On Monday, May 22nd, I revisited Chapter One of my two-year-long neglected work in progress. As I revised the chapter, the familiar thrill of creating images with words surprised me. Once again, I was eager to engage with the creative process. I woke up in the mornings with ideas for improving or adding to the text. What a joy!

Since last working on this chapter in January 2020, I found it easier to “kill [my] darlings”—words, phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs. While maintaining the purpose of setting the stage of the world in which the featured women fought for agency in their lives, I found it challenging to cut and tighten critical historical information. Although the players in our own time have changed somewhat, women and minority groups are still fighting the same battles.

To establish the author as a participant-observer in the lives of these women, the narrative also contains autobiographical information. The author, like all the players on the stage, shares their legacy of severed ancestral roots.

Regardless of the efforts of some among us to rewrite or erase America’s brutal history, the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue to impact our lives at home and worldwide.

WOMEN WITH AGENCY
(Working Title)

Chapter One: Severed Roots

When I took my first breath on leaving my mother’s womb, I did not know the adverse conditions already stacked up against my chances for survival. Born female. My mother, just turned eighteen years, trapped in an undesirable marriage. My father, eight years older, forced to wed the minor he had seduced and impregnated. A poor, working-class family in a small backwater country, then known as British Guiana, forged by violence. Subjects of Empire forgotten by the gods. Brown-skinned in a region dominated by the white man, where skin color defined one’s place in society.

That year I made my entrance, bawling at the stark sensations of a strange new world, political upheavals across the waning British Empire were already in motion. King George VI, the reigning British monarch since 1936 and the first Head of the British Commonwealth, died on June 2, 1953. Our new monarch was a woman, crowned Queen Elizabeth II. Just twenty-five years old. God save the Queen. Long may she reign. My mother was twenty years; my father twenty-eight years.

As I grew older and became aware of the world around me, I observed that life under the British colonial government was no paradise for descendants of peoples transported to this conquered territory, first settled by indigenous peoples over thirteen thousand years ago. Thrown together for the capital gains of the then lucrative European sugar market, we owed our existence mainly to sugar cane cultivation. The wounds of discord and resentment between the diverse ethnic populations ran deep.

After Christopher Columbus first stumbled on the so-called New World in 1492, under the auspices of the Spanish Crown, Dutch traders were the first to claim the territory located on the northern shoulder of what later became known as South America. Despite continual Spanish aggression, by 1648, the Dutch managed to establish three colonies—Essequibo, Berbice, and later Demerara—built on the backs of African slaves, first introduced in 1633.

After two failed attempts in the late 1700s to grab the colonies from Dutch settlers, the British finally gained a foothold on the vast continent dominated by Spain and Portugal. In 1831, during the reign of King William IV (1830-1837), Holland’s three colonies became British Guiana. After 232 years, English replaced Dutch as the official language. Hundreds of Dutch words in common use, such as koker (sluice) and stelling (pier), became part of the Guianese English language. The names of villages are also a reminder of Holland’s enduring influence on the colony: Beterverwagting, Meerzorg, Uitvlugt, and Vergenoegen are just a few examples.

The greatest Dutch legacy is the transformation of the coastal landscape from swampland into agricultural land for cotton and sugar cane cultivation. The Dutch engineering marvel of forty-nine miles of drainage canals and ditches, as well as sixteen miles of waterways for transportation and irrigation on higher ground was made possible with African slave labor. In 1948, the British Venn Sugar Commission estimated that the original Dutch construction of these waterways must have entailed moving at least one hundred million tons of soil. What a muddy hellscape for the slave laborers that must have been!

Decades of intermittent rebellions for freedom gained traction when King William IV, pressured by the abolitionists, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. The new law did not take effect in Guiana until August 1, 1834. Jubilation was short-lived for the estimated 69,579 slaves on learning that they faced a six-year transition period as apprenticed laborers. Same punishing conditions. Same demanding bosses. Four years of open revolt and constant opposition short-circuited the new apprenticeship system.

After more than two hundred years of African enslavement of mind and body, the darkness of oppression lifted from across the land. Freed at last, the blacks fled the inhumane conditions of plantation life. Over time they would learn that laws do not automatically change human attitudes and behavior towards others we deem as inferior beings.

Faced with a dire labor shortage, the white planter class first looked to Portugal for help. After a 78-day voyage via London on the Louisa Baillie, forty-eight peasant farmers from the Portuguese colony of Madeira arrived on May 3, 1835. Though they were hard workers with experience of sugar cane cultivation, they suffered many casualties under the deplorable living conditions on Guiana’s plantations. Owing to the harsh economic conditions and political unrest in Madeira at the time, Madeirans continued coming to Guiana. They ventured into the husker and retail trade, coming into direct conflict with ex-slaves who operated in the trade. By 1882, when migration ended, there were 30,645 Portuguese from Madeira as well as the Azores and Cape Verdes who had settled in the colony. Though the white colonial government did not classify them as “white” but rather as “Portuguese,” they enjoyed a high social status just below the British plantocracy.

British India soon provided a new prospect for a steady, cheap labor supply. The East Indians or “coolies,” as they were called, proved more successful for the rigors of plantation life. Contracted for a five-year period as indentured laborers—instituting another form of slavery—the first group of 396 East Indians arrived on May 5, 1838, from India on the Whitby and Hesperus. Eighteen Indians died during the 112-day voyage. By the end of the Indian Indentureship system in April 1917, 238,979 East Indian immigrants had set foot on the shores of Guiana. Like the former black slaves, their dark skin placed them on the lower rungs of British colonial society.

The white planter class also experimented with indentured laborers from China. In early 1853, three ships arrived in the colony, carrying 647 Chinese immigrants. Over the following twenty-six years, ending in 1879, more than 13,000 Chinese came to Guiana, forming the nucleus of the minority Chinese community in the colony.

Whose blood pumps through my arteries? I know very little. My maternal grandparents migrated to the United States in the 1940s, leaving behind my mother and her two youngest female siblings in British Guiana under the care of their mother’s sister. Grandmother, as we called her, died when I was about three or four years old. She was married to a soft spoken and generous man we called Grandfather. A colored man, over six-foot-five tall, he owned and operated a bakery in the capital, Georgetown. As kids, my four siblings and I spent many happy times with our cousins at Grandfather’s large and spacious home above the bakery and shop. A wisp of baking bread evokes memories of those carefree days.

My maternal grandmother was born in British Guiana to Portuguese immigrants from Portugal (father) and Bolivia (mother). She married a black man, a descendant of African slaves, born in the British West Indian Island of Barbados. He operated an import-export business between the two British colonies. Since they migrated to the United States almost a decade before my conception, I never had the chance to meet them and hear their stories. My mother never spoke about them. As children, we knew very few of our Portuguese relatives. Moreover, we had no connection with our black, Barbadian relatives.

My paternal grandparents, who had died when my father was an adolescent, also remain a mystery. I have learned only that my Chinese paternal grandfather arrived in British Guiana as a six-year-old from China. Where in China? Which year and vessel did he arrive in the colony? I know only that, after his death, his common law wife or mistress and their four sons—a fifth son died from drowning—inherited none of his wealth or property. My father had frequent contact with only one Chinese relative whose son, a few years older than I am, often visited our home.

My paternal grandmother’s origin is lost in humanity’s harsh realities. Based on her surname, she was a colored woman with Scottish ancestry. Was she a bastard child of a white rapist? Following her death, her orphaned sons were separated: two were raised by a relative and the other two by a close friend. My father, too, never talked about his past nor his parents.

What secrets and hurts did my mother and father harbor? In dealing with my own emotional wounds, I have come to understand the pain of remembering and verbalizing our trauma. As I would learn when I reunited with my mother in Los Angeles, after over thirty years of separation, my parents were two broken individuals thrown together in an unholy matrimony.

In growing up in a multiracial and multi-ethnic society, severed from its ancestral roots, I learned to embrace others with all their differences. Beginning with the false conception of male superiority over the female, our differences are social constructions to keep the masses of humanity divided. So much easier for the (heterosexual or cisgender) male minority power elite to control us. Since the creation of the patriarchy over four thousand years ago, violence has remained their preferred strategy for deterring and eliminating all threats to their dominance.