Bassidy (at Walton Hall)
excellent matter for a distempered brain
—Charles Waterton
They say you come from
some archaic French:
abasourdir: “to deafen,
stun, daze . . . to dumb-
found, to bewilder.” YET
the ears’ anarchic bass/bias
swells from bitten tongues.
Wild I am, not dazed nor
stunned into submission:
a nondescript speciMen
re/collected through
Wanderings in South
America. Wild-life I am
free knowing no sanity
like this fine madness.
Bank-House
Stomachs are cavities
filled by the labor of teeth
and tongue who bite
the fruits and flesh of the earth
= sun water air and other Jumbi
who offer themselves up
in place of false-token
contentions / take-ups
that would clog the guts
of bodies: politic and feeling:
ancestral breezes saying:
forgive / for more
future
or fire.
Jumbi Centuries/Sentries
My Aunty Gigi got her name from
my brother Camo
first child of my mother and father
baby Camo couldn’t say
Jeanette
so he said Gigi
and the name stuck.
The sun rises and sets with Camo
but it’s not him I came to talk about
it’s Gigi!
My ancestor Jumbi Gigi
like Love Billie
(she’s the one . . .
that stopped the governor’s train with
the other pregnant Buxton women that day)
you have to throw a lasso on me
or I’ll stray away from that which
we’ve come here to discuss
so?
Later for Love Billie too
let me first tell you about my Aunty Gigi.
When I pray in my mirror in my ancestors’
names?
(Jesus Jumbi is taking too long to come)
it’s ancestors like Gigi
I’m thinking of
so?
I tell them straight-up—
She’s living upstairs!
Yessir it’s her
my Aunty Gigi
an old-old African woman
born eighteen-ninety-eight
three centuries she witnessed
when I call them to come
to deal with all these
emergencies?
She’s there upstairs
in her bed and right here
in my head.
To fix the power-and-light
do you know what I say?
Gigi’s upstairs waiting for her tea!
They’re not obliged to know!
from Jombii Jamborii
Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield
translated from the Guyanese Creolese by Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield
Read the original in Guyanese Creolese
Listen to:
We, I and I, Aunty Joan and Jeremy, work together on many things, while even if many times making one another crazy—bassidy?—in the process. We met over a decade ago whilst Joan was presenting an iteration of her monumental musical drama, Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, Schoolbell Ring: Di Bush Tun Reenforest, and haven’t stopped our liaison since. We write together and translate together, which might present some of the complication and tek-ops, but also much or most of the joy and love we share in creating. What we make together we would never make alone. Our writing and other work happens over countless conversations and deliberations, with near-daily dynamics of mystic meditations and static contentions unfolding in their own (multigenerational) time scales. Jeremy’s child/Joan’s godchild is often involved, as are many others. We claim no consistent anything, but we do try to hold tight to the writing system/orthography suggested by the University of Guyana’s Guyanese Languages Unit.
Bidirectional, some of our poems begin in Kriiyaliiz—most do—but also many begin in English/Inglish. We self-translate, after or while we individually and collaboratively write poems and stories about memory. As in the three poems shared here, we usually begin with an ancestor story (i.e., Aunty Gigi/jiijii), a Kriiyaliiz/Creolese proverbial provocation by Aunty Joan (i.e., Clarise “not a woman to take-she-stomach-make-bankhouse”), or a perplexion of Jeremy’s concerning historical sources (i.e., Waterton’s “nondescript” in relation to Aunty Joan’s Yukuriba).
We are still learning so much, including to write in Kriiyaliiz/Creolese, and find need to continuously revise our spellings especially. Mistakes happen, happily. We see this as a new/generative translation tradition at least in textual form. For Jombii centuries/sentries people have been translating Creole languages into others, while guarding and relinquishing glories and (dis)grace, heights and depths/deaths, life-words. Our Jombii words, “wild,” “lowly,” are (de)sedimented with vilified ancestors we love: “burned / retrieved from the pyre / smashed and mixed / and drunk / inhaled, re-membered / forgotten.”
Bidirectional, some of our poems begin in Kriiyaliiz—most do—but also many begin in English/Inglish. We self-translate, after or while we individually and collaboratively write poems and stories about memory. As in the three poems shared here, we usually begin with an ancestor story (i.e., Aunty Gigi/jiijii), a Kriiyaliiz/Creolese proverbial provocation by Aunty Joan (i.e., Clarise “not a woman to take-she-stomach-make-bankhouse”), or a perplexion of Jeremy’s concerning historical sources (i.e., Waterton’s “nondescript” in relation to Aunty Joan’s Yukuriba).
We are still learning so much, including to write in Kriiyaliiz/Creolese, and find need to continuously revise our spellings especially. Mistakes happen, happily. We see this as a new/generative translation tradition at least in textual form. For Jombii centuries/sentries people have been translating Creole languages into others, while guarding and relinquishing glories and (dis)grace, heights and depths/deaths, life-words. Our Jombii words, “wild,” “lowly,” are (de)sedimented with vilified ancestors we love: “burned / retrieved from the pyre / smashed and mixed / and drunk / inhaled, re-membered / forgotten.”
Jeremy Jacob Peretz is coauthor of Jombii Jamborii (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), a chapbook of Kriiyaliiz (Guyanese Creole) and English language poems collaboratively written and translated with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield. Jeremy’s scholarship, writing, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized, including with fellowships and grants from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Institute of American Cultures, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy’s essays, poems, and films are available through such publications as African American Review, Anthropology News, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of Africana Religions, New West Indian Guide, and Postcolonial Text. Jeremy holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.
Joan Cambridge-Mayfield is an Afro-feminist environmental protector, former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home (Ticknor & Fields/The Women’s Press, 1987). In the 1970s Joan served Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. By the 1980s Joan walked away from a scholar’s desk at the Library of Congress to head for the Guyana rainforest where she spent nearly two decades immersed in her environment, researching, writing, and working on her parcel of the “last of pristine Amazonia” at Yukuriba Falls on the Essequibo River. Joan’s musical drama was recognized within the United Nations’ World Decade for Cultural Development. Her writing has appeared in the Antioch Review and was anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (edited by Margaret Busby; Jonathan Cape/Pantheon, 1992). Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow to Julian Mayfield, and is forever following his profound jumbi guidance.
