Ajudhia Persaud
There's a thwarted love story implied in the entry records of Ajudhia Persaud, a student at McGill University in Montreal and a repeat visitor to New York to see his wife Laika.
Motee Singh's Arrival Record
Motee "Kid" Singh, a professional boxer, arrives in New York in 1931 on the steamship Munamar and is identified on the passenger manifest as an "East Indian" able to read and write English and "Hindoo." The featherweigh
Rose Su Persaud's Arrival Record
In 1924, a 23-year old widow named Rose Su Persaud arrived at Ellis Island and declared her intention to go live with her sister Agnes Premdas at the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel in Harlem, founded and run by Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist United Negro Improvement Association.
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.
Poem, "Ramu" Manuscript
This is the original manuscript for Ramu, composed while Moses Bhagwan was imprisoned by the British for his role as an anti-colonial leader, in the youth wing of the Guiana's People's Progressive Party.
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.
Guyana Exercise Book Cover with Burnham's Image
This notebook contains diagrams of mitochondrial DNA by Mahendra Bahadur when he was a student at the University of Guyana in the late 1970s.
A heavy wooden vase, carried
This photograph was taken in Cumberland Village in Guyana the year before Gaiutra Bahadur's family left for America. Here, the archival creators fellow is sitting in the living room of the Bahadur family home, built by her grandfather born on a ship from India to Guyana a mile from the plantation where he worked as a sugar cane cutter.
Shew Persaud's Naturalization Petition
Shew Persaud was born in Georgetown, Guiana's colonial capital, in 1881. After arriving in the United States on a ship that sailed via Barbados, he petitioned to become a U.S. citizen twice, in 1917 and 1924. The first time, he was working as a dishwasher and living in West Harlem, separated from his wife, who was still in British Guiana.