14. Keeping Wake
p. 189-202
Texte intégral
1 In the summer of 2011, I was awarded a grant to travel to Guyana, my mother’s country of birth. It was the first time I had visited since 1997 (I was twelve), and the first time I had made the trip on my own. As an American-born artist, I had been researching stories of Guyanese migration for quite some time, collecting interviews with older extended family members as well as my grandmother (Nanie in Hindi) and mother. The eldest of twelve children, my mother first left Guyana in 1976 to attend the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada for her Master’s degree. She then migrated to the United States in 1978 to work for the World Bank. The rest of her siblings immigrated to the US over the years, except for one uncle, who stayed behind to tend to the family rice farm.
2 During my trip, I visited our family’s farm in Mahaicony, a small rural community on the banks ofthe Mahaicony River along Guyana’s coast in Demerara county. Many ofits inhabitants are descendants of South Asian indentured laborers who became rice farmers after their term of indenture, which is how my grandfather’s family became established in the region. While I was on our farm with my uncle, we got news that my grandmother, now living with one of my aunts in New York, had a brain aneurysm, eventually passing away. Suddenly my solitary trip became a family affair, with aunts, uncles, and cousins returning from their homes in the United States to lay my grandmother to rest next to my grandfather on the farm.
3 My grandmother was the daughter of a man of Indian descent who converted from Hinduism to Islam to marry his second wife. My grandmother’s mother (the third wife) was a Christian woman of Chinese, African, and European heritage. My grandmother wanted to be a schoolteacher, but became a farmer’s wife instead, fulfilling a promise she made to her father before he died to marry my grandfather. Once married, she focused on family and community, keeping a collection of books that local children were welcome to read and borrow.
4 What follows is a poetic and artistic meditation on our family’s intersecting stories. Like ripples of water, they collide with my body in amplifications and erasures. The accompanying images are mixed media works. While in the farmhouse in Mahaicony, I came across family albums with images of my grandmother, aunts, cousins, and other members of the community. Because of the humidity, the photographs had fused with the album pages, making them difficult or impossible to remove without damage. I created digital images of these photographs, which were then printed with an inkjet printer and manipulated with water and paint to mimic how the humid air of the farmhouse will further degrade the original photographs over time. These images, and the sometimes abstracted nature of the text itself, are expressions of the histories that have been lost to time and memory, the realities we gloss over, the names we forget, and the feelings that remain as our heritage is passed from one body to the next.
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Motion Sickness
5There is a particular ritual: face forward, keep eyes on the horizon, breathe deeply—but it can fail. I am on the train, the bus, a car, a plane, suddenly overcome, lightheaded, nauseous.
6I wonder if my body’s reaction to motion is the legacy of my foremothers. The trace of their fear (encoded in flesh) as they moved across the globe like cargo.
7What would happen if our bodies retraced their paths? Could we become divining rods for truth?
8They made vagrancy a crime to keep slaves on the estates. To keep them tied to the land; the land was servitude. Even when they were ‘freed’ they were still tied to the land and through the land to their masters. Is this why we are nomads? Why we never had a home?
Nanie Says:
9‘Land is like gold.’
My Body Is a Reluctant Nomad
10My body rebelled in ways nobody could quantify. All the doctors could agree on was that it was ‘safer’ for me not to go. Nanie kept her opinion to herself and embroidered on the deck beside me silently as I pondered the relationality of the body, how my health was suddenly dependent on something as abstract as national boundaries. Aunts called, concerned for my safety in a land they once called home. Nanie bought canned sardines, coffee, and toothpaste for me to bring to Uncle on the farm. I bought the latest issue of The New Yorker to read on the plane.
11A year later I watched my mother take her oath of citizenship. A video of President Barack Obama welcomed her. A friend remarked: ‘this place is like a DMV for people.’ How could I believe that for the first twenty-seven years of my life my mother was fundamentally different from me, a difference that accorded me more rights, more freedoms, more agency? How could I believe that by standing in that room under fluorescent lights and raising her hand she was casting off one identity for another? Our bodies cannot lie—this I choose to believe.
A Savage Womb
12Each wave, the sickness spreads. Fear eats at her body with each mile she is not herself. There is a new kinship—awake, the scent of home (damp earth, smoky blankets, splintered stone) fades from her skin, replaced by blood, sweat, and bile.
13Licked clean.
14Only after would come the sugar cane fields watered with sweat and the sweet intoxication as, distilled, it burned warm in her chest.
15All she wants to do is be a cannibal; spit up a new history; never die. She wants to be told.
Momme Says:
16Yeah, I don’t know why we never asked my grandmother these things. I once read this book called L’Enfant Noir about this guy, and he said, ‘when we were young all the questions we should have asked we never asked’ and I guess part of our problem was that we never were really that interested in our past, because we always felt that there were things that we really didn’t want to know, and it was only the future that mattered, so we never really asked about these things...
A Promise is a Promise
17I think there is a kind of truce between Nanie and me. I’m not sure when it happened. The clicking of her knitting needles and her disapproval of me permeate my childhood memories. Always too loud, too opinionated, too stubborn. As if these things were not my inheritance. As if they were not the things that kept our foremothers alive.
18I asked Nanie to tell me her life story once. When she got to the subject of my grandfather, she said that she had other offers of marriage. My grandfather had said ‘a promise is a promise’ and she had agreed.
19A promise. A deep black pool that contains the future and the past. All the things unsaid, to be lost in the faulty memories of those who survive.
A Brief History of the Body
20Nanie: My Aaji, Ramsuki. She say she was just a little girl, gone to get some water from a well. Someone snatch she, marauders or the like. Sell she to the British.
21(On the boat, the women knew she needed to be protected. There was a man. In some stories he is a paying passenger, a free man, a wandering sadhu. He agrees to marry her. The captain says some words, then she goes back to stay with the women for the rest of the trip.)
22Nanie: When they land, she sent to plantation, name Success. They give she a loji, a place to live, like. He stay with she, but he don’t work, don’t take care of the children. She working the cane fields all day, he sleepin.
23Nanie: Eventually he abandons Ramsuki, goes to Suriname to be a holy man.
24Momme: She kicked him out for being lazy.
History with a capital H
25I flip carefully through the book, scanning the endless rows and columns of names. Each entry is an anchor slowly fading from the page. I already know I won’t find what I’m looking for, the stern lady at the desk tells me that the particular volume of birth records for the place and time I’m looking for is ‘missing.’ When I ask what that means she just rolls her eyes. I lie and say I need this year to look for a separate entry. I come to a series of pages where the names cascade away into a creamy white void. The book was exposed to water at some point, and over a hundred entries must be missing. Bloodlines lost forever to a spilled cup or a heavy rain. This is the legacy of our ancestors’ trauma, all the little things we will never know.
Landing
26From above, the water looks like a giant knife cut a dark winding gash through the land. On the ground, our boat rumbles to a start—everything seems soft, overripe. The creek water is almost black, so rich with particles that your hand disappears completely once the water reaches your elbow. It’s hard to speak above the air rushing past and the roar of the motor. Occasionally Uncle points and yells something, but mostly I just watch the banks glide by. It seems like everything is melting into everything else, the boundary between water and land unclear.
27When I was younger, I was afraid to swim in the water, stories of close calls with alligators and piranhas turning every ripple into a threat. Auntie is not helping, telling the story of the time she hitched a ride home from school with a neighbor who was drunk, and how she, her younger sister, and a friend, had all nearly drowned when the boat crashed. The friend had panicked and pulled her sister under. Auntie said she just reached blindly down into the black and pulled her sister up by the bow in her hair.
28We’re on the back verandah of the house, the rice fields stretching out endlessly before us, the canal my grandfather dug off the creek to our right. My mother has her own story of almost drowning, my great-grandmother pulling her unconscious from the water. I think of this silent, black void flowing behind us, and the countless stories of being pulled from it by hands that knew no fear.
29As a last resort, a slave could take his life, knowing that this was his final revenge; to deny the master the thing he prized most, his property.1
Kal Pani
I
30They called the sea Kal Pani—black water. They said if you crossed it, you lost caste— you became forever severed from your life, from the land. I often wonder what they must have thought, emerging from the tomb-like ships, to a land with such unctuous rivers—rivers that on certain still evenings take on the quality of black glass—a river of ink—kal pani.
II
31Blood is mostly water, a means of transporting oxygen and nutrients around the body. It’s strange that for some people it is transferable, shareable, and for others it is more particular. A mechanism and a fingerprint—lal pani.
III
32Uncle tells me the river changes course with the tides. The land breathes like a lung.
IV
33I think of Nanie’s brain, the flood of lal pani from a ruptured aneurysm. I think of the mysteries locked in our blood, the stories of our bodies, permeating her brain. Maybe for a moment before she lost consciousness she got some insight, some answer that can only be found in water.
V
34They flood the rice fields in the planting season. I wonder how we came up with the concept of parallel lines, of corners. Why do we so naturally lean towards this type of efficiency? Nature is efficient in a completely different kind of way. A way that seems infinite and non-linear. Squares lead to fields, lead to blocks, lead to buildings, lead to temples lead to hierarchy and history and war. Curved lines don’t really lead anywhere, except that they are blood cells and bubbles and planets.
VI
35Thalassa, the sea, haema, blood. Thalassemia, sea blood.
VII
36Walcott said the sea is history. My blood is sea blood. My blood is fractured, thrown outside of time. How to live from one moment to the next is a question I can’t answer, just as I don’t know if you can step in the same river twice.
VIII
37Nanie asked that we build her tomb high above the ground so the flooding river would not touch her body. In India they cremate remains and submerge the ashes in the Ganges. Embrace the void or embrace the land, in-between is life.
An Atlas in the Sand
38We ride out in the boat, picking up some friends along the way. We pass beneath rusting bridges that you can almost reach up and touch. Sometimes, people on the banks wave to us. The open farmland gives way to trees that lean over us from the banks. All of a sudden, the motor slows and the banks throw themselves wide to embrace the Atlantic. (Sea of Atlas, who stands between the primordial embrace of earth and sky.)
39At low tide the beach is wide, the land creeping from the ocean at the lowest possible angle. The men head off into the trees to pull crabs with their bare hands from the tidal pools that form around the roots.
40I head out across the alien landscape, passing twisted roots knotted into a ball and bleached by the sun. As the tide recedes, it leaves ripples across the sand. I stand at the water line and watch the water lap slowly towards my toes. I look over my shoulder and see Uncle and his friends up by the trees, drinking rum and eating food. They remind me of an old picture I found in the farmhouse, the figures dark and haloed by the sun. I look back out across the water. The air is still and smells fresh, not salty. I think of deep ocean currents swirling across the globe. I wonder how long it would take a drop of water to travel from India to Guyana. Is it faster, or slower than a ship with sails? I chant the Gayatri Mantra to the water, not sure where my words will come to rest.
41The long-boned, stalwart Bhojpuri, with his staff in hand, is a familiar object striding over fields far from home.
Lal Pani
42Uncle is something of a sentinel, trapped in a liminal space between the past and the future. As the eldest son, he had to leave school young to help with the farm. Nanie would say that when he drove the tractor in the field, he was so small it looked like the tractor was driving itself. Nanie had ten daughters but only two sons, and Uncle, bound to the farm, and through the farm bound to Guyana, tied up in an endless cycle of planting and reaping, was a stone caught in her throat.
43Rice was grown as an offering to the gods.
44It is the day after our boat trip. In the morning I work with clay collected from the trenches that line the rice fields, shaping it in my hands. I lay it out in the sun to dry, burnishing the surface with the back of a spoon. The neighbor says it reminds her of when they were children, that they would make small things with mud. After dinner I spend the evening in the sitting room, reading and writing in my journal. Uncle emerges from the bedroom, his eyes red. He tells me Nanie is in the hospital. They say it’s a brain aneurysm. There’s no internet out here, his cell phone is our only connection. I feel lost in the warm, still night. Part of me knows she is already gone, though her body continues to live for another day in the hospital as her children gather to say goodbye.
Keeping Wake
45I never imagined death was such a complicated thing. Nanie’s body must be prepared, dressed. My mother is the eldest child. She and Auntie wrap their mother in a white sari. Meanwhile, on the farm, I am the only family Uncle has. Every night the neighbors come to ‘keep wake.’ I sit upstairs listening to the rhythmic crack as dominoes are slammed against tables. The women play cards with children and we serve bread and coffee late into the night. I don’t know the games, don’t know the people, I feel more alien now than ever before. The mosquitos flock to me in the cool night air, so I stay inside, alone.
46During the day neighbors come to work, clearing brush, cleaning out the sheds, building out a shelter off the side of the house my grandfather built by hand. There are men out by his grave, building my grandmother’s tomb from cinder blocks and cement.
47I gather scraps of wood. I dig a pit and place my clay objects, wrapped in newspaper, along the bottom. I build a small fire on top. In the evening I pull the fired pieces from the ash.
48... the Indians exchanged a society and a living community (though unequal and degrading to many, tiresome and tedious to most) for a lifeless system, in which human values always mattered less than the drive for production, for exploitation.
49A few days later some of Uncle’s friends take me back to the city. My family comes in waves, and soon we are all there. We have a funeral in the city, and then drive out to the farm. The dirt road is a recent addition. Before coffins had to be carried the last stretch by boat.
Embracing the Void
50There is nothing left to inherit
51Locked away in your body
52All that is left
53Is your wake
54Cutting through these dark waters
55Lapping
56against the shorelines of memory
57Before the coffin is closed, I slip one of my clay objects, a palm-sized Ganesh, next to Nanie’s body.
Tumhi ho mata
Pita tumhi ho
Tumhi ho bandhu
Sakha tumhi ho
58The old women begin to sing, their voices outside of time.
59Our understanding of the words is imprecise
60But my mother’s voice cracks
61And I hold her, sobbing, in my arms.
62Later, the sun is setting. We don’t have swimsuits, so we bathe in our clothes.
63Together we wade out on the plank in front of the house
64And in the fading light we almost feel like a family again (this feeling will soon fade).
65My cousin and I swim out into the black water, our bodies floating in the void
66Working against the pull of the current out to sea.
Notes de bas de page
1 Italics in English here and below are either direct quotes or paraphrased lines from Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Auteur
An American-born transdisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Mackrandilal holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a BA from the University of Virginia, where she was a recipient of an Auspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship. Her artwork has been shown nationally, including the Chicago Artists Coalition (where she was a HATCH Artist-in-Residence), Smack Mellon, THE MISSION, Abrons Art Center, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Armory Center for the Arts. She has presented artwork and research at national conferences, including the College Art Association, Association for Asian American Studies, the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, and Open Engagement. Her writing, which explores issues of race, gender, and labor, has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Inquiry, Drunken Boat, contemptorary, Skin Deep, and MICE Magazine.
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