Thinking coolie, black at the launch of We Mark your Memory in Guyana

Image of Nina Simone from Feeling Good video on youtube.

(Commonwealth Writers launched the book We Mark your Memory : Writings from the descendants of Indenture in Guyana at Moray House Trust on 7 May, 2019 )

Nina Simone and Tabla
Alana Warde strummed her guitar and started the beautiful words of Feeling Good. Amar Ramessar was on harmonium.  They started the musical interlude while waiting on the tabla player, Tarun Daodat.

I started singing along in my own way at the back of the room. I was feeling out of place as I didn't really want to come.
Invitations had arrived from different people so I thought I should come.

Tarun came in quietly , set up the table.  And just started playing some beats on the tabla.

Feeling Good sounded even more good .. 



And I didn't feel too bad to be there . Relieved that Indus Voices was going to be playing music at the Guyana launch of the book.

Music in the Caribbean on my mind , musician descendants of indenture.

Sharda Patesar wrote about her choice of Sufi music for the book launch in Trinidad, she wrote "In a time like ours where as much as we see technological progress, where lives are supposed to be easier, we also find ourselves in the middle of economic wars where tools like religion and ethnicity are often used to create divisions between "us" and "them." Unfortunately, the public finds itself wrapped up in this conflict – mental and physical – and arsenal takes the form of anything that can be used to create divisions, music being one of them.".

Black woman singing , coolie man drumming..

Indus Voices  opened the programme with their composition , a musical translation of Martin Carter's This Is A Dark Time My Love - Timir Hai Samay Mere Jaan.




Indus Voices playing at the launch in Guyana of a book with stories from descendants of indenture.

And the music of Indus Voices, playing in the highlights video of a launch of another book connecting an indentured labourer with descendants of indenture. Rajiv Mohabir's trans-creation of DamaraPhag Bahar.




Ganges, Nile,... Thames..
Anita Sethi read from her essay in the book, talking about sugar cane, Manchester in the UK where she grew up and seeing Manchester as a village on the Corentyne.  Mr Gee, performed a powerful poem about his roots in India via Guyana and Africa via Uganda. And about accepting these mixes as he has to contemplate the Thames in the UK. (or something like that).  Guyana diaspora stories and poems have these themes of longing and nostalgia and so.  They spoke about how indentureship is erased from the teaching of British history.

With the whole dual citizenship thing coming up about who can lead Guyana, I wondered what people who lived in Guyana would have written in the book? Would they have written about wanting to leave Guyana? And oil? And sugar?


Trinidad
I was jealous that the Trinidad launch of the book featured people who lived and worked in Trinidad.  Two of the Trinidadian authors came to Guyana. Kevin Jared Hosein read from his story, the Rebel. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein performed her poem "Dem call meh Chutney Love".  The Trini language and accents were beautiful.

And painful reminder that nobody with a Guyanese accent (if there is such a thing) was also reading.




Jumbie Stories 

This book is another in a series of books about Indo-Caribbean people in which it seems, that coolie people living in Guyana were absent as writers.

The book is part of the commemoration of  the 100th anniversary of the end of indentureship  of Indians.

I have been in places where Guyana is talked about, and written about and studied by people who have not ever been in Guyana.  For various reasons, people who live in Guyana are absent from those spaces.

Subraj Singh , winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature, asked towards the end of the year of indentureship  "Why are there so few Indo-Guyanese people who are writing in contemporary Guyana?"

I think of how Caribbean Beat the inflight magazine of Caribbean Airlines has so few Guyanese contributors, and articles about Guyana. I don't know if this not writing is a coolie problem alone , or black people, and Amerindian people and other people who live in Guyana are not writing .


Commonwealth Writers held a workshop the day after the book launch.  I was fortunate to be invited back to hear the participants read from their work. The workshop looked at fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  Most of the participants were young. And I was glad to see some people who could pass for Indo-Guyanese (though Carlene Gill-Kerr in her own poem 'I can't afford to be racial' challenged the appearances"

I was stuck on how Violence, domestic violence and rape were themes in the readings from the people who I think are Indo-Guyanese. But written and read beautifully. The women with Indian names enduring violence, and rape. Fiction. Do we have to write fiction about what is so real, ugly, told  by survivors now in different settings?

Can't fiction now be a Indo-Guyanese woman taking the man's belt from his hand and using it to tie him up and roll him through the village to his father's house?

Isn't there anything else happening in Indo-Guyanese life worth imagining about?  Like the tabla player coming in late and just adding beats to the song which has started singing?

Kevin Garbaran read from his story which was shortlisted for the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Children talking about and listening to jumbie stories. He didn't read to the end. I don't know if there will be a sad ending like what happened when some citizens of Bare Root murdered Radika Singh in 2007.. . It was nice to hear the words 'Chaacha, and Chaachi'.  His characters , the two children, have a "repertoire of jumbie stories' and I imagine that he might publish a book some day called Jumbie Stories.

I listened and felt some sense of hope that the jumbie stories here and other things could form the seed to make sure that Guyanese living in Guyana would always, fuh sure like the Oil money, be a  part of the launch and readings of things about Caribbean and Guyana.