The Paper Trail, part two

Oct 11, 2009 Features / Columnists, Guyanese Literature

By Petamber Persaud

(Extracts of a conversation on the movement of man with Nalini Mohabir and Juliet Alexander, Georgetown, Guyana, August 28, 2009.
Nalini Mohabir, born in Canada of Guyanese father and Trinidadian mother, is doing her Ph. D. thesis at Leeds University, UK, on the last return ship from British Guiana to India.
Juliet Alexander, Guyana-born UK-resident, has a Masters degree in Documentary Research. She has more than 25 years experience in print and broadcast media. Alexander’s dissertation will be on the movement of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean to Australia. )

Petamber Persaud (PP): You have a timeline here?
Juliet Alexander (JA): My timeline here is coming up to the official end to slavery.
PP: 1834
JA: Yes. This is strange – a hidden history because people were not supposed to be transported anywhere at that time. This is my background, my masters in history – Documentary Research. So they brought those trouble makers, kept them on these floating hulks, these huge prisons, floating prisons, in England on the Thames and other places and kept them with other vagabonds like the Irish … and then transported them to Australia.
PP: Brings to mind a novel by Fred D’Aguiar – ‘Feeding the Ghosts’ – about the distortions of history, the history of enslaved people at sea…go on…
JA: As I said I was really fascinated by all this and I was fortunate to be asked to present a paper on broadcasting at a university in Australia on Coolangatta and I went to the archives there and spoke to the people and they said they knew about it [enslaved Africans brought from the Caribbean to Australia] and there were drawers and drawers of information on the subject with all the names, the parliament had notes about them – numerous ugly names by which they called them because they were troublemakers. It was fascinating – it was all here, all the information, I didn’t know about it and few people knew about it….
PP: For a long while we were under the impression that our history or the outline of our history has been recorded but more and more evidence is surfacing to discredit and rewrite that ‘history’.
Nalini Mohabir (NM): I want to reinforce what I said earlier that the kind of work we [Mohabir and Alexander] are doing is really important, in that the history was set out within a colonial framework, and now the work we and others are doing is helping to uncover those submerged voices and movements which are beginning to bubble up to the surface, and is now being uncovered not only in the colonial documents, but in the living voices that are still with us who have lived through colonial times and post-colonial times.
And secondly, the point that you brought up, is that out histories are interconnected, it is not just about Guyana, Guyana has always been very connected to the wider world but our histories have journeyed and intersected and crossed even on boats as we crossed the oceans, we could have literally, visually, seen other boats crossing.

Yes, we intercept at many places, for example here in Guyana, the Indian Arrival Committee celebrates the arrival of Indian Immigrants (I think is the term they use). It’s a bit deceiving, because it was not necessarily immigration, in that they could have chosen to go somewhere else, like say America or Canada — those options were NOT open to them right unto the late 20th Century.
In Guyana there are shared spaces, shared commonalities, not that they were the same, I am not saying that at all, but they were moments in time when emotions and feelings might have been shared. For example, although my focus is on the last return ship, in the course of my research, I have discovered that around that same period there was an attempt to sail from British Guiana back to Sierra Leone – there was an attempt to charter a ship named ‘Coptic’ and in the very year the ship sailed to India, there was a ship from Trinidad sailing to Liberia. So now we have not a divergent history of Indians going back to India on one hand and Africans going back to Africa on the other hand, but a sense of the kind of emotions, hopes, yearnings and feelings that the pre-independence post-colonial period might have rekindled.

PP: It is not that I am at sea, but I am sure you [Alexander] would want to come in here.
JA: I am absolutely agreeing that there is that commonality of experience that we still find here. I brought my three English-born children to Guyana, for the first time, and they are fascinated by the fact that the history they thought was only theirs or perhaps an American-born history is evident here as well, young people are young people, they may express it slightly different, but they are young people. And this is the joy of history, the joy of travel, the joy of discovery, finding out there are commonalities all the way through, which is really exciting.

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