I was ignorant to believe that migrating would help with the automatic erasure of my most excruciating and piercing racial and anti-black memories and experiences. That has not happened. I had expected that migrating meant I would have had a fresh start to cultivate my own values and principles, free from the influence of my parent’s soiled life experiences and the communal imposition of supremacy by non-black people and structured systems in Guyana.
These experiences and painful memories have become increasingly harder to obliterate because of racial animosity, both online and offline, fuelled by polarised global politics, Guyana’s 2020 elections and the common reality of many states using the police and social structures to further relegate already marginalised people. Experiences such as these can be categorised as racial trauma, according Maryam Jernigan-Noesi, a psychologist who studied at Boston College’s Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture. She explains, “it’s not just me and my lifetime and what I’ve experienced — it’s the stories you heard from family members, it’s witnessing that of colleagues or peers, and now with social media and online mechanisms of folks sharing videos, it’s also witnessing things that you may not experience directly.”
The feeling is similar to that of being a caged bird, trapped, because every time a new experience occurs it manages to teleport me back to specific life events where I was both the beneficiary and victim of racial experiences and anti-blackness. I also re-evaluate past experiences that I might have overlooked and am perpetually left with a feeling of hopelessness, guilt, and shame.
I am what many would call a “dougla”, a derogatory term used in many places that seeks to identify Indians who have been “infected” with blackness and are no longer pure enough to be seen as a real Indian. The word has its origins in Bhojpuri (a Hindi dialect spoken by the majority of Indians who migrated to Guyana as indentured labourers). In Northern India, it was used to identify someone with parents of different castes and had strong connotations with pollution as inter-caste marriages were seen as illegitimate in Orthodox Hinduism.
Growing up, I always felt tokenised by society as the ideal racial poster child to curb the country’s ethnic divisiveness, but my dougla experiences varied according to social settings. In predominately Indian settings, I was made to feel like an outcast, but at the same time like the acceptable black because of my British education, my registered home address in Guyana (an acclaimed bourgeois neighbourhood) and the fact that my mode of dress and overall look pandered to more Eurocentric ideals. These notions were sanctioned under the disguise of class and stock sentiments, presumably to lift me but also to separate me from poor people and poor black people in particular without making me feel guilty at how my many privileges came to be at their expense in some way or the other.
In predominately black settings, I was made to feel positively special and different mostly because I wasn’t completely black. But sometimes I was also treated like an outcast because it was felt I couldn’t completely relate to the true black struggle. The latter was completely accurate because it was not my lived experience. To be dougla meant juggling two lives and managing anger, guilt, and shame all at once. I had access to very separated worlds in Guyana, which was both a blessing and a curse.
To understand Guyana’s race relations and how they came to be means confronting a place where many of us don’t want to go: our history. We have the accounts of how our colonial past was used to influence how we see each other and breed a culture of ethnic distrust, with the colonial masters pulling the strings for their economic glory. It paints a stark picture of how we went on to develop stereotyped views of Blacks (as typically poor, dishonest, and lazy), Indians (as typically hardworking, sly, and conniving) and Portuguese (as typically well organised, smart). Looking at our history means acknowledging the socio-economic realities birthed by both slavery and indentureship and how they went on to shape economic power and by extension access to opportunity. It means recognising how religious culture was used as a tool to demonise one race group and uplift another, all in the name of upholding white supremacy (mentally forcing us assimilate to Anglo-Saxon spiritual beliefs) despite the white man removing himself physically from the picture. Our history also reveals that violence is not inherent to one group as seen by the massacres at Wismar, Lusignan, Bartica, and Lindo Creek. It can be perpetrated by any one person who feels marginalised by the system that ‘massa’ developed and left for us to work with and for them to benefit from. History scares us and understandably so. Because if we were to honestly look at it, we would have to face our worst demons: ourselves and the reality of what we are capable of and what we have been susceptible to for the sake of race protection and power.
During my conscious political life in Guyana, I witnessed how the two major ethnic groups would arm themselves with fears about each other stoked by the two major parties through politicised stereotypes, particularly during elections time. Growing up in my parents’ business, I would see how the staff who worked in the bond would separate themselves during election periods into two groups – Indians and Blacks – almost as if it were a company rule. I would listen to the screams of my mother as my father beat her to find out who she voted for.
My mother is Indian, and my father is Black, and their marriage produced four children, but they each remained so scared of ‘the other side’ that whatever love they had could not bridge their deep ethnic/political cleavages. Therefore, they never allowed themselves to make constructive criticisms on policy and practices for their party of choice and willingly turned blind eyes to the reduced value of human life, particularly poor black lives.
I remember the army raiding our home when I was around 13 or 14. I recall feeling empathy for my father as he played a recording for his children of a top-ranking police official admitting to pinning blame on him for violence that took place in Agricola. But I also felt ethnic distrust towards him because in our communal culture to be Black meant to be treated with suspicion and because I, too, have survived his wrath.
I remember how my mom racialised household labour, often giving the most physically excruciating work to Black women and men, and turning a blind eye when other members of staff made them feel like thieves when they dared enter the house for a glass of water. I observed how that suspicion accelerated in my mother when I started dating a black man with braids; I was beaten mercilessly by her. I observed with humiliation how she spoke adoringly of a former partner who was mixed with Portuguese and affluent, despite knowing of his shortcomings towards me, her dougla daughter, often referred to as ‘the unpolished one’ by a friend in our company.
Today I observe how she treats my Caucasian husband. He is often a recipient of messages singing praises to his success, his financial ability, his balanced family-life, ultimately putting him on the highest pedestal of what it means to be good and right. Even when the messages aren’t so crystal clear, they always make me question my worth and value.
These memories don’t just leave, they remain with you, they shape how you see life, the racial biases you develop, the decisions you make and how you treat people. It gets even more complex when you start to navigate these biases against flawed parental guidance and relationships/friendships where young and influential minds long for acceptance and praise from their parents and peers. Despite many wanting to hide behind veils of pretence, the science is there to back these claims up. According to the American Psychological Association and studies conducted for the Journal of Immigrant Minority Health Vol. 19, No. 3 and Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 134, 2015, “parents who have gone through trauma resulting in epigenetic alterations — which are inheritable changes in gene expression — can pass those changes onto their children. Even if their child does not have direct exposure to racial trauma, the child will have increased sensitivity to stories of discrimination, witnessing racial trauma and systematic oppression.”
It has been a tug of war, something far more complex than a Black and white issue. It has been absolute psychological warfare of the worst kind that my geographic positioning and the amputation of relationships/friendships can’t solve in totality. It has been a constant triangulation of shame, guilt and anger trying not to be sucked into this colossal mess but simultaneously trying to check myself and unlearn flawed racial behavioural patterns. It has been bawling when the pressure peaks. It has been silence, due to exhaustion. It has been staying silent and allowing it to happen. It has been feelings of wanting to give up because I know how to navigate my privileges to remove myself from marginalisation by way of upholding the ‘good Black’ ideology. It has been constant hard work managing feeling liberated and defeated all at the same time.
It will take more than a change in political culture to mend our severely damaged social fabric. It will take words, music, dance, therapy, re-education and most importantly our independent ability to remove our masks and tell our individual stories in the most naked way to be better and by extension build stronger communities. May we all never fear to give the blood that we owe, for it is a debt that needs to be repaid in exchange for personal and collective happiness, for us to collectively thrive as a culturally hybrid people and pay respect to those we have lost to racial and economic oppression—a sad reminder of what we are capable of despite us not having bloody hands.
