Creolese Curry/Creolese Collage

Creolese Curry - Video
Creolese Collage - Mixed media, 24 x 16 in
Not for sale

In 2015, my mother and I arrived at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport ready to be swept by curry memories. I first visited Guyana when I was five to spend time with my mother's mother, Grandma Shirley. We spent most afternoons picking through rice grains for weevils and chasing chickens for supper.

We were there this time to visit my Aunt Annette months before she passed from breast cancer. We drove Annette to one of her last doctor's appointments on our final day. I agreed to write this story about Guyana, where we could use our family as a center to look outward-understanding complex relationships between people who co-resisted colonialism by forming unions while addressing the messy, overlapping and uncomfortable ways dominant forms of power function in Pomeroon.

“Creolese Curry” is an homage to diasporic connectivity through poor images and hyperreal extensions of geographies from the Caribbean to the States. The intention behind this video was to hear more about my mother's childhood in Guyana and her experience growing up on the farm. The story turned into how my mother uses food to physically and mentally heal herself while recognizing her tense relationship with food.

The video glitches and sits out of sync from time to time, reflecting our imperfect but functioning relationships invoking Legacy Rusell's “Glitch Feminism.” Penguin Random House writes, "A glitch is normally thought of as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology, and the body. The glitch offers an opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves into an infinite variety of identities."