Above are all us cousins. I’m in a white shirt with a colourful design, back row, looking right at the camera and ROCKING those bangs ;)

Fun fact, I’m half Guyanese, and spent a chunk of my childhood in Guyana, which is in the Amazon :) They think differently there. For example, the houses in our village were built on stilts, so that during the monsoon season the homes don’t flood. This means that in the off season, there is an “up house” and a “down house”, that is, the area under the house where chickens are kept, hammocks hung and so on. 

Along with the other things that we stored in our down house was a local Amazonian tribesman who had taken to drinking overmuch, and would sleep it off in our hammock. My mom did what made sense; she made him my nanny, in return for which he got to go on sleeping in the down house and share our meals. 

Now… I understand that the idea of taking an indigent person of no fixed address and making him responsible for your child in the jungle seems… unorthodox. Mom was onto something though, he never drank around me, and he became my guide for childhood wanderings in the rain forest. I called him Uncle Quack because I couldn’t understand him, but he made himself understood through gestures. What was good to eat, what was dangerous, where certain animals could be found. 

My favourite memory was whenever he took me to see Guyana’s famous “Black Water”.  The water is a deep golden colour, due to the tannins that seep into the water from the jungle vegetation that falls into the river as it travels north through the country. It’s magic. And in my memory, the water was sweet. Believe me, I’ve considered dyeing it, but I have yet to get it right.

Here’s something neat, when I was there, there was no electricity in the village (we’re talking 80’s). So to decorate the home, my aunt would fill empty coca cola bottles with water, and a little food colouring. She’d put those bottles in the windows, and when the sunlight came through them it would make beautiful patterns on the walls.

When I got back to Canada, I would start squirreling away little bottles too, and I’d open up my markers and squeeze pigment out of the cartridges to make colours. Then I would mix them to get the ones I wanted and put them on the windowsill in different orders. It was my favourite past-time. I come by dyeing honestly ;)

My Grandmother

Another fun fact of my time there, one night my leg slipped out of the net while I was sleeping and I woke in great pain and covered in bites from a variety of night time creepy crawlies. They took me to the local witch doctor (I can’t make this shit up) because that was the option available at the time. He rubbed coconut oil on my leg and basically wrung it out until … stuff… started flowing out of the bites. Then he bandaged me up. 

Last memory. We had to catch the Malali, which was the ferry that crossed the Essequibo river. My mom had to walk there, through the jungle, and she had to carry me because of my leg. I wasn’t small, I was 11. When I woke, it was dawn, and she had carried me all night. When I was trying to have a child of my own, it was that memory that drove me. That desire to give the very best of myself to someone. 

These days I celebrate my culture mostly through food, though I remain unable to handle spice (to the embarrassment of my mother and my spicier friends). And of course though music; I listen to a bit of everything (except opera) but at family events it’s all about chutney, soca and reggae. For a few years running I “played mas” in Toronto’s annual Caribbean culture parade (Caribana!). I speak a passable creole, and my heritage on that side is a mixture of the Indians and Africans the British brought over to work the plantations.

Thanks for taking this little trip down memory lane with me :) I have no idea what prompted this, but I’m glad I wrote it all down. I don’t know who I blog for, really, but I love having a place where I’m more authentically me.