After many years pursuing a postgraduate degree, I finally found an opportunity to spend an extended period in the Caribbean — for the first time in my life. Though my mother is from Trinidad and my father from Guyana, holidays were limited to family visits in the “deep south” of Trinidad or Berbice, Guyana. I can only imagine what it would be like for my parents, who left in the 1960s to settle in Canada, to return for an extended stay.
Over the school break I attended the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Jamaica, visited the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, and spent two and a half months in Guyana, immersed in conversations and research. As Derek Walcott noted in his Nobel acceptance speech, the Caribbean simultaneously transports one through time and continents, but of all Caribbean countries, I felt Guyana must be the one that gives time meaning.
One aspect of human geography is the movement of people to places. As a geography student, I am interested in concepts of time and space. I focus on Guyana in the mid-twentieth century; most of us think of the mid-1950s as a crucial time in Guyana’s anti-colonial struggle, as well as the beginning of a fateful ethno-racial divide in politics. However, decolonization was also a time when opportunities to negotiate national belongings were simultaneously opening up and closing off.
In 1955, the last ship of ex-indentured labourers from Guyana sailed, repatriating some 243 individuals back to India. A few years earlier, in 1952, there was an attempt, loosely associated with the Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox Church, to charter a ship from Guyana, ‘back to Africa’, and a similar attempt in Trinidad to sail to Liberia in 1955. Paradoxically, when Caribbean nations were coming together as a region, and looking towards independence, ships were chartered to sail to India, Sierra Leone, and Liberia — to ancestors, cultures, and heritages of the past? Or perhaps in response to a radically new moment? As African-American feminist writer, bell hooks said, decolonisation can call into question “the very meaning of home”.
Nor were India or Africa the only “motherlands”. To quote Jamaican-British scholar Stuart Hall, “…people like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries…I was coming home.” Trinidadian authors Samuel Selvon and Vidya Naipaul also moved to England in the 1950s. This is the beginning of the period when the Caribbean significantly expanded outward, re-mapping itself onto metropolitan cities like London, Toronto, New York.
This was not the only period of outward flow from the Caribbean. For over a century, return ships sailed regularly between the Caribbean and India (from 1843-1955, and overlapping with African “return” ships), as the right of return was an important legal obligation written into the contracts of indentured immigrants.
Yet, even with the availability of return ships and despite arriving as temporary labour, about 75% of indentured Indians opted to remain in the Caribbean. The first return ship (the H.M.S. Growler) to take formerly indentured Africans from British Guiana to Sierra Leone sailed in 1847, though according to Dwarka Nath, many planned only a temporary visit to family and friends and a subsequent return to British Guiana. Later “Back to Africa” activities, such as those through the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) were organized independent movements. Additionally, Garvey’s teachings had a significant impact on Rastafarians who believe that deliverance will take the form of return to Africa.
“Return” journeys when Guyana was on the verge of freedom from colonial powers may seem anachronistic; on the other hand they may also be understood as an effort to restore losses, or a search for wholeness. After all, any thought of returning “home” had to come from a knowledge that was not completely destroyed by colonialism. To cross borders north to transform yourself is one thing, but to re-cross oceans to liberate yourself is another. These broad efforts represent an alternative mobility to the one we know now (from South to North), and a remarkable effort to define one’s place in a rapidly changing world.
I began my journey in dialogue with members of the Guyanese-Canadian community closest to me, such as my father (Avin Mohabir), and mentors like Alissa Trotz, director of Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto, and Rampersaud Tiwari, a retired Guyanese civil servant. I went to Guyana, in hopes of being drawn into an expanding dialogue.
At the CBJ Airport, the Immigration Officer asked if I was Guyanese; I hesitated, as I am Canadian-born. Sensing my dilemma, he asked if my parents were Guyanese, and then said “welcome home.” I too had metaphorically returned!
After that warm welcome, I had not anticipated the complications of Guyanese identity. Soon enough, I realized I was clearly “from foreign.” For example, although my Ajie had a thick Berbician accent and spoke Creole to me, I could not respond in kind. At times I could not make myself understood without help. If language is the expression of a people, where am I placed?
I relied on religious organizations (such as the Cornelia Ida Vishnu Mandir) to help locate families of some individuals who returned to India in 1955. Sometimes I was greeted as Saraswati, at other times, I was a “deracinated cosmopolitan.”
I also found it disconcerting to witness the demarcated social spaces (though not to say the same does not occur in Canada). For example, it was pointed out to me that the National Cultural Centre usually draws an audience that is either primarily Indian or African. A writer I interviewed spoke in terms of “us” and “them.” Amerindians were rarely mentioned, or only as convenient, as an Amerindian Minister herself said. Divisions still have currency.
A family member, concerned about safety, advised me not to visit Buxton. However, I still visited accompanied by Rampersaud Tiwari and his friend Surendra Lall (Bunty), from neighbouring Annandale. Bunty drove us around Buxton village. Mr. Tiwari’s paternal grandparents, indentured labourers, had lived in Buxton some time after the October 1896 uprising of indentured workers at the neighbouring Non Pariel sugar estate. I witnessed the affectionate greetings Mr. Tiwari received from several residents, despite his move to Annandale following 1964, and his many years abroad. He pointed out where his family had lived and where Elder Eusi Kwayana’s family home was located. I met Kwayana’s sister-in-law, and saw the historic 1838-1938 Emancipation Monument that stands proudly outside the Village Market Building that, as Mr. Tiwari remarked, has not been in full use as it was in the years prior to 1964.
The highlight of the visit was mingling with Buxtonians on Buxton Middlewalk at a celebration commemorating the heritage of Tipperary Hall. Mr. Tiwari was invited to speak and reminisced on his experiences in Buxton where he was born and lived until May 1964 when his family relocated following racial disturbances. I felt the space for his words and its reception from the audience were signs of hope for re-uniting Guyana’s splintered memories.
Though my visit to Buxton was hopeful, the contradictory forces of being ‘familiar yet foreign’ followed me throughout the trip. For some, authentic Guyanese is a singular identity, reserved only for those within its territorial borders. Who is really Guyanese is also a question of legitimacy — how do I know of what I speak, why do I care, and what are my motivations beyond intellectual nimbleness? How can I write about decolonization from a metropolitan university? Education can serve a system rather than contribute, the Guyana Rastafari Council warned me.
As Rishee Thakur helped me to understand, our identities are place-based, but not place-bound. The challenge for those of us in the second-generation who wish to maintain a link, must be to establish a bridge between the two (Guyana and Canada; the past and the present); we do this without the comfort of an origin and, therefore, of belonging. But as Alissa Trotz reminds me, the tentative politics of uncertainty (as compared to the firm ground of a politics of arrogance) is a useful space to begin the dialogue.
