Where were you at 10?

Author’s photograph: Peter Rose & Anira Streets, Queenstown, Georgetown, Guyana. 

The nuns busied themselves trying to learn as much as they could about a country that was, like sand, fast slipping through their fingers. They were a group, of many, who ardently preserved the last bastions of British colonial rule in our country. I was indifferent to their lessons on the history and geography, literature and science of the mother country. I could recite from their watercolour illustrated books with blonde women in floral dresses, belted at the waist with flowing skirts sitting under the shade of oak trees. I could sing the psalms, by heart, in the cool of the chapel every Friday morning, and run the egg and spoon race on sports day. 

I was ten years old and more interested in catching tadpoles with cupped hands from the alley behind our house, buying red and yellow cones from the ‘shave-ice man’ on the corner of Peter Rose and Anira Streets, buying pholourie balls for a few cents, dripping with sour and wrapped in brown paper, from the ladies who sat under the shade of their large black umbrellas with wicker baskets covered in white linen table cloths near our school gates. When no one was looking, I would slip into the corner shop on my way home to drink ginger beer at the counter whilst swatting flies and crunching ants. We, both human and non-human, fought to get a taste of the sweet sharpness from those brown bottles that cooled in the shade along the wooden shelves. 

This was a childhood, lived at the margins of the political turmoil of the 1950s and 60s, in one of the wooden houses on stilts, with whitewashed panes and large jalousie windows that gave shade from the afternoon sun that melted the tarred macadam outside, and bleached the white sheets on clothes-lines behind our house. Riding my bicycle home, a hand-me-down from my third sister, I could catch the breeze from our muddy coastline, peddling fast as fast as I could to then take my feet off the pedals and jump into the bicycle seat, still too high for my 10-year-old pins and knobbly knees with their roadmap of scars.  

Independence in Guyana was happening and the nuns were obliged, by government orders, to suspend their colonial texts for those of a new nation that dropped the British and changed the spelling of our indigenous name meaning ‘land of many waters’.  I learnt a new national anthem, a coat of arms that I could recognise and knew the significance of each colour on the arrow-head flag that replaced, among other vestiges of colonial rule, the Union Jack, pounds, shillings and pence and finally Elizabeth’s portrait. She shifted a little to the right, as we remained part of the Commonwealth of Nations, to make room for L.F.S on the left. Both were proudly displayed in the entrance to St. Gabriel’s Primary School at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. My school, for over seven years at the time.  

At midnight on the 26 May, 1966, I held on tightly to my aunt’s hand, since my parents were part of the official ceremony, the other hand waved enthusiastically on seeing our new flag raised to the roar of a euphoric crowd of fervent Guyanese; all of us together it seemed; “One People, One Nation, One Destiny”. Silence fell, briefly, as we stood attentive to the drum roll that introduced the first bars of our anthem, “Dear Land of Guyana …”  before we all burst into song, cheering and hollering to drown out the waves that crashed against the seawall; our hearts beating, briefly, as one. I stood small; a proud Guyanese. That night I never imagined that I could live anywhere else than on that land “of rivers and plains, made rich by the sunshine, and lush by the rains, set gem-like and fair, between mountains and sea, your children salute you, dear land of the free”.

It had taken centuries of resistance, enslavement, rebellion, murder, extraction and appropriation, union strikes on plantations and in mines, negotiations, talks and walk-outs, suspension of our constitution by the Crown together with continuous forced division to get to this moment, 60 years ago. What did it mean to become an independent nation in 1966, eager to break the shackles of the previous 400 years? I struggled to understand its significance but I knew that something important was shifting in my immediate environment. I was too young to comprehend its magnitude, or envision what would unfold in the years ahead. I was ten years old and not cognisant of the struggle that lay ahead. 

Where were you at ten?