Dreaming of a Passion Fruit Jubilee in Guyana 2026

 

Passion Fruit

Walk in the market and see apples for GYD100 each and a young woman with a tub of passion fruit. I ask her how much and she doesn't turn around as she tells me 5 for GYD1000 .. she leaves me to pick out the five because I think passion fruit is good for me, and that a passion fruit a day has benefits like an apple a day though the way things are in Guyana.. it seems like is foreign things, things imported from outside are cheaper, and so economically better (even for rich people like me) than things from Guyana 

Bus driver says 'dis guvament is stupid' as the bus with people from different origins laughing and celebrating the wheelbarrow of coins which one friend take to pay his other friend costs a few weeks ago. 'New Wheelbarrow..'

Does the guvament care that locally grown passion fruit is more expensive than imported apples? Do people care anymore?

1616 to 1966 to 2026

1616 - the Dutch come and found Essequibo 

1966 - British Guiana turn Guyana , everything else remains the same or gets worse depending on who you ask

2026 - stink x dutty is part of the celebration for 60 years since British Guiana turn Guyana and everything else more or less remain the same or get worse depending on who you ask..

and carnival and jouvay (I wonder if Exxon will bring some cruide oil fuh de jubiliee jouvay.. does crude oil poison your skin ?"

Imports from Trinidad and Tobago ..  Trinidad and Tobago who don't seem to import nutting from we

A sugar worker tells me me that there are not enough people left to cut cane in Berbice so a descendant of an Indentured immigrant from India has worked a scheme to indentures some Jamaicans to help with the guvament's mission to restore the shugah industry.  

Man from India who wants to tell my future on Regent Street gets vex when I ask him what kind of work permit he have because 

Does the guvament with the wheelbarrow wheeling friends want future telling and palm reading skills from India for us?

Aren't the Guyanese future-tellers and dreamers and so on good enough? 

But Trinidadian, Chinese, Indian, Venezuelan, Cuban,  Nigerian, Haitian, Kenyan others who find this place a land of dreams and opportunity and better than where they are while I wondering about passion fruit being more expensive than apple.

Dreams

I am not a patriot. I want to dream though, that even if the idea of boundaries and nation and so are not my own and I just here by accident, that somehow those of us who are locked into these boundaries can value ourselves, can value each other and collaborate in ways to heal from the violence and trauma we continue to suffer from.

Or at least, to think about how to make passion fruit from Guyana more abundant and accessible than say the apples from outside the supposedly Independent Guyana.