenario.
After taking up his issues with a higher-ranking official, Wilkinson reveals he was able to get a fair estimation on the amount of taxes to be paid for the land.
Sunday, I am hoping to start putting on some paint on the outside of the house at least trying to brighten for the 10 th Independence anniversary . . .
-Grandfather Wilkinson to my mother, 10 April 1976 In his many letters to my mother and aunt, my grandfather would cover a range of subjects, from his work as a member of the Central Housing and Planning Authority, to who next was trying to get papers to go abroad, to politics and current events in

Filigree Jewelry
Necklace, two pairs of 'chandelier-style' earrings, pin, and ring. Worn by Miriam Angelina Wilkinson.
Designed and made by a local Indian jeweler, ca. 1960.

Gold 'Slave Band'
The 'Slave Band' was a popular style of jewelry in the 1950s and 1960s. Mother recalls that Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal of 'Cleopatra' spawned a craze for jewelry where people wanted the type of arm and wrist bands worn in the film.

First Proof is Gold
Silver is for when you are older and taking the IRT by yourself.
First proof is gold circling baby wrists-clinging to the fat and bone as tight as baby's fingers closing to a fist.
Gold like my grandmother's tooth.
Dull like the grays of her hair.    This was a time when every institution that carried authority attempted to convince immigrant parents that a sense of cultural identity was an obstacle, rather than a lifeline and a necessity. 'You were born here,' my parents would say. 'You're British.' I remember these years as being darkly lit, gloomy. The prevailing attitude of this time in Britain was a bleak one where racism was an everyday experience. My dad was brown and my mother, although white, was not much better. As far as our little island was concerned, they were both 'fucking foreigners.'

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen
For much of my early life, I struggled to understand my father's heritage. As a child, I knew the part of me that was most hated in the place I called home came from him. This never changed the love I had for him. To the contrary, I clung to my connection to his identity as a constant solid thing because I believed I had nothing else. I wasn't Spanish-speaking, I had no Spanish family, and nothing connected me to England beyond the accident of having been born there. In these circumstances, all I could be was my father's daughter. The only thing that people saw when they looked at me was a face that didn't fit; if I wanted a role model in un-belonging, I need not look any further than my father-the progenitor of my incongruity. Yet everything I knew about his 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.
One night, some neighborhood children threw dog shit against the window of the room that I was sleeping in; this is one of my earliest memories. They had wrapped it in pink toilet paper and some of this paper stuck to the window. There was no joy in the fact that they were forced, either by the police or their parents, to wipe it off the following day. They lived on that street and for the foreseeable future, we would have to see these little fuckers on a weekly basis.
What wears you down more in the end: the big incidents like these? Or, the I understood I wouldn't be permitted to belong to the UK in a myriad of ways.
Maybe I was even conscious of it before I could speak. My mum once told me people would shout abuse at her in the streets as she pushed the pram. I wonder how this must have felt for her and for my brothers. They would have been old enough to understand that she was a target because we bore no resemblance to her. Her skin was white, her hair straight and fair and her eyes blue. We, on the other hand, had varying shades of brown skin, brown eyes, and dark brown wavy hair. In my primary and junior school there were no children of South Asian heritage; in my secondary school there were two. If there were South Asian families living in our area, I didn't know any of them.
We certainly didn't know any other Guyanese families. There were a lot of Spanish immigrants who made their home in West London in the 1970s and 1980s, but we were so obviously beyond their understanding that there could be no way forward there. Like so many children who have no other way to put themselves in context, I found solace and succor in the local library. I never read a book about anyone like me until I left home to go to university, but in weekly, and sometimes daily, visits I managed to leave a world in which I was largely unaccepted and alone.
I remember the past in snapshots. My dad, perennially exhausted from the oppressive hours he worked as a waiter, was almost always unsmiling. I don't imagine that he intended to be mysterious or unavailable, but he was. I spent a lot of time watching him as a child. I would watch him shave. I would watch him cook. For a man battling the challenge of steering four dual-heritage sons through an institutionally racist country at a time when unemployment rates were high, a daughter who read books must have been a thing of great relief.
My parents' attempts to keep my brothers out of trouble were hampered by their own explosive relationship. Any hopes they had for us were repeatedly dimmed as the two eldest served prison sentences and the two youngest were lost to drugs and alcohol. The next few years were ones where the library became more important to me as I abandoned homework to hide in paper, spines, plastic covers, and stories where I no longer had to inhabit the grey, unrelenting concrete misery of West London. I was fierce on the outside, perennially dressed in black clothes and Doc Martens boots. One October morning, age fifteen, I walked out of school and never went back. Too young to work straight away, I was determined not to return to school. From that autumn, to my birthday in the spring of the next year, I would walk at least twice a week to my local library and then on to Kensington Central Library, which was bigger and had more books. I walked deliberately, absorbed in my Walkman; hopeless, rootless, untethered. Challenging years followed. I had no study skills, I had been intellectually absent from my short secondary school career and this was never more apparent than when I attempted to write an essay or complete an assignment. I failed as many exams as I passed. In the background I could feel my dad willing me to succeed. Hoping against all present evidence that one of us might be saved. 'Don't be me.' He had silently screamed at us our entire lives. 'Don't drown in this immigrant shit. Be more, be better.' He had told me once that he felt his greatest tragedy was never really knowing what he wanted to do with his life. Any aspirations to explore those desires when he left British Guiana for the UK had been abandoned to take on the harsh reality of supporting a family of five children. Was it easier for him to let his future go because it had never really been fully defined?
And then came the impossible thing, the moment when the years of reading paid off. A succession of failures was obliterated by the reception of an 'A' grade in the Advanced Level English Language and Literature-the exam that got me into university. This was easily the most important moment of my life. More so than any moment that followed it, including completing a doctorate. It was the first tangible proof that a future was possible. I could go to university. That much was clear from this qualification. The blurry outline of an elite institution where I could be blanketed by knowledge was nudged closer and I dared to think I might have a path distinct from that of my brothers; one that did not involve prison, regret, disappointment, and drugs.
As a mature student with a patchy educational history I was summoned for an interview by all six of the universities I applied to. Three of these were outside London and required long train journeys for what amounted to no more than a thirty-minute interview. I remember each of these interviews in great detail; for the first time I was able to talk about my favorite books to people who seemed to love them as much as I did. In train rides to York, Leeds, and Manchester, I felt myself moving forward, away from the past and its shame: the dogshit at the window, the racial abuse, the endless sense that nothing would go right for me. Positive responses trickled back. else. Yet I quickly came around. For a girl who had barely left London, seeing the interior of Guyana for the first time from a tiny airplane was indescribable. Although I never managed to find the documents I sought in the archives, I was happy to make unexpected connections with the people I met in the city, my father's old school friend, distant cousins, librarians, and archivists.
The morning we arrived we went to see a first cousin of my father's, Aunty Meena. I cannot forget her changing expression as an uncle patiently reminded her of a journey she had made with her mother in 1961 to wave off a boat that was carrying a young 186 Liminal Spaces man, her relative, to England. Slowly I saw it dawn on her as she repeated, each time more confidently: 'Me remember you, me remember you.' I cherished our visits with this aunt who appeared to love me for no other reason than that I was somehow her kin.
Our time in Guyana was over so quickly. And yet, forty-five years had passed since my father left. I think that he must have believed he would die without seeing the country again. A taxi took us to the airport. I didn't realize that from the back of the car my husband had taken a video of us leaving. In one scene, my head is poking out of the window in the back seat as I strain to get a last look. My father, sitting in the front seat, is smiling. I imagine that this was the smile of a man of little means, who after revisiting the land of his birth realized that he did after all have something of value to give to one of his children.

My grandmother was the daughter of a man of Indian descent who converted from
Hinduism to Islam to marry his second wife. My grandmother's mother (the third wife) was a Christian woman of Chinese, African, and European heritage. My grandmother wanted to be a schoolteacher, but became a farmer's wife instead, fulfilling a promise she made to her father before he died to marry my grandfather. Once married, she focused on family and community, keeping a collection of books that local children were welcome to read and borrow. Because of the humidity, the photographs had fused with the album pages, making them difficult or impossible to remove without damage. I created digital images of these photographs, which were then printed with an inkjet printer and manipulated with water and paint to mimic how the humid air of the farmhouse will further degrade the original photographs over time. These images, and the sometimes abstracted nature of the text itself, are expressions of the histories that have been lost to time and memory, the realities we gloss over, the names we forget, and the feelings that remain as our heritage is passed from one body to the next.

Motion Sickness
There is a particular ritual: face forward, keep eyes on the horizon, breathe deeply-but it can fail. I am on the train, the bus, a car, a plane, suddenly overcome, lightheaded, nauseous.
I wonder if my body's reaction to motion is the legacy of my foremothers. The trace of their fear (encoded in flesh) as they moved across the globe like cargo.
What would happen if our bodies retraced their paths? Could we become divining rods for truth?
They made vagrancy a crime to keep slaves on the estates. To keep them tied to the land; the land was servitude. Even when they were 'freed' they were still tied to the land and through the land to their masters. Is this why we are nomads? Why we never had a home?

My Body Is a Reluctant Nomad
My body rebelled in ways nobody could quantify. All the doctors could agree on was that it was 'safer' for me not to go. Nanie kept her opinion to herself and embroidered on the deck beside me silently as I pondered the relationality of the body, how my health was suddenly dependent on something as abstract as national boundaries.
Aunts called, concerned for my safety in a land they once called home. Nanie bought canned sardines, coffee, and toothpaste for me to bring to Uncle on the farm. I bought the latest issue of The New Yorker to read on the plane.
A year later I watched my mother take her oath of citizenship. A video of President Barack Obama welcomed her. A friend remarked: 'this place is like a DMV for people.' How could I believe that for the first twenty-seven years of my life my mother was fundamentally different from me, a difference that accorded me more rights, more freedoms, more agency? How could I believe that by standing in that room under fluorescent lights and raising her hand she was casting off one identity for another?
Our bodies cannot lie-this I choose to believe.

A Savage Womb
Each wave, the sickness spreads. Fear eats at her body with each mile she is not herself.
There is a new kinship-awake, the scent of home (damp earth, smoky blankets, splintered stone) fades from her skin, replaced by blood, sweat, and bile.

Licked clean.
Only after would come the sugar cane fields watered with sweat and the sweet intoxication as, distilled, it burned warm in her chest.
All she wants to do is be a cannibal; spit up a new history; never die. She wants to be told.

Momme Says:
Yeah, I don't know why we never asked my grandmother these things. I once read this book called L'Enfant Noir about this guy, and he said, 'when we were young all the questions we should have asked we never asked' and I guess part of our problem was that we never were really that interested in our past, because we always felt that there were things that we really didn't want to know, and it was only the future that mattered, so we never really asked about these things . . .

A Promise is a Promise
I think there is a kind of truce between Nanie and me. I'm not sure when it happened.
The clicking of her knitting needles and her disapproval of me permeate my childhood memories. Always too loud, too opinionated, too stubborn. As if these things were not my inheritance. As if they were not the things that kept our foremothers alive.
I asked Nanie to tell me her life story once. When she got to the subject of my grandfather, she said that she had other offers of marriage. My grandfather had said 'a promise is a promise' and she had agreed.
A promise. A deep black pool that contains the future and the past. All the things unsaid, to be lost in the faulty memories of those who survive.

A Brief History of the Body
Nanie: My Aaji, Ramsuki. She say she was just a little girl, gone to get some water from a well. Someone snatch she, marauders or the like. Sell she to the British.
(On the boat, the women knew she needed to be protected. There was a man. In some stories he is a paying passenger, a free man, a wandering sadhu. He agrees to marry her. The captain says some words, then she goes back to stay with the women for the rest of the trip.) Nanie: When they land, she sent to plantation, name Success. They give she a loji, a place to live, like. He stay with she, but he don't work, don't take care of the children.
She working the cane fields all day, he sleepin. Nanie: Eventually he abandons Ramsuki, goes to Suriname to be a holy man.
Momme: She kicked him out for being lazy.

History with a capital H
I flip carefully through the book, scanning the endless rows and columns of names.
Each entry is an anchor slowly fading from the page. I already know I won't find what I'm looking for, the stern lady at the desk tells me that the particular volume of birth records for the place and time I'm looking for is 'missing.' When I ask what that means she just rolls her eyes. I lie and say I need this year to look for a separate entry. I come to a series of pages where the names cascade away into a creamy white void.
The book was exposed to water at some point, and over a hundred entries must be missing. Bloodlines lost forever to a spilled cup or a heavy rain. This is the legacy of our ancestors' trauma, all the little things we will never know.

Landing
From above, the water looks like a giant knife cut a dark winding gash through the land. On the ground, our boat rumbles to a start-everything seems soft, overripe. The creek water is almost black, so rich with particles that your hand disappears completely once the water reaches your elbow. It's hard to speak above the air rushing past and the roar of the motor. Occasionally Uncle points and yells something, but mostly I just watch the banks glide by. It seems like everything is melting into everything else, the boundary between water and land unclear. When I was younger, I was afraid to swim in the water, stories of close calls with alligators and piranhas turning every ripple into a threat. Auntie is not helping, telling the story of the time she hitched a ride home from school with a neighbor who was drunk, and how she, her younger sister, and a friend, had all nearly drowned when the boat crashed. The friend had panicked and pulled her sister under. Auntie said she just reached blindly down into the black and pulled her sister up by the bow in her hair.
We're on the back verandah of the house, the rice fields stretching out endlessly before us, the canal my grandfather dug off the creek to our right. My mother has her own story of almost drowning, my great-grandmother pulling her unconscious from the water. I think of this silent, black void flowing behind us, and the countless stories of being pulled from it by hands that knew no fear.
As a last resort, a slave could take his life, knowing that this was his final revenge; to deny the master the thing he prized most, his property. 1

Kal Pani
I They called the sea Kal Pani-black water. They said if you crossed it, you lost casteyou became forever severed from your life, from the land. I often wonder what they must have thought, emerging from the tomb-like ships, to a land with such unctuous rivers-rivers that on certain still evenings take on the quality of black glass-a river of ink-kal pani.

II
Blood is mostly water, a means of transporting oxygen and nutrients around the body.
It's strange that for some people it is transferable, shareable, and for others it is more particular. A mechanism and a fingerprint-lal pani.

III
Uncle tells me the river changes course with the tides. The land breathes like a lung.

IV
I think of Nanie's brain, the flood of lal pani from a ruptured aneurysm. I think of the mysteries locked in our blood, the stories of our bodies, permeating her brain. Maybe for a moment before she lost consciousness she got some insight, some answer that can only be found in water.

V
They flood the rice fields in the planting season. I wonder how we came up with the concept of parallel lines, of corners. Why do we so naturally lean towards this type of efficiency? Nature is efficient in a completely different kind of way. A way that seems infinite and non-linear. Squares lead to fields, lead to blocks, lead to buildings, lead to temples lead to hierarchy and history and war. Curved lines don't really lead anywhere, except that they are blood cells and bubbles and planets.

VII
Walcott said the sea is history. My blood is sea blood. My blood is fractured, thrown outside of time. How to live from one moment to the next is a question I can't answer, just as I don't know if you can step in the same river twice.

VIII
Nanie asked that we build her tomb high above the ground so the flooding river would not touch her body. In India they cremate remains and submerge the ashes in the Ganges. Embrace the void or embrace the land, in-between is life.

An Atlas in the Sand
We ride out in the boat, picking up some friends along the way. We pass beneath rusting bridges that you can almost reach up and touch. Sometimes, people on the banks wave to us. The open farmland gives way to trees that lean over us from the banks. All of a sudden, the motor slows and the banks throw themselves wide to embrace the Atlantic.
(Sea of Atlas, who stands between the primordial embrace of earth and sky.) At low tide the beach is wide, the land creeping from the ocean at the lowest possible angle. The men head off into the trees to pull crabs with their bare hands from the tidal pools that form around the roots. I head out across the alien landscape, passing twisted roots knotted into a ball and bleached by the sun. As the tide recedes, it leaves ripples across the sand. I stand at the water line and watch the water lap slowly towards my toes. I look over my shoulder and see Uncle and his friends up by the trees, drinking rum and eating food. They remind me of an old picture I found in the farmhouse, the figures dark and haloed by the sun. I look back out across the water. The air is still and smells fresh, not salty. I think of deep ocean currents swirling across the globe. I wonder how long it would take a drop of water to travel from India to Guyana. Is it faster, or slower than a ship with sails? I chant the Gayatri Mantra to the water, not sure where my words will come to rest.
The long-boned, stalwart Bhojpuri, with his staff in hand, is a familiar object striding over fields far from home.

Lal Pani
Uncle is something of a sentinel, trapped in a liminal space between the past and the future. As the eldest son, he had to leave school young to help with the farm. Nanie would say that when he drove the tractor in the field, he was so small it looked like the tractor was driving itself. Nanie had ten daughters but only two sons, and Uncle, bound to the farm, and through the farm bound to Guyana, tied up in an endless cycle of planting and reaping, was a stone caught in her throat.

Rice was grown as an offering to the gods.
It is the day after our boat trip. In the morning I work with clay collected from the trenches that line the rice fields, shaping it in my hands. I lay it out in the sun to dry, burnishing the surface with the back of a spoon. The neighbor says it reminds her of when they were children, that they would make small things with mud. After dinner I spend the evening in the sitting room, reading and writing in my journal.
Uncle emerges from the bedroom, his eyes red. He tells me Nanie is in the hospital.
They say it's a brain aneurysm. There's no internet out here, his cell phone is our only connection. I feel lost in the warm, still night. Part of me knows she is already gone, though her body continues to live for another day in the hospital as her children gather to say goodbye.

Keeping Wake
I never imagined death was such a complicated thing. Nanie's body must be prepared, dressed. My mother is the eldest child. She and Auntie wrap their mother in a white sari. Meanwhile, on the farm, I am the only family Uncle has. Every night the neighbors come to 'keep wake.' I sit upstairs listening to the rhythmic crack as dominoes are slammed against tables. The women play cards with children and we serve bread and coffee late into the night. I don't know the games, don't know the people, I feel more alien now than ever before. The mosquitos flock to me in the cool night air, so I stay inside, alone. During the day neighbors come to work, clearing brush, cleaning out the sheds, building out a shelter off the side of the house my grandfather built by hand. There are men out by his grave, building my grandmother's tomb from cinder blocks and cement.
I gather scraps of wood. I dig a pit and place my clay objects, wrapped in newspaper, along the bottom. I build a small fire on top. In the evening I pull the fired pieces from the ash.
. . . the Indians exchanged a society and a living community (though unequal and degrading to many, tiresome and tedious to most) for a lifeless system, in which human values always mattered less than the drive for production, for exploitation.
A few days later some of Uncle's friends take me back to the city. My family comes in waves, and soon we are all there. We have a funeral in the city, and then drive out to the farm. The dirt road is a recent addition. Before coffins had to be carried the last stretch by boat.

Embracing the Void
There is nothing left to inherit

All that is left
Is your wake Cutting through these dark waters Lapping against the shorelines of memory Before the coffin is closed, I slip one of my clay objects, a palm-sized Ganesh, next to Nanie's body.

Sakha tumhi ho
The old women begin to sing, their voices outside of time.
Our understanding of the words is imprecise

But my mother's voice cracks
And I hold her, sobbing, in my arms. immigrants to arrive in Britain, they became known as the 'Windrush Generation,' after the SS Empire Windrush, the inaugural ship that brought the first Caribbean immigrants to Tilbury Dock in Essex, England in 1948.
They left because it was necessary that they imagine a world beyond British Guiana.
At that time, there was no university in the colony. For example, the University of Guyana (UG), the first of its kind in the country, was established only in 1963 and initially offered limited evening classes under British governance. A desire for professional and economic advancement inevitably meant migration. The early 1950s would become a period rife with intense political unrest as the movement towards gaining independence became more forceful. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Guyanese immigrants primarily chose Britain as their destination-a choice that made sense to many as the colony was still under British rule. However, 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, citing it as an unregulated approach to immigration.
In the mid-1950s, another movement of migration to North America unfolded as Guyanese became part of a larger trend of Caribbean people, particularly those from the British colonies, shifting to the United States and Canada and specifically to urban cities like New York and Toronto, respectively. In April of 1953, the colony had undergone its first democratic election and yet it would take another thirteen