Chitra and Pritha Singh Oral History Interview
Chitra Singh is a singer/songwriter and a nursing aide. Here, she and her sister Pritha, co-founder of the Rakjumari Cultural Center, an Indo-Caribbean arts and culture organization in Queens, share the family's history of double diaspora and some of the objects, including an intricately carved brass lota, that made the journey across generations from India to Guyana to New York City.
Kokila Bahadur Oral History Interview
Kokila Bahadur, a retired registered nurse, speaks with her niece Gaiutra about coming to America alone in her late twenties, when she was a married mother of two. She came as a nurse trainee at the Jersey City Medical Center in 1966, the year of Guyana's independence.
Salima and Aliyah Khan Oral History Interview
Salima Khan, a high school teacher and college adjunct lecturer in Queens, converses with her daughter Aliyah, an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan and author of Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean.
Sheorani and Kamelia Kilawan Oral History
Sheorani Kilawan, a claims supervisor at the New York State Insurance Fund, speaks with her daughter Kamelia Kilawan, a journalist who worked most recently for Al Jazeera English in Qatar, at their family home in South Ozone Park, Queens.
Ramu by Moses Bhagwan
Moses Bhagwan wrote "Ramu," a moving tribute to an archetypal figure in Guiana's history, the sugar cane cutter carrying his cutlass home from the fields, in 1964. At the time, Bhagwan was a political prisoner in a detention camp run by British colonial authorities. He wrote the poem, another one dedicated to his wife, and another invoking freedom in a notebook given to him by his sister.
repeat movement until by Nadia Misir
"repeat movement until" was composed by Nadia Misir, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens College. The poem gives elegaic voice to a wedding ring handed down in a family and evokes its experience with labor, with skin, with surfaces, with temperatures, with grandmothers and granddaughters, with death.
One Last Bag by Elizabeth Jaikaran
"One Last Bag" was composed by Elizabeth Jaikaran, the author of the short story collection Trauma. With its buoyant wit, it levitates what is otherwise heavy: the weight of an overstuffed suitcase and, through the figure of a migrant trying to please her Queens cousin, the weight of family expectations.
Wazir and Jordanna Ishmael Oral History
Jordanna Ishmael, an attorney at a law firm in Miami, speaks to her father Wazir Ishmael about his journey as a ten year-old boy from the sugar plantation in Berbice, Guyana where his father had worked as a "dispenser" (a cross between a pharmacist and physician) to the Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in England. When he arrived there in 1970, he was one of two children of color there.
Photograph of Wazir Ishmael
Wazir Ishmael is pictured here, at age 10, with his father Yussuph Ishmael, a dispenser at the Rose Hall Sugar Estate in Guyana, and Alan Dabbs, whose family Wazir stayed with during school holidays when he was in boarding school.
Parbatee Mohan and Dan Persaud Oral History Interview
Daniel Persaud, a musician, interviews his grandmother Parbatee Mohan, a seamstress from a village in Berbice, Guyana about emigrating, her expectations of life in the United States, working to build their American Dream and her recent visit to India. The interview took place in the enclave of "Little Guyana" in Richmond Hill, Queens.