I always knew my dad had grown up bougie. His vividly painted stories of middle-class life in what was then still British Guiana seemed a world away from what seemed the unremarkable normality of Southeast London. There was the scandal of when a former cook came to visit the family house on Church and Cummings Streets and entered via the front steps, not the back. (The ascension of her daughter to the profession of teacher, she felt, afforded her the right.)
Another time, my dad recalled a standoff between the gardener, Arthur, and Nana, the Portuguese-Indigenous carer of my dad and his two sisters, which culminated in Nana holding a pot of scalding hot water on the top step and Arthur wielding a cutlass at the bottom. I’m not sure who won that particular battle, but the idea of having a cook and a gardener was wild to me.
I identified more with the curious passersby who would apparently peer through the windows of an evening to see the Sharples table set with full silver service, or swizzle sticks being stirred in tall glasses at cocktail hour. My dad recounted these memories with a wry chuckle: nostalgia for a time long gone, and a keen sense of the ridiculousness of emulating an uptight, upper-class British ideal.
As a child, my dad’s stories conjured up the same warm sense of freedom, privilege and safety as the Enid Blyton books I loved to read at the time: endless outdoors adventures, climbing trees, making slingshots, then home at the end of the day for thick wedges of cake and lashings of ginger beer. It was only later on that I got a sense of it being a suffocating way of life, too.
Propriety and respectability were highly valued: instilled continuously through admonishments from extended family to mingle only in certain circles, pursue certain careers, and maintain the family’s reputation. I suspect my dad found escape from this strict, stratified society through his creative writing and art, in which the ‘other Guyana’ – the one he perhaps only glimpsed on his way to and from Queen’s College (QC) – came to life.
In ‘Judas Journey’, published in an edition of QC magazine (read brilliantly by Rod Westmaas in the video below), he imagines an interaction between a taxi driver and his passengers as they travel along the East Coast road towards Georgetown, a tale laced with superstition, humour and class consciousness.
In another short story, ‘Shelter For All‘, published in The Daily Argosy in 1955 when he was about 18, the setting is a cakeshop. Again he weaves English and Creolese – the latter (as is still often the case) only being used for the dialogue – to capture a sharply-observed scene of downtown Georgetown life at the time.
Class was ever-present in the Guyana in which he grew up, and under British colonialism this hierarchy had long been overlain with race. Social acceptance and economic opportunities revolved around a complex interplay between one’s skin colour and class. This was something unfamiliar to me as a child growing up in a racially diverse neighbourhood, psychologically though not physically distant from the former heart of empire, the UK Houses of Parliament. I understood some people had more money than others but did not connect this in any meaningful way to race as I had friends of all colours who were in the same, or worse, financial situation.
Race, on the other hand, was more in your face. I’m not sure when I first became aware of being a different colour to my parents, of being mixed. It is not something I remember them ever talking about or providing guidance on. Not for the first time, it was up to me and my sisters to figure things out – a parenting style that had its benefits and drawbacks. So I grew up echoing whatever language of mixedness surrounded me. I was first “half-caste” then later, after digging into racial identity for a school project, my eldest sister instructed me and my middle sister that we should call ourselves “mixed-race”.
I don’t remember specific instances of being asked about my race growing up, but rather a general pressure to ‘explain’ myself. My standard explanation usually involved saying my dad was black and my mum was white. My curly rather than afro hair meant insisting that yes, my dad was actually black. That was the only way I and anyone else seemed to understand mixedness at that time: black and white, half and half.
Coming to Guyana, first as a tourist and then to live, complicated this simplistic racial accounting and raised more questions than answers.
Why were my grandparents each listed on my dad’s birth certificate as being a ‘mixed native of British Guiana’? Why did my dad call his dad’s uncle Papagee, a respectful term of address in Indian culture? Why did a plateful of chowmein or Singapore fried noodles transport him back to Guyana? Who was this white Sharples ancestor who came from Lancaster in the UK, and who was the Afro-Guyanese woman he had children with?
Challenged to expand my personal and wider view of mixed identity, I wrote an article for Gal-Dem about second-generation mixed-race people, to explore how the children of mixed parents articulate their plurality in a world where mixedness is often imagined in binaries. I took part in a project called Mixed Race Faces, in which people of mixed heritage are photographed and invited to share their stories.
Attending an exhibition of these portraits, I found myself for the first time in the UK in a space where the majority of the people were mixed. I walked around, reading the stories shared on the wall, with an excited feeling that for once that I didn’t have to explain myself, that people automatically understood me.
Back in London to do an MA in Creative Writing and Education, I found myself digging deeper into mixedness. I designed and led a creative-writing workshop for people of mixed heritage that, inspired by the work of Homi Bhabha into concepts of hybridity, I called Third Space. The group is still going – and growing.
Later I reprised and extended the concept into a creative-writing workshop series for Middleground, an e-magazine that publishes work by mixed-race creatives. My intention was not to cut us off, but to hold a temporary space where our stories were enough, where we were enough, where we didn’t feel we would be taking space from anyone else, where we wouldn’t have to quickly acknowledge our privilege even as we shared our pain.
This journey has now led to me back to Guyana, to combine my love of books with my ongoing questioning about mixedness. When I meet people and do the ‘elevator pitch’ of my PhD research (roughly: exploring mixed identity in contemporary Guyanese literature), the responses have been varied. Some people feel seen and share their own lived experiences of mixedness. Others ask me to explain what I mean by mixed. Some say nothing or move the conversation on.
I’m interested by all of these, and other, responses. What began as a personal journey is morphing into something wider and I’m trying to walk the path tentatively. Are these questions that people are asking here in Guyana? Am I imposing language or conversations that are specific to the UK or the wider diaspora? By asking such questions, am I racializing others? Am I racializing words on a page? Who is mixed in Guyana? How are different mixes received by different people across different locations?
In the 2012 Census in Guyana, 19.9% of people self-identified as ‘mixed’. Either the mixed population is growing, or people are shifting how they choose to identify on the census and perhaps in other forms of data gathering. A friend mentions to me that in recruiting for participants for a research project, they had difficulty representing the so-called six races of Guyana as many potential recruits identified as mixed.
Others may not use the word ‘mixed’ but have their own preferred term: dougla, red, afro-indigenous, buffiano/buffiana (a term I have not personally heard people using in regular conversation, though have seen referred to in texts I have come across or on social media) and other terms I don’t yet know (but would like to).
Of course, people may choose to identify in different ways throughout their life – or even on a daily basis, depending on who they are with or where they are. These decisions can be determined by how others ‘read’ you, or how you choose to present yourself – how you ‘manouvre’, to use a term employed by Dr Sue Ann Barratt and her colleague Dr Aleah Ranjitsingh in their fascinating research into dougla identity in Trinidad and Tobago.
As mixedness grows in Guyana, and the population make-up is diversified further by the increasing number of people relocating to Guyana from Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and beyond, how will Guyana adapt linguistically, racially, culturally? Will we try to maintain the ‘six races’ narrative? Or create a new story that weaves this history with present-day realities? Will Guyana’s binary political landscape, still constructed around ideas of ethnic inequality and entitlement, disintegrate, collapse into itself or be forced to expand?
Likely, there will emerge many stories rather than a singular truth – which is probably a good thing. We are all familiar with the dangers of a single story. In reality, everything is multiple, shifting, changing – including our selves, the landscape around us, the language(s) we speak, the way we view each other.
While we may not all identify as mixed, we lived a mixed reality. I think of it as when light is refracted by water to reveal a rainbow of colours. It’s an analogy that seems fitting for Guyana, a land constantly crisscrossed and encroached by water. Here, brown meets black in stark or hidden confluences, salt meets sweet in brackish blends, fluidity is possible and multiplicity is natural.
Fela Kuti once sang ‘water no get enemy’. Yet we are living in a world where not everyone has access to clean water, where rivers and seas are routinely polluted, where water is packaged and privatised, where the toxicity of one body of water infects us all. Rather than seeking purity of water for all, we divide ourselves pursuing myths of racial purity; and in the process make enemies not only of each other but ourselves.
HUMMING OF THE BIRD 