Guyanese Quotes

She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.

English has a single verb "to be," which occurs in a variety of contexts. The Guyanese have three verbs for the same set of functions. Or rather two verbs plus what we linguists call a "zero form," a verb that is "not phonologically realized" and looks to the layman like nothing at all: I am hungry = me hongry. The boy is laze = di bai lazy. This is typically what happens when the predicate is an adjective. If it's a noun, you get yet another a: I am captain = me a kyapn. However, if the predicate is an expression indicating location, de must be used: I am in Georgetown = me de a Jarjtong. If there is no predicate (as in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") then the meaning must be the same as "exist," and again de is used: God is/exists - Gad de.

You might think that in any contact between folk speaking mutually unintelligible languages, some of the few things that would surely get through would be question words: who? what? when? which? where? how? why? After all, people who have trouble understanding one another must be constantly asking questions. Well, you'd be wrong. Typically, a Creole will acquire just one question word from its dominant European language. It might be "who," or "what," or "which" - it makes no difference, that word henceforth will signify just "Q for question." Then to this you have to add another word: "Q person" for "who?" "Q time" for "when?" "Q place" for "where?" and so on. Often it's even more opaque. Haitian Creole for "who?" is ki moun. Moun is the Haitian version of French monde, "world," so you might initially translate this as "who world?" Then you'd remember that le monde is used by the French to mean "people in general," so ki moun really does mean "Q person," or "who?" Not all Creoles have the full deck of two-piece question words-for a variety of reasons, some got lost or never took shape-but almost every Creole has at least one or two. In the oldest form of Guyanese, wissaid, derived from "which side," was the chosen for for "Q place." That meant that side could thereafter mean "place" and only "place" and therefore could no longer mean "side." But something meaning "side" still had to be said, so they co-opted "corner"; a road corner now means "by the side of the road." And these are only a few kinds of thing that can happen to words. For example, nouns can and often do turn into verbs. You don't dust a room, you cobweb it; you don't steal something, you thief (pronounced teef) it. This creates new gaps, which in turn have to be filled; since thief is now a verb, a thief has to become a teefman.

Anjali is Guyanese, and her braid looks like a thick rope that lays heavy against her back, curly baby hairs tamed by coconut oil. Michaela is Haitian and likes to mimic her parents’ French accents on the school bus (Take zee twash out! she says, as we clutch our sides in laughter), and Naz’s family is from the Ivory Coast—I mean, we’re practically cousins, she says to Michaela. Our teachers snap at Sophie to STOP TALKING NOW, but call her Mae’s name. Sophie, who is Filipino, clamps a hand over her big-ass mouth, which is never closed—she loves to gossip and flirt with the boys we call “Spanish”—while Mae, who is Chinese and polite to teachers, at least to their faces, jolts from the bookshelf where she’s stealthily shuffling novels from their alphabetical spots, in order to disrupt our English class two periods later.

I’ve had motherland-born African family tell me I don’t have a right to my Africanness because my ancestors were sold. I have had multi-generation African American family tell me I don’t have a right to my Americanness although I was born and raised on Black soil in the U.S. of A. I have had Guyanese family tell me I don’t have a right to the culture that birthed my parents, grandparents, and their great-grandparents because I am a “Yankee.” For all these folks, I am an orphan. But that’s their problem, because only I get to define me, and I own all of my spiritual, cultural, geographical, and genetic DNA.

In Hasan’s voice, I could hear the echoes of Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and political activist who wrote, in his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “[E]very African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow.