Liminal Spaces
|Part I. Mothering Lands
2. Until I Hear from You
Texte intégral
Figure 2.1 My mother Cita DeFreitas and grandmother Angela DeFreitas (nèe Vieira) in their home in Georgetown, Guyana, then British Guiana, ca. 1965.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
On Imagined Geographies
1My mother, Cita DeFreitas, was born in her family home in Alberttown, Georgetown, British Guiana on 10 December 1951. She was the youngest of three siblings. She left Guyana for Toronto, Canada in July 1970, citing political and economic reasons for her departure. She was eighteen years old. She left with two hundred dollars, one suitcase filled with clothes, and a small off-white carry-on just big enough to carry her tiny pillow and the only doll she ever owned.
- 1 Interview between Erika DeFreitas and Cita DeFreitas, Toronto, Canada, 12 June 2016.
You’re growing up in a country as a young girl [where]
there wasn’t much opportunity […] It’s hard to even imagine
my mother letting me go, at that age, as a young girl, growing
up in a sheltered life.1
2She returned ten years later with me in tow a month after my birth in 1980, when her mother, Angela DeFreitas (nèe Vieira) lay in a comatose state between white sheets. What she remembers is what I remember. It is all fragmented and disjointed and pieced together in ways that may or may not make sense to those who are living in the land in the present. What I remember of these geographies can be found in a particular set of ink drawn landscapes that were mass produced in Guyana. They are framed and hang on a bathroom wall in our home. They, too, have migrated. My grandfather, Carlos DeFreitas, co-owned a store on Holmes Street that framed paintings in wooden frames. My mother lived on First Street, moved to DaSilva Street, then to Hadfield Street, and to Cowan Street—in homes that housed up to seven people at times.
3From my mother, I heard of Stabroek Market, Kaieteur Falls, and jungles where large snakes traveled in pairs. I heard of homes that stood on stilts. My mother talks about back home but has never been back since her own mother’s passing in 1980. She does not want to see how it all has changed. Change changing changes. It must be better than having to stand in line for a loaf of bread. Rations: cheese, milk, flour, and sugar. Yet, no matter how hard one may try, some things just don’t change. Like the cadence in her speech, how pepper becomes peppa and daughter becomes daughta. This is how I know that we both imagine.
Figure 2.2 A portrait of my grandmother Angela taken in British Guiana (year unknown).

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
Figure 2.3 My mother Cita in front of her house on Hadfield Street, Georgetown, Guyana, ca. 1965.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
On Migration
4These notes written over the course of three years, between 8 November 1973 and 15 October 1976, in cursive, have crossed borders and exchanged hands. They were written by my grandmother to my mother after she left Guyana. These sentences, extracted from several letters (Fig. 2.4), have been examined and rearranged by me.
Just a few lines to let you know, we are all o.k. I am told it is getting very cold. Don’t worry, I will keep you posted, remember you are as near to me as the phone. I hope you get your passport soon. Things are just the same here, with a few more shortages every now and then but we can get by somehow. I have not heard from you since my last letter, I hope you are well. Just a few lines to let you know both dad and I are still alive. I myself had to see the doctor on Monday before you phoned. Dad wants you to apply to immigration for himself and me, I know this is going to be a surprise, but he has finally decided to make a move. But on Saturday morning I began to feel faint again so I decided to see the doctor and of course he ordered me to the hospital right away as he suspected I had a slight heart attack. Everything is just as you left it, only for some robberies at a few pawn shops and jewelry shops with masked bandits with guns, cutlasses, and knives. Plenty of rain is still falling, and now we expect to have high tides next week, so everybody is preparing for floods. I dreamt last night of you and I had a feeling I would have heard from you. I am working on a wedding cake for Saturday. I had it framed and have it on my glass cabinet, so that you are looking over everything that goes on in the house. Everything around this time as you would know is centered around Mashramani, the tenth anniversary of Independence. Let me know if you need anything in particular, besides pepper sauce, guava cheese, guava jelly, cassareep, and thyme. I am sending you two pairs of slippers, a bottle of pepper sauce, some dried sorrel, and some thyme. I am moving from there and I am going to live on Murray Street out very far from where I am. About your invitation to dad, nothing doing, he says you can come home instead. Until I hear from you.
Figure 2.4 Undated letter from my grandmother to my mother, sent between 1973 to 1976.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
On the Time Before Us
5Erika: There was a time before us; a time when we were strangers.
6Cita: There was?
7Erika: Yes.
8Cita: When was that?
9Erika: A time that I could look back to in pictures and see me in you, but you couldn’t see me back then like you see me now.
10Cita: Ah, okay.
11Erika: You didn’t always know me, you know!
12Cita: Yeah, okay.
13[laughter]
14This is how our discussion begins before I open the spiral bound, tan colored— almost deceivingly gold–photo album that sits precariously at the edge of the table where we sit.
15There she is (not as she sits before me). Newspapers strewn on a table in the background and on the floor at the base of the wooden rocking chair she leans back in (Fig. 2.5). Those lines have also been read, but by her? Are her fingertips blackened with ink? There she sits with the book open hovering above her lap between pinching thumbs and closed fingers. I imagine she is ever so gently balancing on the tips of her toes. Geometric shapes mirror the windowpanes making patterns on her hand-sewn skirt, the hem of which, when seated, meets the edge of the chair. Perhaps in red, orange, yellow, and green threads? She corrects me. In mustard yellow and beige. Legs long. Her hair neatly pinned up with a handful of black bobby pins. There she was. In a room of windows. There is a solitude. I could ask and should ask and must ask questions and I do, and she answers, but these aren’t the questions nor the answers I want to ask and know. I want to know about all that is left out of the frame. I want to know which word her eyes rested on when this moment was seized and what imagery sat behind those eyes.
16She looks up from her book. I have never seen her before. Never before with a smile somewhat unburdened. Who stole this moment from her? Her left hand, fingers spread on her lap.
17There is a comfort in all this looking back at what was and will never be again except for in the faint remnants; the residue that stains. This comfort. It’s deceiving. I can look back and speculate. I can look back. But there is a depth. One too entrenched in the then I am not privy to. Only so much. Over there in that photograph where I have never been and cannot gain entrance.
18When she is looking off to the side with hands clasped below her right knee, it is then. This expression is one that I recognize. She has gone inside herself. She is looking at nothing and something and everything. The nylon webbing on the folding chair leaving imprints on the tanned skin of her thighs. I once thought that there was a time when she was most present to herself. This was what I thought of the time before us; the time when we were strangers.
19Erika: Were you happy then?
20Cita: Looking back at it, I don’t think I was totally happy. I always felt like something was missing.
Figure 2.5 Cita at a bed and breakfast in New Amsterdam, Guyana, ca. 1965.

© DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
On Pre-Mourning
21It is what composes the essence of being. Having done it on many occasions, I should have a greater understanding of the differences between being and having been, and the never going to be of human being human. It is not an understanding of it all that I have, but an awareness of its insistence. The way it sits and rests and threads itself. The way it kneads and punctures and erupts. Deep within this cavity. Derrida has whispered to me. First about the politics of friendships and then about this. He has said to me that in all friendships one will be left to mourn the other. We know this yet we keep it as murmurs in hushed tones and low voices until there is a fissure and it becomes.
22I don’t have to close my eyes to recall this. This that exasperated my fear of the void that loss carves. The rain was sudden. Everything was tinny and heavy and dank. 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.
23What I wrestle with is the preparation. The anticipation of the unpredictability and its permanence. All before it happens. Before it happens without repetition.
24It is our names that will survive us.
On Death
25The photograph is an odd size, rectangular in shape with curved edges, aged. The face of it is faded and all colors look to be muted, bleached. She lays there still, unmoved. When we see people laying with their eyes unflinching like that with their hands folded like that, we know. Call it to mind. The last time my mother returned, she returned to cicadas’ warning from trees, to that natural dampness of flesh, to bananas that are as sweet as they are yellow, to pulpy genips picked, to tamarind trees, jack fruits, sapodillas, paw paws, and mirrors covered when lightning strikes. The last time my mother returned, I read in the letters on lines that remain straight that she, my grandmother, wasn’t feeling well, wasn’t feeling right, wasn’t feeling like herself. That last time she returned she believed that her presence wasn’t known. I question that. An unarticulated distance emerged in a shared space where breaths were taken, held, and exhumed from the body. It, the body, becomes slightly smaller, lungs no longer stretching. With slender fingers she fixed her mother’s hair while she lay there unmoved, still.
26It pervades. It conjures itself without permission. It incites fear and held tongues. When I look at that photograph, I see my grandmother as my mother as myself. There is a truth. Each one before is a rehearsal for the next. And so, I must prepare. And so, I must work towards making the impermanent permanent, with death masks made from icing and tears caught in lachrymatory bottles and stitches recording time. The crux of it all are those moments spent together making all previous efforts futile. Or so one would think. It produces an unyielding echo.
On Memory
27The photographs behind plastic sleeves serve as traces. She remembers being no older than six years old. Hand washing her brother’s socks in buckets and sweeping wooden floors. Dragging her tiny finger along the insides of big, off-white enamel bowls lined with white icing. Inscribed measurements of raisins and prunes soaking in a large earthenware cork topped jar, which now sits in the corner of our kitchen. It, too, is a trace. The sweet smell of rum. Egg whites, icing sugar, almond essence, freshly squeezed lime juice. My grandmother, her mother, made and decorated cakes as a way of earning money. She taught classes in her small house around a table to women who would bring their own cakes and learn how to make roses with icing atop sweet drink bottle caps (Fig. 2.6 and Fig. 2.7). Pink. Blue. Green leaves were always green. Yellow. Orange. To prepare. To keep. To keep alive. To maintain. To make lasting. To preserve. 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.
28And so, the repetition continues.
Figure 2.6 My grandmother teaches women in her neighborhood in Georgetown the art of baking and icing cakes, ca. late 1960s.

© DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
Figure 2.7 My grandmother in Georgetown poses with a wedding cake she made and decorated, ca. late 1960s.

© DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND.
29In this work, ‘The Impossible Speech Act’ (Fig 2.8 and Fig. 2.9), my mother Cita is both subject and collaborator. Drawing on the teachings of my grandmother Angela, my mother and I take turns to hand-fashion face masks out of green, yellow, and purple icing. The diptych featured here is the final two portraits of the process. These repeated actions situate my mother psychically closer to her homeland as she remembers it, but only places me further away.
Figure 2.8 and Figure 2.9 Erika DeFreitas, ‘The Impossible Speech Act’ (detail) 2007, archival inkjet print.

© Erika DeFreitas. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND.
On My Mother, My Mother’s Mother, and I
30It is in the way that the gathering of these letters cannot encapsulate each and every 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.
31Her and I and those who came before and will come after us continue to develop this matrilineal consciousness consisting of singularities and multiplicities that have woven themselves, presented themselves. The past and present self (selves) contains the other (others). There is a matriarchal lineage that endures and rejects omission despite memories that may be pieced together with inaccuracies, illusive details, unintentional omissions. Collectively writing and rewriting unwritten narratives. They are ever present. They are in the darkness below my eyes, the bridge of my nose, the slight curve in the nape of my neck, the length of my fingers, the pain in my joints and in the crevices that are etched into, mapped onto my skin.
32All that I have is tucked into my pockets. Some of it lingers in my clenched fists. Some of it is hushed in the pleats near my eyes. Kept between toes and under nails. Some of it is intertwined with strands of my hair conceiving tight curls. In the thick of. Under. In the alcove below my tongue and in the seams between my teeth. Yes. Most of it. Most of it nests itself in my bones. All biding time. All taking form.
Notes
1 Interview between Erika DeFreitas and Cita DeFreitas, Toronto, Canada, 12 June 2016.
Table des illustrations
![]() | |
---|---|
Titre | Figure 2.1 My mother Cita DeFreitas and grandmother Angela DeFreitas (nèe Vieira) in their home in Georgetown, Guyana, then British Guiana, ca. 1965. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 55k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.2 A portrait of my grandmother Angela taken in British Guiana (year unknown). |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 20k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.3 My mother Cita in front of her house on Hadfield Street, Georgetown, Guyana, ca. 1965. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 33k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.4 Undated letter from my grandmother to my mother, sent between 1973 to 1976. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 157k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.5 Cita at a bed and breakfast in New Amsterdam, Guyana, ca. 1965. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection. Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-5.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 29k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.6 My grandmother teaches women in her neighborhood in Georgetown the art of baking and icing cakes, ca. late 1960s. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-6.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 44k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.7 My grandmother in Georgetown poses with a wedding cake she made and decorated, ca. late 1960s. |
Crédits | © DeFreitas Family Collection, Courtesy of Erika DeFreitas. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-7.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 34k |
![]() | |
Titre | Figure 2.8 and Figure 2.9 Erika DeFreitas, ‘The Impossible Speech Act’ (detail) 2007, archival inkjet print. |
Crédits | © Erika DeFreitas. Courtesy of the artist. CC BY-NC-ND. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/15002/img-8.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 67k |
© Open Book Publishers, 2020
Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0