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By Dr. Juliet Emanuel |
January 2002: Is home a figment of your imagination visited only in dreams? A place where all grows and which you in your dreams never do? I do not know if I ever left the twin worlds of primary school or British Guyana, especially in October when I hastened into that old elementary school with its spanking new building and clean yard in Kitty. Indeed, I did not want to go there. It is a place best left behind because of awareness and a growing predilection for hiding at that time. It is a place in which the meaning of subject quickly began to overgrow the meaning of citizen, it is a place of forced pleasantries and nagging fears. It is a place that, buried, forms the nexus of some of the papers I present.
The new building, that was to be opened on November 11, is a joy to behold. Once called Kitty Methodist Primary School, it is now J. E. Burnham. My visit was shy, impatient, and my rush must have seemed rude. But I did not want to return to the shame of a black child draped in a whiteness that still nags at the edges of my voice, to the nothingness of my psyche, to the formalized of source of the doubling, the tripling of a confusion that it may be possible for some to dismiss as they revel in their positions of freedom in other parts of the world
But this school is in the place where my grandmother owned property. This was the place where I loved to call out to my cousin as she passed by, this was the place where we all knew each other, this was the place without which I would not now have the career that I have. This is the place to which I may give a small gift and have it graciously accepted. And this is the place where I should know better than to eat before the rest of the group and where I was expected to salute at the March Past
When as I hurried from the school grounds where memory served only as a reminder of the ghosts of my friend, where the old woman, not the same one surely, still swept the school, I was tugged back into that glorious past of School Sports. I was never good at Sports. I did not want to run. I did not want to compete period. I was the one who held one end of the tape, I was the one who called out the names of the winners. The faculty invited me and so I went to School Sports at J.E. Burnham School determined not to see Kitty Methodist.
The sun was hot. The houses were lined up. They paraded around Transport Ground. And I did the March Past with the Head Mistress and the Senior Master. I was informed later by my cousin that I did not salute. But as I stood there, more shy than they knew and as I looked at those little faces, I knew that not only had I never left home but that I could not return home. I had to give a speech. I wanted to hug all those glowing, expectant faces instead and to tell them how precious and wonderful they all were and how sure I was that their compatriots who died in The World Trade Center destruction and the damage to the Pentagon surely had days like this one and had been doing their own jobs so well on that fateful day, and how great all of us were -- only, these were thoughts that rushed through the mind. For, this was their Sports Day and I had to smile and speak as one had spoken fifty years before when I was their age and their school was called Kitty Methodist. I looked down on what I used to be and with the knowledge of five decades told them about this man who had come back to visit our school and how excited we all were to see someone from "away." And that the school was named after his father. They shouted the name of their school. And that they should run well and hard and I called the name of Claudette Masdammer They cheered and fell away.
I heard that the first race had started because of the noise from the children. I heard that the balloon man had come onto the ground from the squeals of the children. I heard that the ice-cream man had come from the ringing of the bells on his cart. I enjoyed the sports, each and every run. The chests puffed out. The limps of those who dared too much, the lack of grumbling from those who did not come first, second or third, the involvement of the parents. The reminder that lunch was served at a precise hour and that chewing gum was a despicable habit. Sports day but not exactly as I remembered it. Or I would not have eaten my lunch long before anyone else did his or hers. There was a slight tilt to my day like that given to the frame of a mystery film; my memories were without color; my day held together by the collectivity of a people who held me there because I had been born in a country that has changed and yet not changed, by the jeers of the boys from the back bench, by the carefully kept records of each race in a neatly red ruled notebook, by drinks, frozen and liquid, in plastic bags, by proud parents, by the stares from children of neighboring schools enjoying another school's Sports Day, by my own sense of an unwavering blue sky
A relative was coming to visit. There were still a few races to be run. The Headmistress, Ms. Gloria Williams, walked me to the gate. We enjoyed, I believe, a conversation that was to the point. I had not learned well enough how to hail one of the new (to me) buses. So it became a short walk home because I had no choice but to walk. I saw one friend from school days as I hurried on my way. We chatted briefly, the sort of curiously intimate conversation in which friends of many years indulge. Then I went on lest I be late for the appointment. At home, I smiled as I described my enjoyment of the morning and early afternoon. For, I knew that the care that went into Sports day, the display of pedagogy that I had seen the day before on school boards at the new version of Kitty Methodist, the integrity of the Headmistress, Ms. Gloria Williams, the Deputy Headmistress Marjorie Beckles-Arthur, the Senior Master, and the rest of the faculty and staff, testify to the pursuit of an excellence to education in which Guyana continues to take pride.