TOWARDS A CULTURAL RHETORICS APPROACH TO CARIBBEAN RHETORIC: AFRICAN GUYANESE WOMEN FROM THE VILLAGE OF BUXTON TRANSFORMING ORAL HISTORY
Pauline Felicia Baird
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
May 2016
Committee:
Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Advisor
Alberto Gonzalez, Graduate Faculty Representative
Sue Carter Wood
Lee Nickoson © 2016
Pauline Felicia Baird
All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT
Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Advisor
In my project, “Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Caribbean Rhetoric: African
Guyanese Women from the Village of Buxton Transforming Oral History,” I build a Cultural
Rhetorics approach by listening to the stories of a group of African Guyanese women from the
village of Buxton (Buxtonians). I obtained these stories from engaging in a long-term oral
history research project where I understand my participants to be invested in telling their stories
to teach the current and future generations of Buxtonians. I build this approach by using a
collaborative and communal methodology of “asking”—Wah De Story Seh? This methodology provides a framework for understanding the women’s strategies in history-making as
distinctively Caribbean rhetoric. It is crucial for my project to mark these women’s strategies as
Caribbean rhetoric because they negotiate their oral histories and identities by consciously
and unconsciously connecting to an African ancestral heritage of formerly enslaved Africans in
Guyana. In my project, I enact story as methodology to understand the rhetorical strategies that
the Buxtonian women use to make oral histories and by so doing, I examine the relationship
among rhetoric, knowledge, and power. iv
To Buxton
“To add to our illustrious line of sons and daughters, who all time gave of their best that they
may shine for Buxton my own native land” (The Buxton Battle Song). v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the ancestors who made a way for me, I offer my deepest thanks.
To my family: The Bairds, the Griffiths, the Jacksons, and the Watsons, I owe a debt of gratitude. My immediate family: Lenny Oberg, Gem Murray, Gavin Baird, Dain Baird-Rogers,
Morton Baird, Dara Baird, Junior Baird, Denise Martin, Marva Fortune, Wendy Zephyr, Audrey
Zephyr-Willabus, Dorothy Oberg, thank you. I also thank my friends who provided material and moral support: Paulette Coulter, Joy Forde, Cloyd Nelson, Sherranne Doorgasingh, John
Newton, Basil London, Sarah Tekle, Shirley Faulkner-Springfield, Colleen Holder, Egon Reid,
Ron Hogue, Penelope Montfort, Wayne Gordon, Andre Baveghems, Michael Ward, Roger
Jeffrey, Thora Mark, Bernadette Boatswain, Ulric Mark, the late Mark Austin, the late Skip
Zeitler, Dr. Vibert Cambridge, Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, Dr. Kimani Nehusi, and Dr. Dianne
Strong for listening to my stories, sharing your knowledge, reading my manuscript, proofreading, feeding me, driving me places, picking up from airports, giving me a table in your homes to write, and much more. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr. Andrea Riley-
Mukavetz for her unfailing support and mentorship throughout this project. To Dr. Gillian
Richards-Greaves for inspiration, long late-night chats, and support. I would also like extend thanks to those who offered guidance: Dr. Sue Carter Wood, Dr. Lee Nickoson, Dr. Alberto
Gonzales, Dr. Christopher Schreiner, and Eusi Kwayana. My sincerest gratitude is extended to the Buxtonian women: Jennifer Lee, Lorna Campbell, Cheryl Glen, Shevan Forde, and Tamika
Boatswain, who shared their life stories with me so that I could do this work. v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER I. SITUATING THE STUDY—MAPPING OUR JOURNEYS
WITH STORIES ...... 1
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians ...... 1
Buxton People Stop Train ...... 1
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee ...... 10
Making Relationships: Five Buxtonian Women ...... 14
Shevan Forde ...... 14
Cheryl Glen ...... 17
Tamika Boatswain ...... 20
Jennifer Lee ...... 23
Lorna Campbell ...... 27
Making Connections: Situating Land and People in Story ...... 30
Making Relationships: Situating Story with (in) Cultural Rhetorics ...... 35
Making Relationships: Situating Story in Buxtonian History and Caribbean Rhetoric 43
Conclusion…………...... 45
CHAPTER II. AN “ASKING” METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
FOR ORAL HISTORY ...... 47
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians ...... 47
I Sell My Village ...... 47
I Heard It First from My Grandmother ...... 49
You Go to Your Grandmother to Collect Bam-bye ...... 50 vi
A Lot of Traditions Are Not Being Passed Down ...... 52
Women Are the Agents of Change ...... 53
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee ...... 54
An “Asking Methodology”—I Began with a Poem: ...... 57
“Asking” to Do Cultural Rhetorics ...... 60
“Asking” to do Caribbean Rhetoric ...... 61
We Do: Using Blood and Marking Heritage ...... 64
#“Old People” vs “Archivist” ...... 67
“What if I Talk About People and Their Family Get Vexed with Me?” 69
Writing, Trust, and Colonial Impact ...... 70
Leaving a Buxtonian, Returning an Academic ...... 74
Conclusion…………...... 75
CHAPTER III. RELATING LAND, BODIES, AND PRACTICE ...... 77
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians ...... 77
They Used to Throw Box ...... 77
They Had to Go and Break the Bricks ...... 78
Some Never Came Back ...... 79
It Always Seemed to be Struggling ...... 81
You Blaze a Trail ...... 82
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee ...... 83
Weaving Our Stories as a Decolonial and Land-based Practice ...... 85
Towards a Decolonial and Land-based Inquiry: Mapping Land and Making a
Village ...... 87 vii
Valuing Land: Cultivating a Relationship for Growth ...... 91
Land, Bodies, and Practice: The Women Who Planted ...... 93
Conclusion…………...... 98
CHAPTER IV. TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF SURVIVAL...... 100
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians ...... 100
My Grandparents Talked About That Story ...... 101
Buxtonian Women are Very Strong ...... 103
That is the One that [‘s] Gonna do Something for You ...... 103
I Have Never Told That Story ...... 104
Success is Supposed to Breed Success ...... 105
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee ...... 106
Girl-Child Training ...... 109
Girl-Child Training: A Land-based Methodology and Pedagogy ...... 114
Village Perspectives and Dominant Academic Perspectives ...... 117
Location of knowledge ...... 117
Entrances to knowledge making ...... 117
Knowledge authorities ...... 118
Apprenticeship in Girl-Child Training: Methodology and Pedagogy ...... 118
Girl-Child Training as Embodied Land-based Practice ...... 121
Dresses Might be Different, but it was the Same Material ...... 122
I Have Options ...... 124
Making Space for the Domestic in the Academic ...... 128 viii
The Mindful Body...... 129
Conclusion…………...... 137
CHAPTER V. WHERE I HAVE BEEN AND WHERE I AM GOING ...... 138
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians and the Dissertation Committee ...... 138
Under the Conversation Tree ...... 138
Buxtonian women moving the conversation ...... 142
Towards the future: pedagogy and practice ...... 144
Caribbean rhetoric: being heard and being seen...... 148
Conclusion…………...... 149
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 151
APPENDIX A. CONSENT LETTER...... 159
APPENDIX B. HSRB APPROVAL...... 163 ix
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Quasi-family tree of Shevan Forde ...... 15
2 Quasi-family tree of Cheryl Glen ...... 18
3 Quasi-family tree of Tamika Boatswain ...... 21
4 Quasi-family tree of Jennifer Lee ...... 24
5 Quasi-family tree of Lorna Campbell ...... 27
6 Free Political Location Map IV-2 Buxton/Mahaica ...... 31 Baird 1
CHAPTER I. SITUATING THE STUDY—MAPPING OUR JOURNEYS WITH STORIES
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians
Dear Young Buxtonians,
Leh we tell yuh a story.1
Buxton People Stop Train
Village Backdam unda wata
Crap a ratten, stack a dead
Ratten tanya, ratten casada
An Govna a sleep a feda bed?2
‘tone de a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat
‘tone de a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat me tell yuh. 3
Gov’na bin a train
An’ he fut cock ten
Yuh see he suit an’ he cork hat white like rain
Special special carriage
Special porter fuh carry he luggage 4
1 Let me tell you this story.
2 Backdam, or farmlands, are flooded. Crops (Tanya and Cassava) are rotting, livestock are dying. The Governor sleeps well (on a feather bed?).
3 A proverb that means: “The stone at the bottom of the river does not feel the heat of the sun.” Privileged persons cannot feel the social injustice and hardships of others. See Gang Gang by Eusi Kwayana. Baird 2
‘tone de a a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat
‘tone de a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat me tell yuh.
Dat time Buxton did get some strapping uman
Wah na bin frighten backra man 5
Me na bin de when e happen
As me buy am a suh me sell am6
‘tone de a a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat
‘tone de a battam ribba
He na know how sun hat me tell yuh.
Uman throw demself a train line
Train stap.
Gov’na come out
A na de train dem stap
A de Gov’na 7
4 The Governor, who is dressed in white, sits in a special train carriage and is served by a special porter.
5 At that time Buxton had some strong women, with imposing physiques, who were not afraid of the white man.
6 Proverb – As I heard it, I tell/convey it.
7 Women throw themselves on the train tracks and when the train stops the Governor comes out. It’s not the train they stop; it’s Baird 3
You may have heard the story Buxton People Stop Train and you may be wondering why
I am telling it to you in poetry, but first let me introduce myself. I am Pauline Baird, the eldest daughter of Fitz “Buddy” Baird and Megan Baird of Buxton.8 Like my parents and relatives— the Bairds, the Jacksons, and the Griffiths—I am a Buxtonian: I was born and raised in Buxton and spent most of my adult life there. The Buxton People Stop Train story and poem have traveled with me all the way from the Buxton Village, in Guyana, to the university in Ohio,
USA, where I am a doctoral student. I find myself (re)telling this story to Buxtonians and scholars at the university. As I (re) tell the story, however, I realize that I am discussing with intellectuals in the village and the university about how stories function as maps that connect us to each other, our ancestors, the land, and our practices.
In my early childhood, my mother and my grandmother used to tell me the story of
Buxton People Stop Train. They said that during the time when Guyana was called British
Guiana, some pregnant women of Buxton learned that the Governor was on a train that would pass through villages such as Buxton. As the story says, some women stood up, while others sat and lay on the train line as the train was approaching the village. When the train stopped, the governor came out and villagers made their complaints about the deteriorating conditions caused by flooding. In addition to the story my mother and grandmother told me, when I was a teenager,
I also heard a poem, which I just shared, called Buxton People Stop Train. The poem was written by Eusi Kwayana, a revered elder whom the Buxtonians fondly call the Buxton Sage because of his knowledge and leadership in the village and Guyana. If you notice, in the poem Buxton
People Stop Train, Kwayana, who at present is 90 years old, tells a Dem Seh Story when he says:
the Governor.
8 I am the sister of Gavin (Javid), Dain, Morton (Devil), Dara, and Hirfa and Shaka Baird – a sister and brother who perished when our house was burnt in 1973. I never intended to relate this tragedy, but I find it fitting to mention my family’s tragic story because it reminds me that all of our relations and stories help us connect to each other. Baird 4
“As mi buy am suh mi sell am.” He means to say that he is passing on the story exactly as he
heard it.
As you may notice, I begin this project with a story to you, the young people of Buxton.
This is a deliberate choice I have made. Here is why. I do so to relate to you and to the
intellectuals in the university. In the university, it is required that I use particular methodologies
or principles for research projects. Because stories like Buxton People Stop Train show how
people can make knowledge by connecting to their history and the roles women play on the land,
I am using stories as a methodology to conduct village research and academic research to
connect the Buxtonian community with the university community. Additionally, when they are
connected in specific ways, as I do in this project, stories can teach intellectuals in Buxton and
beyond about oral history and community research to benefit people inside and outside the
university. I also share this project with you to make visible the relationships I make as I use
stories for research.
Initially, I wanted to learn more about who the women in the story were, what they said,
what they thought, and what they did—in their own words—but I did not find their words in
books. Because I did not find the words of women in books, I have often wondered whether one
day you might desire to learn about our heritage; hence, as the project developed, I decided to do
something about it. I am writing down stories—stories by Buxtonian women in their own words
about their life experiences. In those words, I hope to find the stories of women who lived long
ago and to relay cross-generational knowledge to present and future generations of Buxtoninans.
Currently, when I tell the stories, I make connections to many other stories. By making these connections, I am learning to understand how I begin to make relationships with intellectuals from the village and from academic communities. When I talk about intellectuals, I Baird 5
mean scholarly relatives in the academy and relations who make knowledge in their
communities. These stories are maps with which I hope to make sure those Buxtonian women’s
oral history-making relationships become visible. Making relationships is like making maps
through stories. These stories allow us to (re) consider how we make knowledge, show our
identity, and demonstrate relationships of humility, respect, and responsibility. Remember, I told
you that I could not find the women’s words in books? I realized that it was because the making
of stories involved physical activities and oral storytelling. And because writing and reading are
dominant ways of learning about others at the university, our oral stories appear to be missing.
When these stories are missing in written history, readers might believe that our history, our
identity, our ancestors do not matter; when it appears that our history does not matter, or that our
people are not literate, you might come to think that you do not matter. I want to change those
beliefs.
I tell stories to trace my journey as one would mark a map. Using Kwayana’s story in my
experiences I highlight how I think and connect to “Dem Seh Stories,” 9 such as the ones the ole’
people tell and Buxtonians (re)tell. By (re)listening to the stories and telling them, we pass on the
knowledge given to us by our mothers, and grandmothers and others before them. Thus, when I
listen to stories, I understand that stories travel over time and space because of people’s
practices—we tell and retell them the stories and in doing so, we pass them down from
generation to generation. What’s more, this story-telling practice marks the process of making
knowledge which highlights important relational actions that map our interconnected relations as
non-western. These stories collapse time. Stories live in us! In the process of telling stories, we
9 The Dem Seh Story is a genre of oral history in which the participants are not required to provide authorship for story because the story is more important than the source. Dem Seh Story also includes stories told by the elder’s (dead or alive or anecdotal) in this case people invoke the wisdom of the aged to create indirect authority; The Dem Seh Story is used to tell lies, to gossip, to teach, to chide, to entertain, to historicize, and to share news. Baird 6
enact a kind of libation that African-based rituals use to bring the lives of women long dead into
the present time to honor them and to teach us.10
To be clear, when I recall my personal story, I listen to myself, and I think that I am on a
journey that simultaneously takes me back in time as well as anchors me in the present as I conduct
my current research. Using this story and other stories that I share in this project, I forge/create
relationships with Buxtonian women storytellers: our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunties,
our cousins, and all our relatives.
Hear nuh.11 As you know, women in our families and in the village as a whole are often
our first teachers. From them, we learn our family stories, village stories, and nation stories.
These stories are important ways of knowing about how Buxtonian women have always been
story-makers who shape our reality, beliefs about that reality, and how we use our knowledge to
exist in the world. Buxtonian women are storytellers who produce story-makers: through
storytelling they make us, the children, who go on to make knowledge that preserves our village’s history. To understand how we learn to make knowledge from Buxtonian women who lived in a time before our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and cousins, we must listen to stories of our relatives over and over again. By listening to stories that, we, the Buxtonian women tell,
Buxtonian women continue to shape my life and shape my ideas on how to construct new knowledge.
10 Kimani Nehusi, a Guyanese intellectual, in his book Libation:An Afrikan Ritual of Heritage in the Circle of Life, Nehusi tells this story. Libation is pouring liquid on the ground “by and on behalf of all humanity, those living and those yet-to-be-born, to the Creator, to other divinities, to ancestors, and to the environment. It is a practice in the Afrikan life experience that “connects Afrikans to their social history, and so to themselves across generations in different spaces and times. The methodology is at once both multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary” (“Introduction”).
11 Nuh means now. Baird 7
Leh we talk this story. Imagine me at age nine or so with my six younger siblings. We are sitting at our bottom house 12on the ground on crocus bags (burlap), and my mother is performing a story for us as though we are in a theatre, and she is an actor. I am learning the history of the village; I am learning how to tell the story as well. I am becoming a story-maker.
Imagine me at ten years old. I am sitting on the front steps of my grandmother’s house. I am sitting on a lower rung of the steps, between her knees, and she is combing and braiding my hair. And she is telling me a story. She begins “Long time, dem seh….”
I am listening as she pulls the wide-toothed comb through my freshly greased hair. I am learning the history of the village; I am learning how to tell the story as well. I am becoming a story-maker.
Leh’ we talk another family story. I title it ‘Story Leads to Grandfather’s House.’
Imagine my niece at age nine in New York where she was born and raised. She is lying on the bed with her mom, who is telling her a story about our childhood. One day in
2009, when she is fourteen years old, she goes on a school trip to Guyana and decides to visit her grandfather in Buxton for the first time. When she enters the village, she asks a male villager for directions to her grandfather’s house. However, because she does not know that most males in Buxton have false names (nicknames) and her grandfather’s was
“Buddy” Baird, the villager cannot give her directions. He asks, “Where does your grandfather live– Buxton Back, or Buxton Front?” That, too, she does not know.
Nevertheless, she knows a story and tells it to the villager this way—“My mother is Dain
Baird and she said when she was a child their house burned and the children died.”
Immediately, the villager says, “Follow me, I will take you to your grandfather.” And he
12 A bottom house is the space under the home. Because the village is seven feet below sea level, most houses are built on stilts. People use the space beneath for cooking, baking, commerce, and entertaining. Baird 8
does. When her grandfather, my father, sees her, he does not remember her name, but he
recognizes her face and reaches out his hands in welcome and calls her “Dain,” the name
of her mother and my sister. Until that day in 2009, I am not sure whether my sister knew
how well my niece listened to her stories and how the knowledge of the tragedy would
help her find grandfather. My sister’s story is now my niece’s stories, ones that cross land-
masses: the North American Continent, to the South American Continent to connect her
to “all of our relatives.”
That we learn from our elders who we are and why it is important to mapping our journey so that children can learn. Children help carry on traditions. When children listen to stories, children learn that listening is one of the tools for “reading” history. In listening to the stories, we hear all our relatives. Thus I tell those two stories to show that stories map how relationships co-exist on the land and people. Activities that occur on the land are connective pathways that are vital to knowing ourselves, our history, and the world. These stories are maps of the living connections we make to our ways of life, beliefs, and practices that can lead us and our children back home, if we want to go there.
I must confess that my journey with Buxton People Stop Train is not very straightforward because I am realizing that the stories-beget-stories; the stories exist beside, within, and around other stories. As a researcher, I do not consider sharing stories easy. Stories involve other people; they involve me, and telling stories as a researcher is complex, so bear with me as I tell you stories. You will see and hear from five Buxtonian mothers and ordinary women whose stories I record to create maps that help young
Buxtonians remember, imagine, and construct new knowledge. Baird 9
Before I end this letter, I want you to know that in my project I will share four more letters in which I tell you stories by Buxtonian women so that you can learn from them. These letters are part of the story as methodology framework that I told you about earlier. I will tell you from whom I gathered stories, to meet the expectations of academic research. I also include the Wha De Story Seh? [What’s the news or what does the story say] stories and Dem Seh Stories [they say stories] that are Buxtonian methodologies for story-telling in the village. By doing so, I am teaching my professors and readers a Buxtonian and Caribbean story way of researching.
Like any good map, I need to have a key. Thus in my letters to you I write informally, greeting you by asking, Wah De Story Seh? and I tell you stories that the
Buxtonian women tell. After each story, I offer some interpretation. They are mine and if
I make mistakes, please understand that they are mine, only. My dissertation committee will also read these letters, and to mark my journey through the stories, I will use words such as “I listen” or “when I listen.” When I am drawing on the stories to make meaning,
I will use words such as “I hear” or “I understand” or “I feel.”
I will refer to academic scholars and Buxtonians as intellectuals. When I am connecting stories to show relationships, I use terms like bridging and weaving. To mark when I am making relationships among academic scholars, I use terms like “Think of” and “I am reminded of” to bridge or weave intellectuals’ stories together. To further bridge, weave and mark my story as relational maps to connecting with intellectuals in several communities, I sometimes use/ask “Wha De Story Seh?” like the Buxtonians do.
At this time, I will explain more about my project to my dissertation committee and other readers. I invite you to read along as I formally introduce the five Buxtonian Baird 10 women who have agreed to help me tell stories for this research. Without these women, my study would not have been possible.
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee
Dear Dissertation Committee,
I decided to ask five Buxtonian women—Cheryl Glen (Brooklyn, New York), Jennifer
Lee (Brooklyn, New York), Lorna Campbell (Brooklyn, New York), Tamika Boatswain
(Nassau, Bahamas), and Shevan Forde (Buxton, Guyana)—to tell me stories so that I can explore and learn. I learn what it means to be a Buxtonian from each woman:
Shevan: Being a Buxtonian, it gives me a sense of pride. It’s thinking in terms of the
struggles my foreparents went through the sacrifices that they had to make to
purchase this village at the time when they were working hard for little or no pay.
So it gave me a sense of pride that they were able to accomplish that much, that I
can inherit it. Ever since I can remember, there was always a sense of pride of
being a Buxtonian. There was always that sense of pride and looking back over
the years at the caliber of persons that came out of Buxton, and what they have
accomplished, I was always proud to be a Buxtonian.
Cheryl: It means I am proud of where I came from. It means that I have a determination
to succeed no matter what. It means that I should be independent. It means that
you share what you have with others. You look out for the people around
you whether they are family or not because everybody is cousin somebody. I have
seen it happen in my family. We look out though, despite their differences. My
mom came from a very large family and despite their differences whenever one
was in trouble everybody put their heart and hand together in order to do what
they have Baird 11
to do to help that one. So strong family values I would say…. Buxtonians are born
and raised in Buxton and they have deep family roots and background in that you
might find yourself that you are related to almost if not half, three-quarter of the
village because everybody is cousin somebody.
Tamika: It means pride. First and foremost pride because, um, there are a number of
achievements that the ancestors of the village of Buxton would have achieved that
would instill pride in anyone. For example, the purchase of the village even
though they have been recognized as a second village to be purchased by ex-
slaves, they were actually the first group of people to receive their land titles
because they were able to pay off all that money quite quickly. And the
community spirit kicked in from very early on.
Jennifer: The slaves made a way for us. They opened the way, so you know, if you’re in
your field you open the way for those coming. So if you don’t set an example, then
there will be no room for someone to follow. You blaze the trail no matter how
small it is. So I grow up with that because it was like Buxton…took on a whole
meaning. So it became part of my life. So whatever, I went to work with it; it was
in my mind. You have to do your best. Race and whatever beset your life should
not stop you. So I grew up with that spirit, not to be stopped by anything. And you
know mom used to say, “Never say die.” So for me it was always to find a way. I
think that is the spirit of Buxton and that’s what lives in me, and I want to give
back.
Lorna: It’s a proud heritage. To be a Buxtonian, I feel proud, gratified and sometimes Baird 12
lucky to be a member of that community and to have had ancestors or foreparents
who sacrificed so much to provide for me and to provide that confidence, a sense
of confidence and that ability that I can succeed against all odds. I think that they
were a great group of people of inspiration, and I will forever be thankful and
grateful for, you know, the legacy that they have left for me…. I wouldn’t say it is
something that I have always felt because I didn’t know. Um, growing up in the
village or going to school, I don’t recall, let’s say, that part of the education
about our heritage or what our ancestors did. It was more about learning, as they
said, reading, writing and ‘rithmetic…. So, I didn’t and perhaps [know] too
where I came from. Um, the environment may be part of Buxton, I can’t say that I
knew, or even around me, you know a lot of what happened before. Because, I
mean, you know things about emancipation, and all of these things. These are
things I learnt when I grew up. I think that it really kind of kicked in, that sense
when I was in my late teens.
Buxtonian women’s stories concerning what it means to be a Buxtonian elucidate the origins of their identity—a creole ancestral heritage evident in the creation of Buxton Village by former slaves. The women value the purchase and the conversion of the plantation into the village of Buxton. Thus, the women celebrate the ancestor’s actions of making the village a home for them apart of their identity negotiations. In each story, the women express their knowledge of the purchase of the village against great odds by formerly enslaved Africans, generating emotional responses such as gratitude, pride, and admiration. Leaking out from their stories are theories of embodiment, and spiritual relationships with ancestral relations that are land-based knowledge, key components in making Indigenous relationships. Baird 13
Pride is a key motivating factor in their personal responsibility for success, hard work, and reciprocity to the community of Buxton that has inherited the sacrifice of the first villagers— the ex-enslaved. Like Dian Million, I hear the women making a “felt theory” in which they enter
“feel our histories as well as think them,” as they mark their relevance to discourses in decolonial rhetorical expression (54). I take up these knowledge-making processes later in subsequent chapters in this project.
Mapping the experiences of women allows readers to hear them creating in a creole indigenous ontology informed by their relationships to feelings, story, relatives, and land. I use creole indigenous in a decolonial context to refer to Buxtonians, the descendants of people who, in the words of decolonial scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith in “On Being Human,” have been
“ripped from their lands over several generations and shipped into slavery. Africans made the land their home culture under imperialist conditions. The land they made home as enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples were already taken by settlers from another group of indigenous peoples” – the Amerindians (Post Colonialisms 101). Further, by exploring Buxtonian women, I can begin to work towards exploring Caribbean women’s creole indigenous identity to bring visibility to nature of rhetoric of the land as place of new realities and possibilities. Thus, this study provides insight into conceptual ideas on:
● the types of stories Buxtonian women make
● the reasons Buxtonian women make stories
● the ways in which the knowledge of women’s story-making practices play a
meaningful role in Buxtonian/Guyanese everyday lives
● the ways in which listening to Buxtonian women’s stories challenge me to relate
or Baird 14
not to the stories
● the types of stories the women’s stories encourage me to tell
● the ways in which the knowledge of Buxtonian women’s story-making
methodology/ies play a meaningful role in Caribbean Studies
● the types of knowledge rhetoricians in the field of rhetoric and composition can
learn from Buxtonian’s story-making practices
Learning from the women will make visible the community-based knowledge structures in academic communities such as the discipline of rhetoric and composition, Cultural Rhetorics, and Caribbean rhetoric for a more just rhetoric.
In the following section, I introduce each woman by stating how I recruited them to participate in the project. I also explain their family or village connections and display a quasi- family tree to approximate the customary Buxton way introducing each ourselves. These first three women, Shevan, Cheryl, and Tamika once resided in the same neighborhood between
Friendship Road and Company Road. Tamika and Cheryl were close neighbors.
Making Relationships: Five Buxtonian Women
Shevan Forde
I asked a friend of one of my elementary school classmates who lives in Canada to suggest names of women living in Buxton that I could contact by phone for my study. She suggested that I talk to Shevan who lives in Buxton. Shevan still lives at her family home when she grew up. I contacted Shevan on Facebook and got her phone number, and she readily consented to be a part of the study. On January 26, 2015, I interviewed Shevan by Skype call phone and she was willing to share her stories with me. Shevan hails from the Forde and Dorsett families. Below is a figure of her family tree. This figure allows me to introduce Shevan’s family Baird 15 background as a custom of Buxtonians when they introduce each other. Making introductions by genealogy, Buxtonians recognize and honor their relatives by naming them.
Figure 1: Quasi-family tree of Shevan Forde
Shevan introduces herself thus:
My name is Shevan Ford. I live at Company Road, Buxton. I am forty eight
years old. I was born in Buxton; raised in Buxton. I spent the better part of my
life here. My first school years were spent in Buxton. Being a Buxtonian gives me
a sense of pride.
Shevan is the mother of three children and teachers Instructional Technology in a High School in
Georgetown. As a Buxtonian woman, she describes being a Buxtonian as feeling of pride that propels her to be maker of community—“I do a lot of work in the community,” she says. Shevan calls attention to the importance of “sense of pride” by using it four times, and I hear its importance. Repetition of key words and phrases are a form of reduplication that is common way of speaking in the Creolese language to show emphasis.13 In the village, she acts on her sense of pride by being a community worker. She says, “In Buxton, I am a Buxtonian like any other person. I take pride in my village. I do a lot of work within the community.”
13 Creolese is an English-based language that is spoken in many parts of Guyana. See African Guyanese Kweh-Kweh Ritual Performance by Gillian Richards-Greaves. Baird 16
Outside of the village she acts as an ambassador and storyteller for Buxton as part of her way of life. She says, “Outside of Buxton, I sell my village to other persons. I tell them about
Buxtonians and what they have accomplished. I’d try to erase whatever stereotypes that a person may have had about Buxtonians.” One of the stories she tells is about how she understands
Buxton People Stop Train and fosters the right representation of Buxtonians’ story.
Another story she tells involves food. It is the Bam-bye story that offers a glimpse of how stories illuminate the ritualization of food as part of the process of how women make a
Buxtonian child that would later develop a sense of pride. Shevan says that would go to her
“grandmother [‘s] to collect Bam-bye. Bam-bye was food that cook and lef’ back.”14 She also articulates some clear ideas on the roles of grandmothers in the upbringing of children by saying that grandmothers had nothing more to do than “comb your hair, rub you down with coconut oil, and tell you stories.”
The loss of tradition in the age of the Nintendo and the television concerns her as a mother trying to educate her children in using the ways she had been educated about the village.
Knowing that “stories shape [her] life” she tries to tell them to her children “basically the way my mother told me stories without any research or so,” but the children are not as receptive as she was to her mother’s and grandmother’s stories. When the children watch television or become “glued to their nintendo”, “they tune from me” she says. The children’s behavior breaks with tradition. Consequently, “a lot of the traditions are not being passed down; a lot of these traditions are not being passed down because time is taken up elsewhere.”
14 All unconsumed meals are called Bambye, an epenthesis of the words Bye and Bye. Before people could access electric power and could store food in refrigerators, they cooked almost every meal and consumed most of it at mealtimes. However, left overs were eaten later in the day. Customarily, Buxtonians and Guyanese eat Bambye anytime, however, school children eat usually eat Bambye at the end of the school day, but well before dinner. On other occasions, Bambye becomes dinner. Grandmothers form bonds with their grandchildren through making and giving food. They often deliberately leave Bambye for their grandchildren who would stop by on their way home from school. Baird 17
Shevan is hopeful. She believes that children are less accessible, but women still have
roles to play in helping the community to survive in its storytelling tradition because as Shevan
says, “women are the agents of change.” She has a plan of how to make change by telling stories
while doing simple things like “combing their hair” or “taking them to school” while telling
them “something about the building [landmark buildings].” These are teachable moments that
Shevan identifies as useful in helping the children “see what the village was built on and try to
build on that” to “pave your [their] own way.”
Overall, Shevan’s stories complicate the narrative of the women stopping the train.
Weaving her own experiences of life in Buxton more than a century and a half after the events of the purchase of the village and the stopping of the train, she creates a constellation of stories that offer new knowledge of how intergenerational Buxtonian women make family and community dynamics in the twenty-first century.
Cheryl Glen
Cheryl, known as “teacher Cheryl,” was my second recruit. Cheryl and I are acquainted
because we taught at the Lusignan Government School in the 1980s. I was happy to interview
Cheryl, who had lived for some time outside the village during her childhood, as her stories
could offer some perspectives on Buxton as a person who has had life experiences in a place
other than Buxton. She is fifty-seven years old. She was born in Buxton and was mostly raised
there. She is the daughter of Shirley Glen from the Glen “tribe.”15 She is the mother of three
girls.
15 The word “tribe” is loosely used to describe large families and with large extended families in more than one generation. The Glen family, in one generation, has had twenty-four siblings fathered by one man. Baird 18
Figure 2: Quasi-family tree of Cheryl Glen
She introduces herself by saying:
I am Cheryl Glen. I was born and raised in Buxton. I am the mother of three girls.
I taught for thirty-two years before I came to New Your City. I am a teacher in
New York City. Sixth Grade Math teacher. Junior high school for the past thirteen
years. I have a degree in Sociology, as well as a diploma Education, and a
Masters in regular and Special Education.
When talking to Cheryl, the topic of family and relationships stand out. She says, “I was raised in Buxton by a single mother. I knew I had a father who took care of me. But I was raised solely by my mom.” Cheryl has lived in Guyana’s mining town called Linden as well as in
Buxton where she was born and raised. She recalls that she spent her “elementary childhood in
Buxton, then [she] went to Linden,” “went to secondary school in Linden, started working in
Linden, came down to go to Teacher’s Training College, and never went back.”
For Cheryl, going back to Buxton was important because “Buxtonians are born and raised in Buxton and they have deep family roots and background.” What she means is that relationships are inclusive and boundless: “you might find yourself that you are related to almost if not half, three-quarter of the village. Because everybody is cousin somebody.” In the interview, she uses the phrase “everybody is cousin somebody” twice; I will return to this story Baird 19
when I discuss tools women use in Wha De Story Seh work to inform story as methodology for
inter- and intracultural engagements.
Being a Buxtonian means to have pride and pride looks like actions. Cheryl explains that
a Buxtonian “share [s] with others” and “look [s] out for others.” Relationship making leaks out
of her stories. Relationships exceed bloodlines. They extend to family unrelated by blood, but
related by citizenship within the community. Thus it is bad form to call elders by their first
names or “full mouth;” hence, it is customary for children to add the word “cousin” to the names
of elders. In so doing, Cheryl outlines how identity and belonging are cultivated within the
community as a result of shared values, enacted by Buxtonians. Cheryl says that “strong family
values” pull Buxtonians into a circle of care. In other words, whether Buxtonians are of blood
relations or not, their actions are the essential hallmarks of a true Buxtonian identity.
Cheryl is a judicious and inquiring storyteller. With regard to telling the story of Buxton
People Stop Train to her daughters, she says, “I have never told this story” because “I think at that time I maybe did not think they were ready for the story.” From Cheryl, I heard stories that challenged the way people behaved in families. For instance, she questioned her grandmother who had twelve children with her grandfather, who himself had twelve more children with another woman, in the village. She asked her grandmother, “Why would you keep making kids for a man who doesn’t appear to act like if he cares for you. I even think at one point I had asked her, so ‘grandmother, they didn’t have abortion in your time’?”
Although Cheryl has pride in her village and understands the role of relationships within and without bloodlines, her stories are pregnant with many unanswered questions about the social dynamics of family, and gender, to name a few. In my research, I return to Cheryl’s family stories to 1) expand on how she understands her own role in story-making practices as a modern Baird 20 day Buxtonian woman in Chapter Four and 2) connect and extend discussions on the relationship of land to communities in discourses with Indigenous and Native scholars in the discipline to advocate for pedagogies and methodologies that include non-western knowledge making, in
Chapter Five.
Tamika Boatswain
Tamika is the daughter of “teacher Bernadette” and Earl Boatswain who were teachers in
Buxton, but currently residing in New York. I have known her for many years as a person who was raised by my great-uncle’s niece. When I first started my research on the poem Buxton
People Stop Train in 2012, I asked “Teacher Bernadette” Boatswain to recommend persons I could contact for more information.
Although “Teacher Bernadette” lives in New York, she still retains the role of a resource person in the village. In the village, it is customary for Buxtonians to consult, seek guidance or ask for information from qualified “elders” who carry a wealth of local history, even before conducting library research. Thus, it was in the capacity of a younger person seeking information, that I contacted her. In doing so, I maintained my role as a learner and she her role as a teacher. She suggested that I talk to her daughter, Tamika, because she worked for the
Department of Culture at the National Museum, in Guyana.
When I considered persons to interview for this project in 2014, Tamika seemed a natural choice given her experience as the only Buxtonian woman who worked for the Guyana National
Museum for four years. She became an administrator there. Tamika holds a Bachelor’s degree in
History and a Master’s of Architecture degree in Monument and Cultural Heritage Conservation.
Her Master’s thesis explored the history of landmark buildings in Buxton. Baird 21
Regarding my research, she was the first person that told me that I would not find
Buxtonian women’s words in any written records in the archives because she had not encountered any in her work there. She says that much of the history of post-colonial times replicates history written by colonials; hence, she encouraged me to conduct research on our oral history.
Tamika hails from the several prominent families such as the Watson family, whose
name appears in the 1856 list of sharecroppers in Buxton.16
Figure 3: Quasi-family tree of Tamika Boatswain
Tamika introduces herself saying:
My name is Tamika Monifa Boatswain. I hail from Buxton Village, Guyana. I am
thirty-six years old, and I’m a teacher. I am of Afro-Guyanese ancestry. I’ve
worked both in the cultural and education [al] sectors for more than thirteen
years, and I currently work as a Spanish teacher. I am very passionate about
history. I’m passionate about the community from which I hail for its many
achievements.
Tamika is a proud Buxtonian who is “passionate about history.” Her pride as a Buxtonian originates from how she relates to the work of the ancestors as history. She admires the early
Buxtonians whose “community spirit kicked in from early on” so that “they [the ex-slaves]
16 See the 1856 Buxton Village map at the Buxton Village office. Baird 22
[became] actually the first group of people to receive their land titles because they were able to pay off all that money quite quickly.”
Tamika speaks passionately about the history of the village. One topic she addresses is the process that the first villagers used to convert a plantation into a village. “Buxton is also one of few villages, probably the only ex-slave owned villages that has been properly laid out with proper architectural, um, mapping in terms of its quadrangles, squares; the village has been properly mapped out,” she says. She applauds the first villager’s “educated point of view” for the arrangement of the house lots dedicated for residential purposes on one end of the village and the backdam17 lands for farming at the other end of the village. She says that “economic independence from the white masters is enough to make one feel proud of our heritage.”
It is the “Backdam” land mentioned in the poem Buxton People Stop Train that the women of Buxton were attempting to speak to the governor about. Tamika recognizes that
Buxton is the product of the transformation of plantation into a village. Tamika’s story about the making of community through the transformation of land becomes central to the study of
Buxtonian women’s motivations for pride in the village. I will explore Tamika’s story more in my project to answer the question of “How do the women understand the making of a village?”
Listening to Tamika’s story of being a proud Buxtonian and her relationship to her older female relatives from whom she learns life skills, reminds me of “small days” stories. Her stories of childhood are about “May May,” her great aunt, who taught her to bake, sew, and cook. And
“[May May’s] main reason was, I’m a girl child, and I need to be independent. It was important
17 Early Buxtonians had divided the land they had purchased into house lots for residential and business purposes. Accompanying each house lot had an assigned plot of land to the rear of the village that is called the Backdam and was used mainly for farming root crops, vegetable crops, and fruit. Baird 23 that I have a skill—baking, cooking, sewing whatever,” Tamika says. These “small days” 18 stories offer more insights into how an older woman teaches a young girl to make things so that she can become independent and to understand her identity in the shadows of Buxton People
Stop Train. In fact, when asked about how she understands the role of women such as her mother, May May, women from other families in the village she says, “Women are the necessary ones. Women are the strong ones, [they] set the tone.”
Tamika is a storyteller—in one sitting of forty-five minutes of interview we moved through a period of more than one hundred years of history through her life story of a thirty-six year old woman. She is candid about the nature of stories she heard and her own relationships to the storytellers and the stories. She says, “Growing up, from a very young age I had the privilege of growing up among older relatives who would always tell me stories about people in the village, about the struggle of the village. But, I didn’t really understand as a child.” The intricacies of her stories become increasingly complex as she mixes her knowledge of written history and her life story.
Overall, I have assembled profiles of three women who once lived in the same neighborhood to provide a glimpse into their stories that might offer insights into who they are and what they think. The following two women did not live in the same neighborhood and both resided outside for various reasons.
Jennifer Lee
Jennifer is the daughter of “teacher Hector” Lee and Charlotte Lee of Buxton Middle
Walk Road, over the train line. My sister who worked with Jennifer at the United Nations in
Manhattan, recommended her for the project. I did not know Jennifer personally before the
18 “Small days” stories are a genre of storytelling that is prevalent in Buxtonians oral traditions; young adults and older adults always telling childhood stories. It is a rite of passage that is memorialized in a play song called “Small Days is Still on Mi Mind” that children sing and perform at recess in school. Baird 24
study. However, I knew of her because her dad had taught me in his after school lessons for
Pupil Teachers19. Jennifer had been a recipient of the famed Buxton scholarship that was instated in 1924 for promising Buxtonians to attend secondary school and this is one of the reasons why I
wanted to learn more about her life story.
Figure 4: Quasi-family tree of Jennifer Lee
Jennifer is a sixty-three year old Buxtonian woman who resides in Brooklyn, New York. We
met for the first time on January 6, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York for a face –to- face interview.
Jennifer says:
I was born in Buxton Village Guyana, 1953 around the same time when the
constitution [of British Guiana] was suspended and my mother told me stories
about that. And basically you know I grew up in Buxton for just about eighteen
months and after that wherever my mother taught or lived that’s where we went
so I moved to.
Although her family left Buxton when she was 18 months old, she returned to the village
to visit with relatives on holidays. Jennifer has worked at the United Nations in Manhattan, New
19 A Pupil Teacher is an apprentice teacher or teacher’s aide. Pupil teachers may be in their late teens. Pupil Teachers have qualified in the Oxford and Cambridge GCE certificates. Sometimes, they hope to attend one of Guyana’s Teacher Training Colleges and become certified teachers. Some use the opportunity to decide if teaching is the career they desire. Career professionals such as Hector Lee held lessons at the Buxton Anglican School in the evenings and on weekends where he tutored them in Math, English, and Science for teachers. Baird 25
York, and in the African nations of The Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad for more than thirty years.
Being a Buxtonian was not a title that Jennifer readily embraced as a child. Her feelings and behavior ranged from shame, to power, to fear, and then to pride. Of her early childhood she says, “I felt as I had to hide the fact that I was Buxtonian because for me I just felt bad to think about Buxton. I felt ashamed because I felt everything bad was associated with Buxton so I didn’t want anybody to know that I came from Buxton. So I would just say, ‘Oh, my mother’s family is from Friendship’, but I was silent about the other part.” At other times, she found that playing up the notoriety of Buxton was a good thing; she says, “I used to say “don’t play [mess] with me because you know I am from Buxton and Buxton people stop train.”
Her feelings changed from shame to pride in 1964 when she won the Buxton Scholarship.
“My mother said, Jennifer, guess what? You have got a Buxton Scholarship. I said, Buxton scholarship? And mom said, ‘oh, you should be proud. You’re going to meet Winifred Gaskin.
She was at the time Minister of Education.’ She told me about Forbes Burnham and all the brilliant Buxtonians… In its heyday Buxton set the pace.”
After she was awarded the scholarship, Jennifer had a change of attitude toward Buxton but it was not instant; she had to learn about the people, the land, and its landmarks. She notes that “from then I became interested in Buxton and there was no more shame about going to find my roots. Going to find where Tipperary Hall20 was, what it meant to be a Buxtonian” by going back to visit with her grandmothers and cousins living in the village. By listening to stories and
20 Tipperary Hall is a landmark building located at Buxton Middle Walk road. It was built in 1909. Villagers held the Buxton- Friendship Benevolent Burial Society meetings there. Other social gatherings such as Burial Society (1911) meetings, Masonic Lodge meetings, Penny bank meetings and year end dances were held there. Any and all important gatherings occurred at Tipperary Hall. See “Buxton-Friendship: Guyana's Premier Village” in the Buxton-Friendship Express of July 2010. Baird 26 asking, she begins to learn. As she says: “And then I started to find out what’s the difference between Buxton and Company dam and Friendship.”
I make this account as knowledge structure that is land-based. It inspires Jennifer, and connecting to her, I hear her making land-based theories of girl-child that allows her even as a child, to dream of ways to show her pride. Thus as an adult, she says: “And then you know it was
I had this pride of being a Buxtonian and I had like dreams of what could I do to bring Buxton back to life as it was. There was no shame, any more shame of going to Buxton. I looked forward to going to Buxton, to meeting people in Buxton and there was not fear.”
Jennifer’s mother played an important role in helping her embrace Buxton and its story of
Buxton People Stop Train because she understood what outsiders did. That Buxton was a bad place. Her mother told her “don’t look at it negatively; you must look at it as people who advocate.” Taking to role of advocacy seriously, she finds that her career was affected by being
Buxtonian working for others at United Nation’s International Children’s Emergency Fund
(UNICEF).
Jennifer is an observer and critic of social norms regarding topics such as labor and village development regarding women. Her stories open up spaces where there are silences that her mother had no answer for. For instance, she examines the conventional roles of the women in her mother’s stories about the brick breakers. “I say why the women break bricks and not the men. Mom said, I don’t know. And I was like, this world is never fair because women had to take care of the children. They had to go and break the bricks but what were the men doing? And
I don’t hear anything saying.” Nevertheless, for Jennifer, being a Buxtonian means doing things such as mapping lives and legacies through personal goals based on what she perceives as a legacy of the slaves. Jennifer says “the slaves made a way for us.” Consequently, “you Baird 27
[Buxtonians] open a way for those coming; you blaze the trail no matter how small it is, [and] if
you don’t set an example, then there will be not room for someone to follow.” Equally, she
rounds out the experience of the Buxtonian spirit as a manifest practice of “giving back.” I
understand her as showing how she is making things, a topic that I would like to return to in
Chapter Three and Chapter Four. In those chapters, I explore the relationship among land,
bodies, and practice as part of a decolonial framework of relational visibility that transforms
oral-history. I further theorize that through the relationships women make among their land,
their bodies, and their actions, they survive colonial impact.
Lorna Campbell
Lorna introduces herself thus:
My name is Lorna Patricia Campbell. I am a Buxtonian. I was born in Buxton 60
years ago to Gwendolyn Ifilll. I have been living in Brooklyn New York for over
30 years.
She is the mother of two children. Lorna Campbell is the daughter of Gwendolyn Ifill, a prominent fishmonger in Buxton market whom everyone fondly called “Miss Gwenny.”
Figure 5: Quasi-family tree of Lorna Campbell
I interviewed Lorna on January 8, 2015 in Brooklyn New York. Being a reader of her
newsletter, I was excited to meet her in person. For Lorna, knowledge of the ancestors’ actions Baird 28
generates a sense of gratitude toward the ex-slaves whom she calls a “great group of people of
inspiration” and she says, “I feel proud, gratified and sometimes lucky to be a member of that
community and to have had ancestors or foreparents who sacrificed so much to provide for me.”
Lorna is thoughtful and reflective on how she understands being a Buxtonian. She says
that “the environment may be part of Buxton” but growing up she did not learn about Buxton
from just living there. Hence, the environment is not the only factor for determining a
Buxtonian’s identity. Formal education does not guarantee that children will cultivate a sense of
being Buxtonians, either. She indicates that formal schooling did not teach her about Buxton’s
history because:
growing up in the village or going to school, I don’t recall, let’s say, that part of
the education about our heritage or what our ancestors did. It was more about
learning, as they said, reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. So, I didn’t [know], and
perhaps too, where I came from.
Thus early schooling in the village, in the 1950s, did not facilitate conditions favorable for developing her Buxtonianness. In her experiences, she has a felt sense of Buxtonianness in her teens when “it really kind of kicked in, that sense when I was in my late teens.” Thus, for her, a sense of awareness can be a way of marking relationship to sensory knowledge. Sensory knowledge becomes part of story-making and disrupts academic and western ways of gatekeeping. Sense-making challenges western notions of who can make knowledge, when, and how, as Million indicates. Sensing seems dependent on a child’s age of social maturation.
Regarding Buxton People Stop Train, Lorna talks of responsibility:
It’s just that, you know, there is an issue in the village and when you got issues,
they needed to be addressed. And they go to whatever lengths there are to have Baird 29
those issues addressed so that they can continue with developing their community.
It was that sense of independence. That sense of responsibility that our fore
parents took on to develop their village or their community.
Lorna works closely with the Buxtonian community in Guyana organizing fundraising events and programs for school children in the village. In my search for the written stories of Buxtonian women, I did not anticipate finding a woman who is in charge of the vehicle that records the words of women. She is also the Editor in Chief and founder of The Buxton-Friendship Express, a monthly publication that showcases some of the achievements, events, and perspectives on topics of relevance to Buxtonians and to a readership of persons in Guyana and abroad. Lorna is a community organizer and she took the celebrations of 170th anniversary of the purchase of
Buxton to a new level in 2008 by working toward inspirational activities. One of her major contributions to the village is keeping the citizens informed of its development by making a newsletter. In this project, I return to Lorna’s way of taking story-making into the digital age and using the publication as an instrument that can preserve Buxton’s history in Chapter Five as I discuss how women are shaping the future through oral history.
In sum, the events of the poem Buxton People Stop Train that I shared with the young
Buxtonians and the stories of the women I introduced, show how women in the context of the village of Buxton attempted to exert control of their lives under colonialism. Buxtonian resistance is an indication of African Guyanese’ and Buxtonians’ complex relationship with land.
In the section below, I make connections or relational maps using stories Buxtonian women and scholars to situate the context, people, and land. By mapping the Buxtonian women in the poem and in the stories of my participants bring attention to possible ways to listen to knowledge- making in the Buxton community and beyond. Further, I draw on scholars in the disciplinary Baird 30
communities of Guyanese History, Cultural Rhetorics, Caribbean rhetorics, and Rhetoric and
Composition. By drawing on these communities, I constellate the cross-disciplinary relationships
I make among intellectuals to open pathways through which intellectuals can enter inter-cultural discourses with each other.
Making Connections: Situating Land and People in Story
Buxton People Stop Train, the event, occurred sometime in the late nineteenth century, in
the post-emancipation era in British Guiana, now Guyana, when there was a sitting Governor. 21
By listening to the story in the poem Buxton People Stop Train, I understand that the land is
home; the land was/is prison; the land is hope. The geographic place, Buxton, is a living space
for lived struggles in the lives of Buxtonians in the de Certeaun sense.22 More importantly, it is
with struggle as lived experience on the land of Buxton in mind that scholars must read and
theorize Buxtonian women’s story-making. In the land of struggles, pride is a key motivating
factor in the women’s story-making. Another key factor in women’s story-making is the
women’s knowledge of the purchase of the village against great odds by former slaves, a
knowledge that prompts them to generate and declare emotional responses such as gratitude,
admiration, and pride. They hold personal responsibility for achieving success, working hard,
and desiring to demonstrate reciprocity to the Buxtonian community. This community has
inherited the fruits of the sacrifice of the first villagers—the ex-slaves—whose heritage is
defined by a struggle for independence through the acquisition of land.
21 In Buxton Friendship in Print and Memory by Eusi Kwayana, Kwayana records stories of Nana Culley a mother and activist lead marches to the Governor’s office repeatedly to confront the officials about assisting them in matters regarding taxation and representation. It is implied that her actions give credence to the story told in the oral culture. The story is not recorded in the prominent publication arm of the British colonial authority The Court of Policy Minutes, at the Walter Rodney Archives in Georgetown. Alongside the oral history are three written accounts of Buxton men petitioning the court about the taxation and flooding.
22 De Certeau distinguishes place and space calling “place” a location and “space” a more fluid ambiguous concept that is dependent on several factors such as: function, time, and orientation. In essence, he regards “space as a practiced place” (117) Baird 31
Buxton Village is one of the first African purchased villages in Guyana.23 The village is
located on the East Coast Demerara, which stretches 270 miles along the Northern Atlantic coast
of Guyana.
Buxton
Figure 6: Free Political Location Map IV-2 Buxton/Mahaica
The East Coast of Demerara, the coastal clay region, was the site for enslavement of
Africans who cultivated cotton, sugar, and agricultural crops for settlers. After that emancipation project that resulted in official pronouncement of the end of African slavery in 1833, formerly enslaved Africans purchased two neighboring plots, in 1840 and 1841. Buxton (580 acres), formerly part of a cotton plantation (Plantation New Orange Nassau) was bought by 128 enslaved individuals. Friendship (750 acres) to the west of Buxton was bought by 168 enslaved individuals. These properties were so named Buxton as sister villages combined (Kwayana
“Holding Fast”).
Understanding the role of seminal villagers is also crucial to situating their relational activities on and with the land. Like Unaisi Nababo-Baba in Knowing and Learning: An
Indigenous Fijian Approach, I understand anything that is passed down intergenerationally is part of the land. Thus, I theorize that through networks for people, enacting their everyday
23 Guyana became an independent nation on May 26, 1966. It is in South America, bordered by Brazil (South), Venezuela (East), Suriname (West), and the Atlantic Ocean (North). Given its history as a British colony, Guyana is also a part of a group of English speaking nation states called the Caribbean Community. Baird 32 activities, I can listen to conversations they make on the land where relationships are key components for survival and regeneration. Hence, in the context of this history, I introduce
Kwayana, the author of the poem, whom I relate to as a scholarly relative and kin to iterate that knowledgeable people of the village are part of relational and indigenous story-making theories.
Kwayana is a historian, activist, educator, and one of three Guyanese who fought for and won constitutional rights for the citizens in Guyana from the British in 1953. Kwayana was born in
1925 at Lusignan Nigger Yard (quarter of former enslaved Africans) to Buxtonian parents and named Sidney King. He later changed his name to Eusi Kwayana which in Swahili means “black man of Guyana.” He made his home in Buxton in his early childhood and lived there for most of his life. I mention Kwayana’s background to mark that his ethos is rooted in African and land- based resistance.
In the poem Buxton People Stop Train, Buxtonian women’s role in the story takes center stage. They use their bodies to stop a train. As I listen to Buxton People Stop Train, I feel the horror of self-sacrifice of the body and I am compelled to note that feeling as empathy. Empathy engenders my civic responsibility for understanding and valuing this story in rhetorical studies.
Storying my personal connection means that I make visible how I connect to the women from whom I am a descendant and in whose veins their blood runs, to honor them and straddle the local discourse community and the academic discourse community.
In their actions women mark themselves as being able to make themselves seen and heard by the ruling authority—the Governor. In making blood connections, I am compelled to theorize that at the physical and social levels, rural African Guyanese women from the village of Buxton demonstrate the ultimate rhetoric of visibility in their self-sacrificial actions to resist colonial impact—as Kwayana says: Baird 33
A na de train dem stap [It’s not the train they stop]
A de Guv’na [It’s the Governor]
One of the stories I tell after listening to the poem is that the women in the poem make stories in
particular land-based ways that are relational and indigenous. When I think of these knowledge
structures, I think of Indigenous relational practices of making. In “Growing Our Discipline: An
Interview with Malea Powell,” Malea Powell maintains that the indigenous practice of making
connections among “land, bodies, and making” is integral to creating space for the non-western
rhetorics. Non-western epistemologies help to keep “the discipline of rhetoric of rhetoric and
composition growing, vibrant, engaging, and contestatory” (“Abstract”). By making relational
knowledge structures we can trace their actions. We can understand these actions as women’s
ways of making visible their roles and responsibilities, and connections to land, bodies, and
practice that can teach us how to understand, value, and honor communities. In doing so, I
understand that women’s rhetoric in the context of struggle is a point of entry into discussions on
power and access. In Chapters Three and Four, I further discuss how Buxtonian women such as
Tamika Boatswain transform their oral history through land-based knowledge by engaging in
“Girl Child Training.” These knowledges are significant in mapping aspects of continued
resistance in home-based activities.24 Home-based activities offer theories that are relevant to
how we understand the development of community-based knowledges as land-based practices.
As I explained to the Young Buxtonians, stories are relational maps. Thinking of stories as relational maps, reminds me of Ezekiel Choffel’s theory in “Stories as Maps and Maps as
Stories: A Navigational Epistemology.” Choffel builds his theory by navigating his indigenous experiences in Michigan to make sense of indigenous history through the scholarly stories of
24 By home-based, I mean all activities the people engage in during their daily lives. Baird 34
Indigenous scholars.25 Akin to Choffel, I explore oral history to provide maps that challenge western notions of map making that are land-based but are often devoid of indigenous place- based experience. Thus what Buxton People Stop Train does is show the people’s experience at a
particular time and place.
What the story does not show is how it relates to a wider social background to the event,
people’s relationship to the story and the stories they tell about it. Thus I weave written history
and lived experiences into the oral narrative to give the story more relationality to the land, and
actions that speak to issues of power, access, and survival. I want intellectuals to read the stories
I write in the project as my efforts to mark women’s stories as indigenous resistance stories
“within particular tangible spaces” “where events occurred” and connect them to “the nature and
consequences of the events the events themselves,” as Lisa Brooks, citing Keith Basso, shares in
The Common Pot (xxiii). Akin to Brooks, who connects Indigenous experiences and community- based knowledge to understand how to trace those relationships, I write to create moments for linking to what she calls “place worlds” in village. Listening to Choffel and Brooks, I think of the oral story and of historical accounts that connect the land to the actions of the women and consider how the relationships therein complicate mapping the knowledge-making process of oral history. My aim is to add Buxtonian women’s s story way of knowing to the literature of the village by using relational maps of people, land, and story. Doing so helps me disrupt dominant negative narratives of African people, often labeled violent, who were once enslaved and robbed of their humanity. By underscoring their relationship to land in my project, I explore and unpack a kind of place-based and indigenous relationship.
25 Choffel used three main Indigenous scholars works: The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast by Lisa Brooks, History of the Ottawa and Chipewa Indians of Michigan by Andrew Blackbird; and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich Baird 35
Thus I write to provoke social consciousness to disrupt dominant narratives that render people in specific indigenous communities invisible in history. By linking place-based rhetoric to
Caribbean rhetorics and the rhetorical studies of Indigenous and Native intellectuals in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, I make a space to explore a Cultural Rhetorics practice of making relationships through story, so we can learn with others of shared beliefs (with)in distinct communities.
Making Relationships: Situating Story with (in) Cultural Rhetorics
Buxtonian women’s story-making plays a relational and pedagogical role in village life.
When communicating oral history, Buxtonian women’s pedagogical roles becomes a matter of importance. As children’s primary care-givers and teachers within the household, women make stories that create the community one child at a time. Children learn to adopt story-making practices. Hence, to continue in the pedagogical purpose of Buxtonian women’s story-making, I use a constellation of stories from Buxtonian women to bring young Buxtonians into the academic community and vice-versa. The rural community of Buxton has not been formally studied as in rhetorical studies. By conducting this study, I make space within Rhetoric and
Composition for intellectuals to explore ways of learning with the community of Buxton. Hence, in Chapter Four, I explore how home-based activities are decolonial options for a methodology and a pedagogy that complicate what is at stake for education at the intersections of education at home and at school. Doing so, I broaden discourses on pedagogy and methodology. I draw on
Walter Mignolo’s epistemology. In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Mignolo theorizes that we are complicit in colonial legacy in the Americas and that to confront the legacies of Baird 36
colonialism, we must actively use practices of our knowing and from our places of doing and thinking as decolonial options.26
I draw on an Indigenous framework of relationality to communicate some social practices
of the Buxtonian community with other Buxtonians and intellectuals in the subfield of Cultural
Rhetorics, Caribbean rhetoric, and the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. An Indigenous framework of relationality adheres to overarching tenets of Cultural Rhetorics. Andrea Riley-
Mukavetz in “Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Methodology,” notes that Cultural Rhetorics is an
orientation in which researchers draw on their scholarly relations and civilian relatives to disrupt
pat notions of who makes history, theory, and what counts as knowledge and theory. Members of
village communities and Indigenous, Native, and communities of minorities, to name a few, are
making attempts to write their histories in ways that are representative and respectful. Because
cultures and practices are persistently rhetorical, however, they grow, change, and resist labels
that marginalize them. A Cultural Rhetorics approach to researching rhetoric overturns vistas of
meaning-making that operate inside, outside, alongside, and with the academy and ordinary
people in civil society for scrutiny.
The Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, at Michigan State University, describes Cultural
Rhetorics as “an orientation to a set of constellating theoretical and methodological frameworks”
(2). Some cultural rhetoricians such as Malea Powell in “Listening to Ghosts” use Michel de
Certeau’s framework in the Practice in Everyday Life (1988) to describe the power dynamics of
culture, for instance. De Certeau theorizes that we can understand how cultures are constituted
through practices. De Certeau’s framework is useful in understanding people’s practices within dominant systems. De Certeau’s believes that people use strategies and tactics to create, support,
26 Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Emma Perez among others have also theorized the decolonial along with Mignolo. Baird 37 and disrupt dominant systems. Hence, some cultural rhetoricians draw on de Certeau to examine capitalist and colonial systems that operate on the theory that some cultures are not equal.
The members of the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, among others, acknowledge that cultures are made through people’s relational and constellative contacts with each other across, within, and alongside systems of shared beliefs (2). In addition, cultural rhetoricians study the methodologies that people use when creating new realities to learn how new and shifting paradigms operate within communities (Enculturation 2014). In practice, cultural rhetoricians build relationships on shared beliefs with cultural communities, civic or academic, to “surface, recognize, extend and intervene in how rhetoric scholars think about culture” (1). In essence, they seek social justice and inclusion. In Chapter Two, I share theories of relational methodology such as an “Asking methodology” in which Buxtonians connect to each other to pass on knowledge in a communal and collaborative network. I also listen to and share theories of
“Blood Memory” in Chapter Two. In the section titled We Do: Using Blood and Marking
Heritage, I align the knowledge structures that Buxtonian women use to invoke ancestry, pride, and community spirit, alongside Indigenous scholars Linda Hogan and Scott Momaday. In that gesture, I extend the discourse on the relationship among kinship, blood ties, memory, identity, and story to talk about access, and visibility that are not readily transparent in dominant narratives.
I think of Lee Maracle in “Coming to Oratory” (1994), who theorizes that reality is social;
Western European notions of theory making are not adequate to tell what is real; and there is need to “tell” stories. The story way of knowing and being encompass people’s values, thoughts, and experiences. In other words, cultures use story to theorize the world; hence, theory is rhetorical and culturally situated. I understand theory as how people comprehend the world and Baird 38
their relationship to the world and that stories are not objective; through them people articulate
their own values, beliefs, and realities. Hence, disregarding stories or any aspect of story fosters
a non-human way of being. Cultural Rhetorics focuses on shifting research away from a single
theory—the notion that dominant stories are the only ones that theorize—towards many stories,
and many theories. Therefore, many ordinary people do this thing called theory, too. When
people cannot relate to theory because they do not perceive theory as story, they may be denying
themselves and others access to the particular participatory aspects of specific communities’
ways of building and sharing knowledge.
Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson, with whom I make a scholarly relationship, shares the
belief of story being a relational framework. Wilson believes that shared beliefs on relationality are a connecting principle of story-making. Wilson demonstrates a framework of relationality in
Research is Ceremony on which I base my research approach to knowledge sharing, using stories in letters. Wilson’s community conceptualizes knowledge as something that is shared by
the world and the cosmos. Wilson’s community believes that all things living and non-living are
in relationships with each other and “go beyond individual knowledge,” hence, the people
believe that they are accountable to their relations for their knowledge (177). Thus he writes
letters to his sons to share knowledge about his research because he believes that research is for
everyone, even children in the Indigenous community that is being researched. His letters
demonstrate how he practices research that can be shared by members of his civic community
and the academic community.
Wilson’s work is an example of a Cultural Rhetorics orientation to community-based
research because he frames his research in indigenous paradigms. He locates his thinking in
Indigenous epistemologies. In so doing, he fronts his subjectivity. Likewise, when Kevin
Browne Baird 39
in Tropic Tendencies acknowledges that Caribbean practices are distinctly, and deliberately
vernacular and not a response to Western and European culture, I understand him as speaking
from the place he dwells in his thinking—the Caribbean. Both Wilson and Browne explore a
decolonial option. They both practice research from particular locations – their communities of
practices. Both scholars understand that the knowledge-making methodologies that reside
outside of the dominant Western/European ideologies are options they can exercise. Employing
interconnecting methodologies reorients notions of center and margins of knowledge.
Drawing on Wilson, I frame my project with an opening letter of introduction, and a
closing letter. In each chapter of the project, I have included to young Buxtonians and the
dissertation committee to introduce Buxtonian women’s stories that are derived from the
interview manuscripts and to make interpretations as necessary. The letters are spaces where I
perform oral story-making so that I can theorize as I enact relationality that is difficult in a
wholly text-based project. I assume the role of a woman who tells “Dem Seh Stories.”
Additionally, I strive to uphold the notion that “We no longer just write culture. We perform
culture” which Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln posit (x). I also emulate Gian Pagnucci who
in Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making who uses interchapters in his
work to “attempt to transcend the boundaries of conventional chapters” to execute “a different
way of doing critical exchange” doing textual discourse (29-30) as Harry Denny in Facing the
Center states (29).
I extend the story as methodology beyond these scholars in that I use the practices of my
community to frame my research. I deliberately engage my village readers as I create non- conventional and multiple ways for them critically engage with rhetorics. I not only maintain cultural integrity, but I also intertwine oral narrative, print, and manuscript into my project to Baird 40
create multiple points of entry into story which can be used in intercultural exchanges with
specific communities. Thus I draw on two Buxtonian story-making practices that work as
entrances to my project’s relational framework. First, my project is a story—a Wah De Story
Seh—a practice used by villagers to greet each other and to transmit information garnered from others. I will explain Wah De Story Seh in greater detail in Chapter Two. By using Wah De
Story Seh, I create narratives as an “organizational scheme expressed in story form” as described by Donald Polkinghorne in Narrative Expression to communicate stories to young
Buxtonians and my dissertation committee, inclusive of a wider academic readership (13). I
modify the Wah De Story Seh genre that is practiced by Buxtonians by using mixed narrative
forms such as letters, conversations with scholars, textual analyses, and personal stories in my
story-making framework.
In using these relational and epistemological practices, I do not only relay experiences,
but also, I use John Dewey’s metaphor of story to include shared belief between Cultural
Rhetorics drawing on the use of narratives as research methodology (Connelly and Clandinin,
Narrative Inquiry). Like Connelly and Clandinin, I argue that “people live stories, reaffirm
them, modify them, and create new ones. Stories lived and told educate the self and others,
including the young and those such as researchers who are new to their communities” (xxvi).
They also contend that “narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience” (20). By
studying the oral histories of women from the villages, I hope to extend academic perspectives
on how to make what counts as knowledge and what counts as worthy of study, inclusive of the
everyday seemingly mundane rural experiences relevant in the civic and academic communities.
By deliberately including Buxtonian rhetorical expressions for conducting research, I am
addressing my concern that women’s stories can be hidden in their domestic activities and Baird 41 become an irrelevant are of concern in academia. An absence of stories of rural African
Buxtonian women creates invisibility which hinders the transparency of Buxtonian women’s agency, their heritage, and their communities, within and across academic discourse communities. Consequently, in this project, I use the terms narrative, story, personal story, life story, and oral history as interchangeable with “story” to disrupt areas in the purview of rhetoric that do not include places such as “story” where women theorize and are visible.
Furthermore, as I will share in Chapter Two, I use an “Asking” methodology to engage in storytelling and listening. As I listen to stories of Buxtonians, I also listen to rhetoricians who are already theorizing ordinary women’s stories from the locations of the community to gather and to make intercultural connections and to broaden the scope of rhetorical methodologies. For example, after listening to Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, for example, in her dissertation “Theory
Begins with a Story, Too: Listening to the Lived Experiences of American Indian Women,” and in her article “Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Methodology: Making Research Matter with Multi- generational Women from the Little Traverse Bay Band,” I hear her drawing on decolonial theory to talk about practice. In both of these studies, I hear Riley-Mukavetz listening to learn and develop a new language to relate to the lived experiences of some Odawa women of East
Lansing, Michigan. By listening she learned to allow the women to tell stories and in their telling and her listening, they forged the pace and strength of the relationships she developed with the women. The women helped re-shape Riley-Mukavetz’s embodied research practices throughout the data collection, interpretation, writing and reciprocity processes. Thus, as I listen to women in my own study, I mark the processes by which I come to understand that story is theory and knowledge is encapsulated in the theories of ordinary people. As I listen to the women, I understand the “story” comprises multiple embedded narratives or what I call “story of many Baird 42
stories” and the women mark the places in which they theorize the embeddedness of story when
they use the “asking methodology.”
Gloria Anzaldua (This Bridge Called My Back), among others, initiates conversations
with women in and from their communities where they practice and theorizes women’s story- making practices in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. Similarly, by engaging in the interpretation of each woman’s story, I practice making space for embodied listening to life stories from five Buxtonian women. Learning from women map pragmatic courses in which people learn values and behaviors for community survival. Iterations of the Buxtonian women’s stories, including mine, are considered “embodied listening” in which there are opportunities to learn oral history from the qualified village women in the purview of cultural rhetoricians. Thus,
by drawing on the practice of cultural rhetoricians, I aim to make bridges between communities
of practice: the civic and academic community such as rhetoric and composition, and the
emerging subfield of Caribbean rhetoric, and the civil Buxtonian community.
Overall, in my project I work to explore how a practice of theorizing with story is
essential to staging interventions for my community so that academics can think of theory and,
ultimately, of cultures in new ways. Akin to Malea Powell, the founder of the Cultural Theory
Lab, I situate story as methodology to collect with all of our relatives to make a wider, more
visible web of how knowledge making is practiced.27
By combining, land, story, and people we can understand that maps like archives are
complex. For Buxton, stories are relational maps that make visible how persons under
colonialism transform their lives and these rhetorics inform theories of survival of the African
27 In “Listening to Ghosts” Powell articulates a theory for listening as part of using story as methodology by building on her Native American history, her personal experiences, and her web of scholarly relations, inclusive of Michel de Certeau (1984), Barbara Christian (1987), Jean-Francois Lyotard & Jean-Loup Thebaud (1985), and Jacqueline Jones Royster (2001a). Baird 43
diaspora as a continued and daily occurrence that have hidden memories which can influence the
future. Though village specific, these stories have import for international, intercultural, and
intercommunal dialogue from which the discipline of rhetoric and composition can benefit.
Making Relationships: Situating Story in Buxtonian History and Caribbean Rhetoric
As I listen, I connect the stories among a relational network of intellectuals to understand
my positionalities and my relationships to intellectuals in Guyanese and Caribbean community.
Thus, I listen to Guyanese intellectuals such as Kimani Nehusi, former lecturer at the University
of Guyana, who calls for village people to become writers of their own histories. In the article
“Writing the History of the Villages in Guyana and the Caribbean” (1994), Nehusi notes that historians of Guyana and the Caribbean use a wide brush when writing the history of the region.
They study the history of the region too “generally” (3). Consequently, historians largely ignore the voices of a large majority of people—the working class from the rural villages. When I listen,
I hear Nehusi calling for intervention: the people in the village must intervene on their own behalf and disrupt dominant colonial methodologies that undervalue people. I understand that constellating the stories of the women in my study with Nehusi, speaks to relational network that is built on the knowledge structures that can serve many communities. Engaging in multiple communities allows intellectuals to forge theories and methodologies to transform oral history. Furthermore, what this practice does is include people from all communities and strengthens intercultural relationships for the good of humanity as I hope to show as I map the
“asking” methodology I discuss in Chapter Two, for example.
As I conduct research with Buxtonian women, I pull along the story I begin with Buxton
People Stop Train to mark how I listen to oral history. Oral history is spread by word of mouth
and accessed through connecting to people who tell stories that intervene in how we make Baird 44
history—body to body—over time and space. One of the benefits of gathering lived experiences
of women as a rhetorical study is that doing so expands community-based research involving
women. Although Kwayana writes about the women in the poem, I have not encountered published stories written by women of the village; thus, I intervene in this seeming invisibility to
examine issues of access, power, and knowledge. Further, a case in point is that although Nehusi
argues for a working class historian’s perspective and input towards village history-making, he does not identify women as a majority within the constituents of the working class sector. They
are not on the landscape of meaning-making. Thus marking the women’s knowledge-making is
integral to the making of themselves as historians and agents who use particular methodologies to be seen and heard. Focusing on women’s rhetorical agency provides a way to examine and engage in issues of relational visibility. I explore a space that Nehusi opens and address history- making by and with women in the context of Buxtonian women’s oral history.
Another benefit of my study is expansion of study of Caribbean rhetoric and approaches to oral history of the region. By examining oral history from specific community practices
regarding land, bodies, and making, I open up spaces to make an impact on the way intellectuals
read, listen, write, and think about history-making throughout the Caribbean region. For
example, villagers in the Caribbean region share similar stories of self-efficacy that can be
accessed in stories such as Buxton People Stop Train. My research takes a Cultural Rhetorics
orientation that allows me to go to the ordinary women to listen for their stories to write history.
I show how a relational approach in story as a methodology helps connect the lived spaces of
ordinary people to academic spaces. This relational connection is not present or formally studied in Caribbean rhetorical scholarship within the field of rhetoric, as Kevin Browne argues in
Tropic Tendencies: Caribbean Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Browne, who is a pioneering scholar in Caribbean Baird 45 rhetorics, asserts that Caribbean rhetorics comprise a range of homegrown expressions. These expressions are not responses to Eurocentric rhetorical traditions; they are for the survival of
Caribbean people. Browne asserts that Caribbean rhetoric is “acquired through experience and catalogued as a living archive of knowledge” (7). Caribbeans use their expressions for
“collective identification” and for “mediated communication” to consciously or unconsciously connect with ancestral knowledge (5). Thus while Caribbeans claim connections to an ancestral past, they continue make new traditions out of their contemporary experiences.
Conclusion
In sum, the Buxtonian women’s stories about formerly enslaved Africans in British
Guyana who became communal owners of land during the mid- nineteenth century is a space for mapping relationality in the region and the discipline. Stories of Buxton Village are relational story-making which broadens the scope for more inclusive communities of knowledge making that is non-western and decolonial. Thus in Chapter Three, I discuss the roles Buxtonian historian Eusi Kwayana and other Guyanese scholars: Walter Rodney, Wazir Mohamed and
Compton Dennis Canterbury play in marking the settings and circumstances the village movement emerges from. Doing so, I make visible the creole native identity of the Buxtonians.28
As I listen to the women, I understand them to be making theories of survival they make visible relational theories of identity, ancestral knowledge, and blood kinship that are crucial to transforming oral history. In exploring relationality as a Cultural Rhetorics practice of these shared beliefs, I find kindred spirits with Indigenous and Native intellectuals who have already begun work. My project on exploring the relationality and story as research methodology is a making in which communities become more visible.
28 I do not use the word creole to mean solely the class of people of European descent who were born in the colonies (see Shona Jackson Creole Indigeniety). Baird 46
In Chapter One, I have introduced the project to my two audiences, young Buxtonians and my dissertation committee, to bridge the civic and academic communities and to situate the study. I use a Cultural Rhetorics practice of relationality, exemplified by Indigenous scholars
Shawn Wilson, and Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, and my Buxtonian relatives including Eusi
Kwayana to situate the project. I used letters to engage the civic and academic audiences in my oral history research relating to the story and poem Buxton People Stop Train. The exigency for my research is that a study of women’s story-making practices from the village is needed to better understand and theorize the role of women in oral history research within the broader
Guyanese and Caribbean scholarship on history-making. I do not only focus on a well- known oral history narrative of Buxton in Guyana, but also, on oral histories exemplified by life-stories of five Buxtonian women, to demonstrate story as methodology, which I discuss further in
Chapter Two. My study of women’s story- making practices contributes to cultural rhetorician’s discussions on theories of listening women in and from civic communities and in the discipline of rhetoric and composition.
Thus in Chapter Two, the methodology chapter, I introduce my research methodology. I also discuss the project’s methodological framework of story as methodology with a Cultural
Rhetorics orientation, and decolonial theory, to explore the why and how Buxtonian women make stories. I also begin a cursory exploration of how knowledge of Buxtonian women’s story- making practices can benefit the discipline of rhetoric and composition. I continue to demonstrate a Buxtonian women’s approach to oral history, by examining the story-making practices of Buxtonian women through several Guyanese-Buxtonian story-making genres and by code meshing the Creolese language and the Standard English Dialect. Baird 47
CHAPTER II. AN “ASKING” METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR ORAL
HISTORY
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians
Dear Young Buxtonians,
Wah De Story Seh?
For my research project, I recruited Shevan Forde who lives at the Forde’s family home, at Company Road in Buxton. Let me introduce Shevan properly. Shevan Forde hails from the
Forde, Harris, and Dorsett families and in an interview with her, she introduces herself thus:
My name is Shevan Forde. I live at Company Road, Buxton. I am forty-eight
years old. I was born in Buxton; raised in Buxton. I spent the better part of my
life here. My first school years were spent in Buxton. Being a Buxtonian gives me
a sense of pride.
Shevan is the mother of three children and teaches Instructional Technology at a High
School in Georgetown. As a Buxtonian woman, she describes being a Buxtonian as a feeling of pride that propels her to be maker of community—“I do a lot of work in the community,” she says. When I listen to Shevan, I hear her calling attention to the importance of a “sense of pride.” As you may already know, repetition is a common way emphasizing things when speaking Creolese. In the village, Shevan acts on her sense of pride by being a community worker.
Here is one story Shevan tells:
I Sell My Village
In Buxton am a Buxtonian like any other person. I take pride in my village. I do a
lot of work within the community. Outside of Buxton, I sell my village to other Baird 48
persons. I tell them about Buxtonians and what they have accomplished. I’d try to
erase whatever stereotypes that a person may have had about Buxtonians. Way
back when, there was this whole thing about Buxtonians stopping train so it’s
kind of perceived that Buxtonians are bullies and that Buxtonians are warlike. So
I try to erase that stereotype. Buxtonians did what they had to do at that
particular time, but that does not define us. We’re more than that kind of warlike
persons that they portray. Buxtonians have accomplished a lot. And we are
educated people.
So it was basically to get a meeting with the governor. It was not the case of
ignorance – [like] yeah [we] went to see Governor and we gonna do it with brute
force and ignorance; he doesn’t want to see us and we gonna show him that we
gonna see him!
Buxtonians are a patriotic like any other nation; like any other nation in this
country. Buxtonians are patriotic. They wanted to see the governor; they stopped
the train; they laid out their concerns; and they got it resolved, and that was it!
When Shevan describes herself as one who “do[es] a lot of work,” “tr[ies] to erase stereotypes,” and “sell [s]” her village, I hear her talking about her responsibilities in the village or “nation” as she calls it. These actions make me think of her as an ambassador and an activist because of her efforts to create a positive image of Buxtonians. Some of the reasons are:
When you get yourself into certain situations, you try to remember, I am a
Buxtonian. I don’t want to fit the stereotype by portraying a certain attitude or, Baird 49
um, doing a certain action. So you pull back on that. You’re a Buxtonian and you
know the stereotypes exist and you don’t want to feed into it. So it kind of curb
your behavior, all right?
I’m a Buxtonian and I’m a proud Buxtonian and I tell people that always.
Regardless of what may have happened in Buxton, regardless of what people may
think what Buxton is about. Yes, we have our good and our bad. And I think our
good outweighs the bad, and you cannot sacrifice all Buxtonians by the little bad
we have or had within the community.
During our interview, I asked Shevan, “In the interest of “Buxton people stop train,” when did you first hear the story, and who told it to you? And why? What were the circumstances? One of the stories she tells shows her understanding of Buxton People Stop Train and why she attempts and fosters the right representation of that story.
Here is her story.
I Heard It First from My Grandmother
I heard it first from my grandmother. And it was a case where she was telling us
all about how the slaves bought Buxton. And how they pushed this wheelbarrow
with all these coins—because in those days that they were coins eh?
And imagine them working for like 25 to 35 shillings and had to come up with
$50,000 to purchase this village. You know it was really a group effort. And she
was telling us it to show that one person can accomplish this much, but as a
group, you know, there is unity and strength. Where unity is number to instill in Baird 50
you that you can do it together, you can work together. You don’t have to do it all
by yourself. You may not be able to do all by yourself …but as a group you know
you can do it.
And I think that was the first time I heard that story. Then I subsequently heard it
from my mom. My mom told us that and I basically just repeated what my mom
told me to my children without doing any added research or so.
As you can hear, Shevan tells Dem Seh Stories. As you know, Dem Seh Stories are second and third party stories. In this case, she tells stories that she heard from her mother and grandmother. When I heard these stories, I understand Shevan’s mother and grandmothers are her first history teachers. The home is the first academic site where she is taught to trust in traditions of passing down the stories told by women from previous generations.
Here is another story she tells, but in this one she talks about food or Bam-bye that her grandmother prepared. This Bam-bye story offers a glimpse of how stories illuminate the rituals with food and the role of her grandmother plays in her life story. These rituals and conversations are part of the process of how women make a Buxtonian child that would later develop this
“sense of pride” Shevan talks about.
Leh we listen to Shevan:
You Go to Your Grandmother to Collect Bam-bye
I can’t remember exactly where. That would have happened like when I was, ah…
nine or 10? That was way back. In the coming home from school, you go at your
grandmother to collect “Bam-bye.”[Laugher] Baird 51
Yeees! “Bam-bye” was food that cook and lef’ back and my grandmother had two
windows in her kitchen.
An’ she had, yes, she had a nail over the window and she would cook and this
food that lef’ back [was] in the pot, she would hang it on the nail. So when you
come home you’re looking to see that pot because once that pot hang up there
bam-bye in the pot! [Giggles] So you come home, and you ain’t even change off
the uniform, you just take off your socks and shoes and you hold your plate. You
remember those enamel plates- that used to make a lot of noise and suh? Yes, and
you gone over at Muddah fuh Bam-bye. So, and as you reach up the steps, you
know, she si’down in duh Berbice chair, right by di door.
And she smack she mouth and she seh, ‘look a-yuh go to ah a pot deh” and you
go and yuh tek out yuh bam-bye. [giggles]. Now not because I take out this bam-
bye, this Bam-bye is fuh mi [only], yuh know. This Bam-bye had to divide between
me, Kim, and Joy. [Laughter]. But who first go fuh Bam-bye get the biggest
portion but you’d better mek sure that the two of dem get because yuh gon get yuh
tail cut29 if yuh eat out duh Bam-bye.
Shevan also provides some clear ideas on the roles of grandmothers in the upbringing of children by saying that grandmothers had nothing more to do than “comb your hair, rub you down with coconut oil, and tell you stories.” But the village relationships are changing. I hear her talk about the loss of relationships because children and mothers no longer spend time to sit and
29 “Get yuh tail cut” means to get a whipping. Baird 52 tell stories without the distractions. As she speaks, I travel in my mind to every place in the village that she mentions. The sadness and nostalgia I feel are difficult for me bear30. Here is a story.
A Lot of Traditions Are Not Being Passed Down
The other thing too in those days we did not have the television to take away our
time. We were not distracted by the television. The only form of entertainment we
had basically was to sit and talk to each other. You relate your experiences as
well as you talk stories, and you pass tradition down.
But today you have the television there, and you’re glued to the television; you’re
glued to the computer; you’re glued to the Nintendo; you’re glued to the
PlayStation; you don’t have the time to, um, sit and listen to um stories. I would
sit and try to talk to my children and from the time I talk and something happen
on the television they tune from me and they tune into the television. I think it
causing [pause] a lot of the traditions are not being passed down; a lot of these
traditions are not being passed down because time is taken up elsewhere, whereas
you would sit down and talk Nansi stories; then you get yuh lil Bush Cook. You
not having that anymore. They’re not having that.
Just this afternoon I was remarking we don’t even have a village tailor—we don’t
have that. And those are things [that] used to be passed down from generation to
30 Young people were generally made to learn a trade along with school learning. That traditions seems to be lost. Self-reliance ensured that finances circulated in the village and provided sources of employment. This affective response I signal here points to how I access and process change. I felt a sense of loss, and guilt, as I am confronted with change, and not physically residing in the village. I am one of the persons who benefited from the teachings of the old, but I am not there to pass them on. Thus because of my physical location, I reflected and imagined the places and people who conducted their industries there. I sensed the change that Shevan's stories document: shifts in economic and educational outlook. Baird 53
generation; grandfather was a tailor, the son become a tailor; grandson become
a tailor. So the traditions that storytelling brought, traditions are dying because
they’re not being passed down [and it’s affecting the village] terribly, terribly.
Because a lot of the skills that were once in the village is no longer there you now
have to, you have to leave your village, to go out. And most times you end up
going the urban areas to find these services. It’s no longer in the village. You
have to go there to get the services. Go to the urban areas to get.
And I can remember as a child growing up you had - I am living in Ogle Street
here, at the end of Ogle Street you had Sister Clara sewing, two houses away you
had Cousin Elsa sewing, you had Miss Doreen at the bottom line sewing; now for
you to find a seamstress in the village is very very hard. We don’t have a tailor in
the village; we don’t have a shoemaker in the village; [things have] changed a
lot. Change and change a lot.
She notes generational change in her children’s demonstrated preference for playing
Nintendo over listening to stories and making “bush cook.” This is a play/labor through which children learn social roles is being lost. But Shevan is hopeful. Although she believes that children are less accessible today through storytelling, women still have roles to play in making the storytelling tradition because:
Women Are the Agents of Change
Women are the agents of change. I believe women are the agents of change. And
I think as women if we continue to encourage your children, if we continue to, um, Baird 54
tell stories. If we encourage them by [pause] if we pass on the traditions to them it
can make a difference. It can make a difference. We can’t wait on the men to do it.
We cannot wait on the men to do it. We have to do it as women. Women spend
more time with the children. We can do it when we are combing their hair. We
can do it when we’re dressing them. We can do it when we are taking them to
school. You walk by a building, and you can tell them something about the
building, you know like the old Found Out.
Clearly, Shevan has a plan of how to make change among the younger generation.31 She believes it is by telling stories during everyday activities—telling stories while doing simple things like “combing their hair” or “taking them to school” while telling them “something about the building [landmark buildings].” I hear Shevan telling stories in the manner of the old women in the village did when I was a child. These teachable moments that are useful in helping the children “see what the village was built on and try to build on that” to “pave [their] own way,” she says.
Overall, Shevan’s stories complicate the narrative of the women stopping the train. That story is not the only story of women’s involvement in Buxton. Weaving her own experiences of life in Buxton more than a century and a half after the events of the purchase of the village and the stopping of the train, she creates a constellation of stories that offer new knowledge of how intergenerational Buxtonian women make family and community dynamics in the twenty-first century. Before I say, “walk good,” and end this letter, I ask you to look over my shoulders as I tell stories about my dissertation research methodology.
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee
Dear Dissertation Committee,
31 Generation is a term I use to refer to persons in various age groups (age groups outside of and same as the storytellers'). Baird 55
Two years ago, I began working on finding a famous oral history poem called Buxton
People Stop Train. The project developed after coming to know Cultural Rhetorics theories and methodologies and finding myself re-telling the story of searching for the famous poem. I realized that I was observing and engaging in an “asking” methodology, or, as the people of my village, Buxton, say, “Wha de Story Seh?” The five women in my study, drawn from New York, the Bahamas, and Guyana, are invested in the oral history of my village and in making sure that that history reaches present and future generations of Buxtonians. What emerge from the women’s stories are complex theories that shed light on identity negotiations, roles and responsibilities, and land and colonial impact. These methodologies can inform how intellectuals navigate the cultural communities of the village and the academy.
This chapter includes several sections in which I: 1) explain how I came to the research methodology 2) define the “asking” methodology; 3) explain the contributions of the “asking” methodology to Caribbean rhetoric, Cultural Rhetorics, and oral history; 4) describe my concerns about the “asking” methodology, and 5) introduce Chapter Three where I will engage the readers in discourses on theories by Jennifer Lee and Tamika Boatswain. What these sections do for the dissertation is allow me to interrogate intergenerational relationships and my own involvement in my research. By doing so, my study complicates the relationship between the participant and the researcher so that the roles of participant and researcher are not static, but fluid. Furthermore, these sections allow me to lay the groundwork for Chapter Three, in which I discuss the themes of struggle, education, land, identity, and social responsibility in the oral histories of Tamika
Boatswain. My study draws from theories and methodologies in Cultural Rhetorics, Caribbean rhetoric, and oral history to explore the intersectionality of communities of practice. Baird 56
As a reminder, I make scholarly relations with Native and Indigenous scholars such as
Wilson and Riley-Mukavetz, who use community relationships to make rhetoric visible. Like
these scholars, I use the same rhetorical strategy of “asking” practiced by the Buxton community
to build a theoretical framework to study oral history. Thus, I take a Cultural Rhetorics approach
to practice as I theorize and explore Caribbean rhetoric. Theorizing as I practice is my attempt to
show what it looks like to exercise a decolonial option by situating my project at the intersections
of Cultural Rhetorics and Caribbean rhetoric to trouble how knowledge is made and practiced. In
that space, I interrogate knowledge-making and the nature of relationships alongside, and with
(in) my village and academic communities to learn how practitioners make knowledge, ideas,
and materials a part of their daily lives.
In my project, I (re)tell stories of how I make visible a relational framework of stories
and networks in the community of Buxton. Buxtonian relationships, for example, show how
artifacts and ancestors, indeed, are connected to living systems and are never quite dead and
gone. These relationships play crucial roles in connecting people through various means
including blood memory and kinships. I tell our stories of blood kinship and memory to theorize
a methodology of “asking” and to make Caribbean rhetorical scholarship visible on its own
terms.
I use a Cultural Rhetorics approach that allows me to listen to the ways in which the
Buxtonian women in my study and I make knowledge using our particular strategies. From
women’s life stories and methodologies, intellectuals can learn various ways to conduct
community-based research that are intercultural and intracultural. As a Buxtonian intellectual, I
hear Buxtonian women’s stories as theories and practices that make evident creole indigenous
strategies for making oral histories to teach, to learn, and to survive. Furthermore, I study the oral Baird 57
histories made by my women contributors from Buxton to theorize and to illuminate the
relationships between and among individuals and their communities, nationally and
internationally.
An “Asking” Methodology—I began with a Poem
As I mentioned in Chapter One, I used to hear the poem Buxton People Stop Train recited at church gatherings, and at Buxton’s annual celebration of the emancipation of slaves, but I could not remember the words. In 2012, I telephoned friends and family in New York, asking,
“Can you tell me the words of the poem Buxton People Stop Train? As family and friends referred me to other Buxtonians, I engaged the collective efforts of Buxtonians in the diaspora: in
Canada, the United States, Europe, the Bahamas, and Antigua. After a few months of “asking,” I collected a line here, a verse there, and several verses there—fragments of the poem—using a methodology of “asking.”
Here is a story: I live in Ohio and I begin by “asking” Teacher Bernadette who lives in
Brooklyn. She is the mother of Tamika Boatswain, who is featured in Chapter Three. Teacher
Bernadette has heard the poem, but she does not remember the words. Knowing that her daughter Tamika is a historian, she gives me her telephone number and tells me, “Ask Tamika.”
I telephone Tamika, who lives in the Bahamas. Tamika remembers a stanza of the poem and she shares that with me. Then she says, “Ask Gordon.” And more importantly she says, “Ask
Kwayana” because the poem is written in the Creolese language, a signature of Kwayana’s work.
Kwayana, whom I introduced in Chapter One, is a ninety-year old whom Buxtonians fondly call “The Buxton Sage” or “The Sage of Buxton.” Kwayana is an intellectual elder and knowledge keeper. He remains the most prominent village historian—one of three revolutionary
Guyanese, including Forbes Burnham, and Cheddi Jagan, who fought for decolonization, and the Baird 58 eventual independence of Guyana from British rule. In his lifetime, Kwayana became a minister in the government, an activist, and an educator. Kwayana currently resides in the U.S.A. It is not surprising that I was directed to him and not to a library or book. I am reminded that the villagers are aware of his age and are careful to show him intellectual deference. This referral system of
“asking” that directs me to Kwayana is a way of marking that one has become one of the “old people”—a subject I take up later in this chapter.
On a simple level, “asking” brings a network of people who help me to assemble a poem.
For Buxtonians, “asking” creates a constellated network of relationships—each one asking another as they see fit—keeping a balance of power between the participants and the researcher fluid. As a decolonial scholar, I listen and hear this practice as a Buxtonian way of using the language of referral and directing my research, thereby, defying the notion of the “solitary academic” who customarily does the asking, as evidenced by my Human Subjects Research
Board (HSRB) protocol. The Buxtonians resist that practice.
Thus this practice of “asking” becomes a decolonial framework for the study. As I will explore in my project, the collaborative nature of the “asking” methodology allows me to speak to the purpose of Caribbean rhetoric– to be seen and heard as Caribbeans through the use of homemade methodologies.
My “asking” methodology helps me to connect cultural rhetoric’s goals of making visible some challenges of meeting institutional expectations concerning codes of conduct between researcher and participant. Thus, my dissertation demonstrates how I participate in both communities’ practices to blur the lines between the civil and the academic. I choose to examine the relationships between the village and the academy based on the shared feature of “practice” that both communities engage in. Thus, when I tell research stories, I make oral history based on Baird 59 the storytelling frameworks of the knowledge-making systems that women practice. These experiences can help intellectuals (re) imagine rhetorical scholarship that is useful to both the communities of Buxton and the academy. Rhetorically, our oral history practices are decolonial and as such they can become grounds for building sustainable relationships between and among disciplinary and civil communities.
The “asking” methodology is a practice by which Buxton people share knowledge and resources. From researching the poem, three crucial theories emerge: 1) we all know the story of the poem, but not the poem’s words; 2) remembering the words of the poem is not important when I live in the village—my need for words is driven by a western sense of literacy, and 3) my academic research among Buxtonian intellectuals depends on community-based practices with individuals working in collaborative relationships and shared beliefs. This “Wah De Story Seh” aspect of “asking” I use in semi-structured interviews to sustain the research relationships as women would in their everyday life. Thus, when I listen to how my participants and I engage in follow-up conversations, several insights emerge: 1) I hear us asking Wah De Story Seh? to inquire about each other’s well-being, and simultaneously generating stories; 2) by listening to how women direct me to resources, I am reminded of Cultural Rhetorics’ goals of making research methodologies that value, reflect, and sustain theories emerging from the practices of cultural communities. Consequently, this Buxtonian practice of “asking” becomes central to how
I exercise decolonial options and enact a Cultural Rhetorics relational approach to community- based research and oral history research that entails reciprocity.
When I listen to the women and I hear them talk about their lived experiences or discuss the importance of the poem, Buxton People Stop Train, I hear them engaging in Wah De Story
Seh. I understand this as an “asking” methodology which privileges a collaborative and Baird 60
communal approach for sustaining relationships with members inside and outside my cultural
communities. As Buxtonians “ask” for stories from each other, an incipient theory emerges:
“everybody and every “body” has story. Just like the villagers who spread the message by word
of mouth until they assemble the poem, women tell stories that pass on intergenerational life
stories. Collecting these stories in fragments illuminates an embodied practice that I take up later
in this project. Furthermore, just like I gather these fragments, I gather the Buxtonian women’s stories and imagine the village people metaphorically assembling, body by body across time and space—a theory that I explore in later chapters.32
“Asking” to Do Cultural Rhetorics
When practicing Cultural Rhetorics, researchers challenge institutional expectations that
privilege distance, objectivity, and economy.33 When I tell the story of assembling the poem
using the “asking” methodology, I think of how my research confronts how knowledge-making
is cultivated in the academy. Although research writing in the academy can be realized and
regarded as a solitary process, the Buxton community teaches me to interact in an intimate and
communal research process. We, Buxtonians, organize around active networks to make
knowledge that is orally mediated. Thus, the “asking” methodology exemplifies relationality, a
tenet of Cultural Rhetorics, allowing me to closely observe personal collaboration.
Closing the distance in research by asking involves other people and resources making
the process constellated, dynamic, and messy. At any one point, for instance, I am sent to “ask”
another person. As an academic, I think that the research methodology engenders a fragmented
relay of information. As a Buxtonian, however, I see the process allowing each person to
32 I used questions for gathering stories. I listened and spoke the stories as I typed. Next, I created concept or situational maps to frame and editing the stories. Mapping involves writing down situations, themes, gaps, words, events, within and across stories to constellate them. I also involved constellating historical and archival stories.
33 See ‘Listening to Ghosts” by Malea Powell; See in “Coming to Oratory” by Lee Maracle; See The Decolonial Imaginary by Emma Perez; See Traces of a Stream by Jacqueline Jones Royster, See “Listening for Legacies” by Terese Monberg Baird 61 participate in making, keeping, and transmitting knowledge. What these experiences mean for my research is that when I use the “asking” methodology, I practice a Buxtonian relational methodology that is not objective, distant, economical, or static. Furthermore, I see the “asking” methodology benefitting the research by making apparent hidden the preliminary activities often left on the cutting room floor. These preliminary activities challenge institutional expectations on how knowledge is organized during community-based research. Hence, I assert that the “asking” methodology explores how researchers can learn from the networking practices in the civil cultural community to theorize institutional expectations.
“Asking” to do Caribbean Rhetoric
When women ask Wah De Story Seh, they invite storytelling opportunities that magnify the relational, communal, and collaborative practices that characterize Caribbean women’s lived experiences. These women’s intimate and dynamic methodologies extend beyond current published village oral histories such as Buxton People Stop Train. My work departs from static models, for in the follow up to the semi-structured interviews I conducted, we tell stories. By including a Cultural Rhetorics approach, I pay attention to not only what, we, the women do, but also “how we do” Caribbean rhetorics on an ongoing basis and on their own terms.
In my project, as I listen to the women I also pay attention to how they build theories that illuminate roles and relationships.34 These relationships theorize the lives of the descendants of a formerly enslaved African diaspora from the perspectives of mothers, grandmothers, and “old people” who struggled to gain independence, a sense of belonging, and wholeness. Thus, I hear these stories as an African diaspora’s way of negotiating a creole indigeneity through a making—
34 Paying attention to “practice” I build on Krista Ratcliffe’s notion of rhetorical listening which an embodied act. The act of listening connects practice of doing to open discussions about how we gain access to knowledge that is not transmitted by spoken word. Considering the body in its specific locations in action (metis), I trace places and embodied practices. Pinpointing how I enter into inquiry, I model how rhetoricians can engage in methodologies that promote cross-cultural community building. Baird 62
building relationships with land, people, beliefs, and values. These relationships unveil the
broader, richer contexts for making new knowledge to change oral historiography research at the
village and institutional level.
As I make oral history in this project, listening becomes crucial in how I think of my own
responsibility to reflect my cultural communities as I negotiate institutional professional writing
styles. Based on my academic training, I find myself wanting to untangle the stories to fit linear, single stories. I return to the women repeatedly, asking Wah the Story Seh, and learn how they understand the stories—personal stories are infixes in village history and family histories. I struggle with organizing women’s stories for the dissertation to reflect their embedded nature.
By making this project reflect Buxtonian women’s ways of embedding stories within stories as I do in the letters, I practice constellating stories. I privilege relationality by allowing the tangled and non-linear stories of the women to remain in the project—I write exactly what the women say and connect those stories to relevant scholarly literature. By constellating stories as I do in
this project, I chart a complex course to connect the people, what they know, how they know,
and their dynamic situations. Intellectuals who read this work may choose to connect the stories
differently, thereby, making their own constellations. They can also invoke different or similar
scholarly relations to learn as well. Further, they may read all the letters to the young Buxtonians
first or all the letters to the dissertations committee, for instance, to learn Wah De Story Seh.
As a Caribbean rhetorics practice, “asking” involves giving, taking, inhabiting, and
circulating knowledge on an ongoing basis. Thus, I theorize that the Wah De Story Seh “asking”
methodology as interactive. When I (re) tell the women’s stories, using their expressions in the
project, I resist research paradigms that promote distancing and ‘doneness,’ to mark that the
nature of the relationships is ongoing. Sustaining community relations allows me to perform Baird 63 reciprocity, respect, and responsibility for how I gain knowledge. Hence, this study shifts the barriers to include rhetorics that (re) presents Buxtonian as definitively Caribbean. Drawing on land-based and decolonial frames, I intermingle women’s stories with various stories to make them meaningful and available to academics and ordinary people.
My efforts to resist boundaries brings intercultural conversations with decolonial scholars into focus to interrogate the benefits of making scholarship that reflect the Caribbean cultural community. To Emma Perez, Malea Powell, and Lee Maracle, I ask “Wah De Story Seh? to learn how they challenge the professional the writing practices that marginalize culture-specific rhetorics. Referring to the writing of Chicana history, for instance, Emma Perez in The
Decolonial Imaginary says that in the tradition, historians are expected to mimic each other’s style, organization, and content. These practices do not always reflect how Chicanas express and value their practices. Thus, Perez argues for a system that recognizes the cultural community by not trying to mold it to fit set institutional expectations for writing. Critiquing the university’s colonial isolationist practices of objectivity and distance as approaches to reciprocity and respect,
Malea Powell says in “Listening to Ghosts,” that in the academy “[w]e have cut the wholeness of knowledge into little bits, scattered them to the four winds and now begin to reorganize them into categories invented to enable empire by bringing order to chaos and civilization to the savage” when doing research” (15). A colonial understanding of knowledge making in the academy is isolationist, territorial, and elitist. Maracle Lee in “Coming to Oratory” says that we intellectuals also separate story from theory in an effort to create disciplinary divides. Together the authors share that the academy is complicit in separating theory from practice, the researcher from the researched, and knowledge- makers from knowledge. Baird 64
As I embed my story and the women’s stories into my project, I enact a decolonial option to resist placing women’s stories into the appendices. To make Caribbean rhetoric “seen and heard,” in rhetoric and composition, I write letters to tell young Buxtonians “Wah De Story Seh.”
Thus in my use of literacies of the community of Buxton within the academy, like Wilson does, I
practice an intercultural stance that disrupts my own colonial tendencies. I also make alliances
with scholars who share similar beliefs on the affordances of connecting knowledge inside both
cultural communities to help me demonstrate relationality and accountability of “how we do”
Caribbean rhetoric.
Overall, listening to the women allows me to hear Buxtonian women’s stories as theories
and incomplete stories that are ongoing. These theories can transform oral history research.
Using Cultural Rhetorics methodology to make space for growth in Caribbean rhetoric, my work
departs from the current models that neglect the literacies of women intellectuals who are
attentive to the language of social responsibility and telling—Wah De Story Seh. Many
Caribbean stories of rural life are conveyed in fiction, history, song, and other forms of literature.
To add, socio-historical research of this kind situates women’s historiography in the larger reality
of “how we do” in the villages by women on their own terms. As a Caribbean rhetorical practice,
“how we do” as told by women presents opportunities for women to make more visible the
impact of knowledge-making on individuals in the wider regional and academic community.
We Do: Using Blood and Marking Heritage
When I listen to the women’s stories, I notice literacies that connect ancestral heritage to
their identity negotiations. These literacies make me see connections to how Indigenous
American scholars talk about blood memory and embodiment. As a way to further the theory of
“everybody, and every “body” has story,” I will theorize the connections between blood memory Baird 65 and the “asking” methodology to explore how Buxtonian women claim identity. For example, in the excerpt of stories by Shevan Forde prefaced this chapter, she nuances blood memory as a determinant in her patriotism and resist the stereotyping of Buxtonians as “warlike.” Shevan says, “Buxtonians are patriotic like any other nation; like any other nation in this country.”
Words like “nation” refers to African ancestral stories of slavery and colonialism. Shevan’s theory of social justice and social action comes from her engagement with African diaspora’s consciousness, which is Caribbean rhetoric.
I hear Shevan’s expression and connect to an ancestral past that Kwayana speaks of in
Gang Gang, a book that honors an old Congo grandmother he grew up with in the Lusignan
Nigger Yard. In his book, Kwayana relates that when he was a child, the grandmother—Gang
Gang—always told him “Congo a high nation, picnie” meaning that her people, from the Congo, are highly regarded (“Introduction”). Taking the cue from Gang Gang and Shevan, I work to explore intergenerational and diasporic knowledge of modern-day Buxtonian women who consciously or unconsciously profess a relationship with their African ancestors whose genes they carry in their bodies, and according to de Certeau, “the body is memory” (“Politics of
Silence” 227). Hence, as a cultural community of African slave ancestry, blood lines are a positive connecting trope in discussions of how people make histories about survival that resists the dominant narratives on colonial impact on former slave communities.
“Asking” for women’s stories invites intercultural scholarly discourses on colonial impact as part of Caribbean oral historiography, as well. Caribbean rhetoricians can draw from
Indigenous and Native intellectuals to build a scholarly intercultural relationship, as Cultural
Rhetorics practice. I ask “Wah De Story Seh? of Native scholars Linda Hogan and Scott
Momaday in their memoirs which connect blood memory to history and culture. In The Names: Baird 66
A Memoir, Momaday asserts that his mother’s memory became his own. He claims that, “the real
burden of the blood; this is immortality. I remember” (22). Momaday proposes that blood
memory is a determinant in the survival of Native American culture and history. Hogan directly
implicates that the body holds memory when she states in her memoir Woman Who Watches
over the World: “[H]istory, like geography, lives in the body and it is marrow-deep” (59).
Together, these authors open a space for me to “ask” questions about the role of blood memory in the making of an African Guyanese creole indigeneity. As I will affirm, Buxtonian women’s relationships to blood memory is a determinant in their oral historiography. The women reflect on the village’s history and pre-history to “keep alive the memory of what the Europeans have forgotten,” as de Certeau states (227). Native scholars, de Certeau, and Buxtonian women provide blood and body memory as a basis for theory and practice.
In sum, one of my goals in this chapter is to explain Wah De Story Seh as a Cultural
Rhetorics and Caribbean practice and I argue for it to make intercultural contributions to the
discourse on blood memory. As a way to further explore blood memory and scholarship, I also
ask “Wha De Story Seh? as I listen to Terese Monberg in “Listening to Legacies.” The
researcher advances the practice of examining backstories to experience: to see, hear, and feel
past, present, and future stories and to expand discourses on how women’s voices are heard in
non-traditional western ways. Through oral history / narrative methodology Monberg uncovers
hidden voices, untapped ideas and perspectives and open up avenues to learn and grow from
many pinay/pinoy members of her community. Through Monberg’s work, I understand that oral
history research compels rhetoricians to listen and to “ask” on their own terms. Monberg chooses
to write in her own Fillipino voice.35 Her work makes visible how members of a particular
35 Language plays a key role in listening, writing, and being heard. Monberg uses words like Peminism (a play of the Filipino pronunciation of /f/) as a part of identity and of being heard. Monberg cites extensively from Royster and Powell and other Baird 67
community deliberately use diverse non-traditional rhetorical methodologies of knowing and
learning in their research. I hear Monberg as invoking embodied practices to do her own
scholarship. As my dissertation methodology will show, I hear and tell women’s stories and
theorize women’s “stories within stories” that link to ancestral legacies. Focusing on these
embodied practices help me examine how the stories we, intellectuals, tell will intersect in
cultural and disciplinary contexts. I explore several contexts of how “asking” or Wah De Story
Seh sheds light on colonial impact on my cultural communities, and community-based research.
#“Old People” vs “Archivist”
Although intergenerational stories are part of the asking methodology, navigating the
process of gathering them raises a few concerns regarding access and responsibility, writing,
trust and colonialism. As I listen to women, I hear them (re) constructing conversations or Wah
De Story Seh stories that begin with “I asked my mother…,” Or “I asked my grandmother ….” I
hear these women using the “asking” methodology to theorize memory. Through the
remembering of the “old people” in (re) constructed stories, and subjective stories by which
knowledge lives on, I will argue that the methodology of “asking” the old people presents
opportunities to learn intergenerational knowledge-making which is an integral practice of
relationality. Further, women’s perspectives on the social roles of the “old people” can transform
intercultural research on oral historiography.
As a cultural and social practice, I tell stories of the “old people,” to portray a broader, richer, and complex scope for making history that is relational to time, people, and place.
In practice, I reassemble the entire poem when I return to Buxton Village; Grace French, a
villager, tells me to “ask” Sister Yvette Herod, the village archivist. When I ask “Wha De Story
prominent feminist rhetoricians to make the case for “critical listening” to uncover what we could about rhetoric generally and to offer perspectives on what critical listening means in the discipline. Baird 68
Seh? of the villagers, I hear a change in the literacy. I am surprised that we have an “archivist” because when I lived in Buxton, for more than thirty years, we had no such person called an archivist. We just had “old people.” The term “old people” refers to living and non-living persons, explains Gillian Richards-Greaves, a Guyanese cultural anthropologist, in her article
“Taak Half Lef Half: Negotiating Transnational Identities through Proverbial Speech in African
Guyanese Kweh Kweh Rituals.” Living seniors and elders are old persons to whom villagers look for information and advice. Richards-Greaves notes that “it is conventional wisdom amongst Guyanese that ‘the old people,’ on account of their extensive experiences, are wiser than the young, and as such, should be revered” (12). In the Buxtonian and Guyanese community as a whole, the “old people” to whom we give credit include non-living ancestors whose words, proverbs, and sayings are used for various purposes. Yet, “while the old people’s wisdom is respected when they are alive, it is after their death that their advice is rendered invaluable,” further asserts Richards-Greaves (12).36 The import of my encounter and Richards-Greaves stories for my community-based research methodology is that they offer allude to the syncretic nature of knowledge-making that my research will explore.
By telling the old people’s stories, I will assert that the women and I are active agents in the (re) generation of oral history that can cause change at the village level; for our stories can reach a reading public like they have done not previously. “Old people” stories blur the lines between the living and the dead, making space for community researchers to honor their histories and legacies they bring to several cultural communities. Thus, my work makes space for
36 Additionally, in her dissertation on Kweh Kweh, Gillian Richards-Greaves asserts that “old people” are a rich source of knowledge and in their role as storytellers and keepers, they are akin to the West African Griot who function as “cultural historians” (16). I argue that in Buxtonian-Guyanese communities women perform a similar role of cultural preservation of knowledge of practices associated with bush medicine, birthing practices, and childcare as the Griottes (female). For instance, when I was a child, we had “old men” and “old women” who everyone in the village consulted for various reasons. If babies had “thrush” (yeast infection) mothers went to Mamie Fiffie, at Buxton Back, who knew everything about home remedies, not just for thrush, but for many ailments. We also had Sister Prudence Arthur, from Buxton Back, who was a master at the knowledge of the bush medicines. And we had Aunt Jo, from Buxton Front, who was the wise and handy midwife’s helper. Baird 69 extending into intercultural conversations with interdisciplinary intellectuals whose conversations on how the women’s relationships with the “old people” complicate oral history methodology. I will now share a concern of an elder woman intellectual whom I recruited.37
“What if I Talk About People and Their Family Get Vexed with Me?” While recruiting an elder woman, I explained my research. We traded stories about childhood and after listening to her stories, I asked if she would consent in writing for me to tell some of her stories. After a brief pause, she asked, “What if I talk about people and their family get vexed with me?”38
My encounter with the elder woman prepared me to think of how gaining access to stories using Wah De Story Seh carries responsibilities for how the researcher and the participants (re) tell stories and represent others. Hence, when I hear Buxtonian women telling intergenerational stories, I theorize that the stories do center on the researcher; they amplify the complexity of making oral histories the villager participant, and the villager researcher who is also an academic woman. I tell this story to show how in executing the HSRB protocol, relationships ensue to conflate the “asking” methodology. The elder woman’s foremost concern is respect and responsibility.
Vital to the relationality of story-making among Buxtonian women is our attention to tensions in the research. In my exchange, I hear the elder woman invoke oral/scribal suspicions and social responsibility that limit our intergenerational exchange. My encounter also raises the question of importance to Caribbean oral historiography and compels me to ask: How does the researcher honor oral traditions such as paying intellectual deference to the elders? How does the
37 Using the HSRB protocol, I asked friends and relatives for names of persons who would be willing to tell me stories. The elder woman was on person I contacted and attempted to recruit.
38 In this exchange the elder woman reversed the “asking” role. I, the academic, was questioned and not the other way around. Her questions helped my design my research questions to exercise an ethic of care. I asked participants the question, “What do you want me to tell young Buxonians?” so that can they tell stories they wanted to, honorably. Baird 70 researcher navigate the tensions of what and how to speak honestly? How to represent others responsibly, and under what conditions? I argue that the spaces of access where we behave as community intellectuals and academic intellectuals are not always clear.
Although the woman does not directly tell me she will not participate in my study, she recommends an appropriate person who has the proper knowledge or “book learning” as
Guyanese say. I share this encounter to iterate that on the one hand, the “asking” methodology allows me access to knowledge-makers as a villager. On the other hand, the “asking” methodology, for academic purposes, may prevent those who want to “taak half lef half” from participating. I also raise the elder woman’s story to continue connecting to blood memory as it relates to writing, trust, and colonial impact.
Writing, Trust, and Colonial Impact
The “asking” methodology raises concerns about writing and trust. My research presents opportunities to explore how both the Buxton community and the academic community can benefit from each other if they work through commonalities and differences to respect each other. Jamaican scholar, Carolyn Cooper in Noises in the Blood, notes that more oral literature research needs to be done to include the expressions of ordinary people. Cooper, in her attempt to get consent to record their perspectives on dancehall rhetorics in Jamaica, for instance, was met with resistance. Many artists questioned her loyalty and saw her as trying to become an informer. In my research, I take up Cooper’s challenge as I explore Cultural Rhetorics in which story as methodology is used to explore ways in which we can transform oral literature research.
In my dissertation, I address how in the methodology of “asking” the signing of papers raises concerns about oral-scribal representations that are essential for trust building among Buxtonian women. Addressing this concern can influence how intellectuals reframe community-based Baird 71 research to explore the ties that bind communities together and to explore the promise of transforming those ties and create new ways of collaborating and sharing.
In the context of writing the colonial legacies impact women’s educational experiences in and out of the university. When conducting research in the academy, tensions arise because in the act of “asking” to provide written evidence. In the case of the story Buxton People Stop Train that has lived for over a century, “asking” as a methodology did not seem to produce answers that were empirical enough for me. In the community, story-makers do not always have to repeat an entire story word-by-word to make meaning, nor are they required to tell the same version of a story. The people need only to a single word or phrase to trigger an entire story or the rhetorical situation. This practice of reducing stories to mere words or phrases further manifests a manner of speaking with discretion an expectation of “Taak Half Lef Half.”
Contrary to my community practice, as a researcher, I tell myself some stories: I must provide evidence driven research as part of my academic training. I tell myself that a researcher must observe, theorize, and document evidence in “full text” to make the work authoritative. In this project, using the asking methodology, I listen for complete stories and I hear my community was producing fragments. In response, I ask myself, how would I observe and validate stories that are mostly preserved in specific oral forms? How do I account for authorship? And who has the power to tell these stories? Of what relevance to rhetoric are
Buxtonian community’s story-making practices in which words, fragments, and silences characterize storytelling? As a consequence, in my project, I explore the role of asking in communal collaborative authorship to examine a series of interactions with women, and to reflect on how we “do” rhetoric—as practiced. Baird 72
As a reminder, as a Cultural Rhetorics practitioner my concerns are about the right representation and the impact of colonialism on knowledge-making practices. What this awareness does is help me listen for stories that make space for elder women’s concerns. As I include these stories, I do so by listening for cultural codes of respect, relationality, and responsibility in discussions on women’s oral historiography. Interweaving these concerns in my methodology make apparent some of the ways I do community-based research when I listen.
This listening that I did with the elder woman is an orientation or a positioning of rhetors to specific rhetorics not just for my goals, but for a closer engagement in Caribbean and Cultural
Rhetorics framework that is aimed at making every community member visible.
Consequently, the “asking” methodology allows me to engage with Guyanese women
writers who conduct community-based research who are conscious of the need to navigate issues
of trust. I draw on Richards-Greaves who notes that African-Guyanese trust issues with signing
documents are colonial baggage. Participants whom she interviewed for her dissertation feel that
their words cannot be entrusted to the researcher’s paper because of the privileging of text which
is the white man’s way (“Kweh Kweh”). I draw a direct connection to the elder woman who
balked at signing the HSRB consent forms. Thus, I argue that signing and having their words
recorded, as a means of making them visible and accountable, can also make women vulnerable.
Richards-Greaves argues that institutional artifacts such as the HSRB form that require
signatures put a wall between researcher and participant. She asserts that the elders, especially
women ripe with “life sense” that is expressed orally and in everyday practices may not be
heard.39 Scholars in the discipline need to write the differences that make scholarship in non-
39 Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies elaborates on the various ways in which western epistemologies have encroached on Indigenous peoples and created distrust. Smith proposes twenty-four ways of decolonizing methodologies. Likewise, Shawn Wilson in Research is Ceremony offers a research paradigm that is respectful of the relationality of Indigenous epistemology, ontology, axiology, and methodology. Baird 73 community places and include the places where they clash with institutional expectations. I call for a space in research that allows community intellectuals to teach scholars how to learn from them.
Scholars Lucy Watahomigie and Teresa McCarty do such teaching. They opine that the act of committing an individual’s language to writing is an ideological matter: a “statement of value” as well as a “social and political action” (107). Power, ideology, and responsibility are involved in transferring oral stories into writing. Writing is not a matter of just getting stories; it is a way of being in the world. Writing becomes archives of how communities live and practice civic life and can (dis) empower people. When I listen to the elder Buxtonian woman,
Cruikshank, and Watahomigie and McCarty, I hear them drawing attention to how researchers need to be responsible.
In her work on theories and methodologies for documenting Indigenous oral histories,
Julie Cruikshank in “Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social
Imagination” notes that writing oral histories has curative effects, but writing ossifies the spoken word. In “My Old People’s Stories: A Legacy for Yukon First Nations” she writes that “one must now read and not actually hear them” (2). Cruikshank is drawing a direct connection to the ambiguous loss of writing down stories. While we save the narratives, we lose the oral engagement.
In the light of the scholars’ discussions, I modified my research questions to ask methodological questions: How do Buxtonian women make stories? And how can telling those stories in the academy complicate oral history research beyond the village context? I practice a
Cultural Rhetorics approach of incorporating the language and practices of the women to create a methodological frame that demonstrates how knowledge-making methodology necessitates Baird 74
approaches that allow research to travel beyond and within the confines of the academic
community.40
Leaving a Buxtonian, Returning an Academic
As I asked “Wah De Story Seh? to the women, and begin with my own research story as
a point of inquiry, to activate an asking research methodology, I bring together historiography
and community-based research to suggest that rhetoricians can use life stories as a place for re-
imagining how to contextualize knowledge-making and relationality. In the “asking”
methodology, I reflect on the process of doing community-based research. Initially, I was
looking for an “artifact” and in the process of “looking,” Buxtonians teach me to “ask” and in so doing I rekindle and extend relationships with other villagers across the world.
My journey with the stories takes me back to the village. I feel that doing research on the
land offers a level of scholarship that fronts the embodied nature of rhetorics—people to people,
and people on lands—that cultural rhetoricians believe is necessary in doing rhetoric. In going
back to the land, I do not find a museum piece that objectifies my culture, rather, I find
relationships, and “relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality” (Research is
Ceremony 7, original emphasis). For the making of scholarship, cultural rhetoricians promote
decolonial methodologies that explore scholars’ relationships to nature, or the land, and people. I
shift my gaze to multiple spaces where Caribbean writers make stories and to the physical labor
of making those stories.
Caribbean women writers such as Onya Kempadoo in Buxton Spice are making such
spaces. In her work, she connects the fictional village of Tamarind Grove and its people in an
40 To engage in interdisciplinary discourse, we attempt to speak a kind of creole language. To speak this creole language is “to learn--to inhabit--a creole culture” 57. One of the goals of this creole model is to forge interdisciplinary models of research that reaches both inside and outside of the academy (See Cathy Davison and David Theo Goldberg in “Engaging the Humanities,” Profession 2004). Baird 75
ethnographic fiction. Kempadoo, a writer of Guyanese descent living in the diaspora, scrutinizes
relationships in the village in a coming of age story. 41 My work differs from hers in that I privilege accounts by women whose stories reveal how they sense their involvement with others on their own terms and in their own voice. In turn, work with to highlight, contextualize, and
interpret in keeping with the “asking” methodology for making oral history. My methodology
fits Basso’s notion of relationality. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso offers that “relationships to
places are lived most often in the company of other people, and it is on these communal
occasions-when places are sensed together” (57). Thus, returning to the land—the village—
becomes crucial in my work as a decolonial scholar who makes visible how I constellate the
research stories of my academic and village relationships.
Conclusion
I regard Buxtonians as part of my scholarly relatives and we make space for community-
based research together. The asking methodology makes visible how we create scholarly
relationships. When I return from the land in person, I take the stories with me to the academic
“land” to provide sustenance to ourselves and communities. In “Our Story Begins Here
Constellating Cultural Rhetorics,” cultural rhetoricians assert that “working out a relationship to
the land, to the lake, to the histories of … place. Building a space in which our work exists
alongside those histories. Building a practice we can remember when we’re not all together, not
in [a] place/space” (Act 1, Scene 2). Like these scholars, I envision methodologies that build
connected research cognizant of the histories of physical places and how we interact with them
and them on us. The “asking” methodology allows communities to operate in “relational and
constellated” network. Our academic or civil stories create lands where we make knowledge.
41 Kempadoo set out to write a coming of age book that needed the context of the village in which her main character came of age. Baird 76
In Chapter Three, I use the “asking methodology and semi-structured interviews to gather
her stories. I explore, through textual analysis and mapping, women’s perspectives on land,
colonialism, social roles, and responsibility to understand the practice of struggle that Tamika
Boatswain theorizes. Tamika asserts that “Everybody Struggles” in Buxton and relates her own
experiences of struggle through several embedded story of “Girl Child Learning” in the home.
Through her story we can learn of intimate processes that directed her learning history towards
independence, and options. Tamika holds three college degrees. I listen to her stories and I begin
to discern how she relates to independence and options. These relationships allow me to ask questions about community-based education for girls and the impact of having a university
education. I interrogate the impact of female education in colonial and post-colonial Buxton to
complicate scholarly conversations about resilience of women from the village. A moment for
theorizing arises: family stories are important spaces for learning the struggle for balance of
power, gender relationships, and social uplift. Baird 77
CHAPTER III. RELATING LAND, BODIES, AND PRACTICE
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians
Dear Young Buxtonians,
Wah De Story Seh?
I have more stories this time for you from Jennifer Lee, a sixty-three year old Buxtonian
woman. If you remember, I introduced Jennifer previously as the daughter of “Teacher Hector”
Lee and Charlotte Lee of Buxton Middle Walk Road, over the train line. She is also a recipient of
the famed Buxton scholarship that was instated in 1924 for promising Buxtonians to attend secondary school in the city. Jennifer currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. In her career, she
worked as an accountant at the United Nations International Children Emergency Fund
(UNICEF) in Manhattan, New York, and in the African nations of The Democratic Republic of
Congo, and Chad for more than thirty years. Jennifer has a close relationship with her parents
who told her many stories.
I asked Jennifer, “Tell me a nice story?” 42
Leh we listen to a few of her stories.
They Used to Throw Box43
I start to ask questions. Then they talk about going to the Backdam and working
in the Backdam, and how people lived for Christmas. You know like my
grandmother, my father’s mother, she bred pigs and then for the Christmas she
would sell and everything. How [come] they used to live on that little bit money?
42 “Nice” stories are memorable stories. They are used to sustain story-telling as entertainment. People gather and tell them at informal social gatherings in the home, with family and friends. “Nice” stories reveal the wayward stories of grandparents, mother, fathers, children, and villagers that are not likely to get told in history books of in formal news.
43 “Throwing Box” is micro-financing. To finance cottage industries or small projects, the people pool their monies. They pool a set amount of money that is given collectively (a box hand) in turn to each person in the group either daily, weekly or bi-monthly or monthly as agreed upon by the participants. Baird 78
And I start to calculate and I ask, Mommie, how people used to live?
She said, they used to throw box. Then I learned about box. They used to throw
box. They would sell and they had to do whatever it is they had to do to survive.
They didn’t steal. And then I said ok. But still it really baffled me that from the
little money that they could get that they can live. And Mommy said, why you
think all of those houses have all those shapes. They didn’t come and build houses
like how we build house. They start with a [n] out-house; you maybe have a little
kitchen; then you add on a bedroom.
And so they didn’t have loans? They didn’t have mortgage?
She said, no. They had to sit and save up. And then everybody come together to
help. So it gave me a very different perspective. This whole thing about
cooperative. So when I came to work my whole approach was problem –solving
because from all these little stories you hear and you know like okay it may not
have been unique to Buxton, but I was hearing it from my mom and from my dad.
Jennifer continues:
They Had to Go and Break the Bricks
I go and I talk to my aunts, you know, it was like, well this is what, who we are.
And I don’t hear anything. My mother told me about her mom that when they
were doing roads women used to go and break the bricks and I say why the
women break bricks and not the men. Mom said, I don’t know. And I was like, this
world is never fair because women had to take care of the children. They had to
go and break the bricks. And I asked, what were the men doing? Baird 79
And I don’t hear anything.
When I listen to Jennifer, I learn that women did hard manual labor outside of the home and I understand that by their “breaking” bricks they “built” the physical infrastructure of Buxton.
Furthermore, I understand that the women are continuing a relationship with the land that formerly enslaved Africans bequeathed as their homeland. Buxton women demonstrate that a connection to the land is a part of the literacy of civic responsibility.
Some Never Came Back
My mother always told me stories about some families who disappear. They go in
the bush44—and they come back at Christmas and they bring whatever gold. So
that they come back with a lot of money—some never came back. And they had
[pause] think it was my grandfather who had a brother who went and never came
back. I asked, you guys never used to find out about them?
Mommy said they go and nobody knows. Maybe somebody would bring a message
saying they died or they crossed the border and go somewhere. And that was it.
They didn’t hear anything more, but for me, the Porknockers45 were the wayward
ones.
When Jennifer mentions the Porknockers, who to her mind are “the wayward ones” and the ones who abandon their families, we need to understand her theories in the context of colonization. The colonial administration´s focus on exploiting Guyana’s mineral wealth for
Britain led the men to take jobs far away from home, Buxton. This movement can be seen as a
44 Bush is local term for Guyana’s hinterland—the location of the gold and diamond fields. “Bush” includes places such as Mahadia, Kurupung, Iping, Kumai and the like. These regions are located hundreds of miles away from the East Coast corridor where Buxton is located.
45 A Porknocker is a term for a gold or diamond seeker. Many ex-slaves took up this work in the mid to late 1900s. Baird 80 disruption of family and activities make the land home. Family life and community disruption and its consequences were not major concerns of the colonial administration.
Charles Bressler, in his book Literary Criticism, has this to say on (reference topic of quotation): The “[C] conquerors not only dominated the physical land but also the hegemony or ideology of the colonized people, and the effects of these colonizations are many and are still being felt today” (202). I understand Bressler to mean that colonization is a package. It persists in the beliefs and attitudes of colonized peoples. In the case of Buxton, even though the ex-slaves buy the village to be independent of colonial rule, some of them and their descendants choose to leave the village and work elsewhere as Porknockers for the same colonizers.
A Porknocker, as you may already know, is a male who works as a prospector for gold or diamond. You may also know that these men earned the name “Porknockers” because they had to constantly “knock” the flies away from the salted pork they carried around as their main source of meat. These men take up jobs as Porknockers in the hinterland several hundred miles away from the village for several months at a time. Being a Porknocker helped the men feed their families, and ensure the economic survival of the village, but it took them away from their roles in the homes and village on a regular basis. In addition, many of these men contract the mosquito borne disease Malaria and become very sick; some even die.
I have heard stories similar to the ones Jennifer and Shevan tell as “nice” stories at family gatherings as you probably have. What you may not know is that by listening to these stories from women, we can learn to connect the stories of the village to “read” village history; not by seeing, but by listening to or hearing stories and weaving them together. I ask you to read the history by listening and weaving the lived experiences of villagers so that you can participate in sharing our home and culture using our traditions. By doing, so we pull together the communal Baird 81 and collaborative practices of people who connect to land-based knowledges or literacies. Land- based knowledges or literacies are tactics that show how we renew, re-ground, and reciprocate in our shared responsibilities as part of how we bear our heritage from the past, and present into the future. In the process, we continue making the community or as Jennifer says “blaze a trail” that honors the creole efforts for the survival of Buxton.
Here is another “nice story.”
It Always Seemed to be Struggling
I asked my mother, how come you had a village that you had these industrious
people who could come together, buy a village, make it one of the brightest
[villages] could fall in such disrepair. What changed in the mentality of the
people? [Jennifer pauses]
So for me, what always interested me was the perspective of the people because
for me if something was not right, it had to start in the mind what was wrong. So
my whole life was like ok, so here is the village in which I was born, in disrepair.
So you go to the houses. When I visit, you see the drains not cleaned. You see
some the houses. Some of the houses broken. You see some people try to keep up,
but when you go [Jennifer pauses] why couldn’t Buxton be as bright and you
know like a hive of life.
It always seemed to be like struggling. And then when the crime came in, to me,
that was like it could be the worst thing to happen. [It’s] the mindset. Because I
said, it is a sort of a dishonor for the slaves and the brains that came out of Baird 82
Buxton for this younger generation to be that way. And how could it be changed?
So, I used to have these conversations with my dad. And my dad said, you
shouldn’t blame Buxtonians because basically, um Buxtonians they were the sort
of people who would advocate. And because they advocate, the village did not get
the help it needed. But I said, the slaves didn’t have to wait for anything. They
worked on their own, so why can’t Buxtonians work on their own? So that was a
question that I had.
In this story, I hear Jennifer struggling to understand tradition, poverty, disrepair, crime, and lifestyles. As a Buxtonian who grew up mostly outside of Buxton, but spent holidays in Buxton, she brings an outsider and insider perspective on Buxton. She seeks answers to why the village is not as “bright” as neighboring villages. She believes that Buxtonians are guilty of not having a progressive mindset and of dishonoring the ex-slaves hard work. Despite her father’s idea that
Buxtonians are not solely to blame, Jennifer believes otherwise.
I asked Jennifer, “What story do you want me to tell young Buxtonians?”
You Blaze a Trail
The slaves made a way for us. They opened the way, so you know, if you’re in
your field you open the way for those coming. So if you don’t set an example, then
there will be no room for someone to follow. You blaze the trail no matter how
small it is.
For Jennifer, being a mindful Buxtonian means employing three principles of caretaking: remember the past for “the slaves made a way for us;” considering your present in which “you open a way for those coming and “blaz [ing] the trail no matter how small it is.” Finally, setting an example for the future for “if you don’t set an example, then there will be not room for Baird 83 someone to follow.” In these stories Jennifer helps us to understand that everyday activities are necessary practices of mindfulness that helps cultivate a community that is empowered.
As you listen to Jennifer, reflect on the stories you grew up hearing, the stories Shevan shares, and stories you might tell of your own life. Next, think of how you make your own connections or relationships to these stories. How do those relationships shape the way you practice caring for the communities to which you belong? I connect the stories to life in the village as I experienced it, life in the academic community, and the Buxton community. As a result of this study, I share the women’s stories with Buxtonians in a column called “Wah De
Story She,” in the Buxton Friendship Express newsletter, as a way to give back to the community and to show an ethic of care. As I speak with my dissertation committee, I share stories from another Buxton woman—Tamika Boatswain. Through Tamika’s stories, I explore what the
Buxton community and the academic community can learn about relationships. I invite you to look over my shoulder and listen.
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee
Dear Dissertation Committee,
Jennifer describes the struggles and success of the Buxton who have had a long history of contending with colonialism and its impact. From these stories emerge land-based knowledge that I understand as ways of building emerging relational theories of the struggles, successes, and village identity. In this research, I am both researcher and villager. As a village woman who has worked in the yard, and the kitchen, I remember seeing my mother, aunts, grandmother, and great aunt struggling at their work—raising pigs and gardening, turning the soil in the yard under the hot sun using a garden fork. I also remember villagers living in unfinished houses, having seemingly fatherless children, and living with extended families to overcome poverty. These Baird 84 experiences villagers stare in the face, wake up to, and participate in comprise a few of the land- based knowledges that intersect power, class, race, and gender. I aim to address in this academic space as an extension of the domestic sites where knowledge making takes place.
These stories that Jennifer tell show a few of the spaces in which Caribbean women from the rural working class perform, negotiate, and display multiple identities. This knowledge is crucial for theorizing Caribbean women’s rhetorics and for understanding women’s contributions to society as a whole. Further, at present, Caribbean women’s rhetorics enjoy minimal visibility in Black feminist discourses in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. 46 Thus, from the locations of Cultural Rhetorics and Caribbean rhetorics, I weave the stories of Buxtonian women to intervene. I show how they are visible in black feminist discourses and rhetoric as a whole; thereby, making women’s rhetoric more textured and global. I use the “asking” methodology to gather stories, and I weave those stories by listening to the women and other relevant scholarly persons. Doing so, I create a path towards a relational approach to oral history that makes more apparent the rhetorics of women for social justice.47
As a reminder, in Chapter One I situated my study of Buxtonian women’s life stories as a
Cultural Rhetorics project using a non-traditional approach to oral history research. In letters to
“Young Buxtonians” and the dissertation committee, I (re) tell personal stories, and introduce five Buxtonian women whose stories help me theorize and practice women’s oral history in research. In Chapter Two, I enacted a Cultural Rhetorics approach using the “asking” methodology that allows me to value knowledges derived from various methodologies and
46 Caribbean feminist literature has focused heavily on Caribbean nation’s issues to the neglect of women and their struggles, notes Violet Barriteau (citing Maxine Henry-Wilson, Robinson, 2004, Barriteau, 1995, 2004a; Bailey, Harris, 2003; Pargass and Clarke).
47 See David Moore, Jennifer Monoghan, and Douglas Hartman in “Values of Literacy History” who share that “Among the most important reasons for knowing and doing history is that it brings into being who we are as a group. History is a vital sign of our community‘s maturity, vitality, and growing self-awareness. It provides the basis for a collective sense of direction and purpose” (97). Baird 85 frameworks inside and outside academia. I rely on an “asking” methodology used by the Buxton people to frame my research. By doing so, I practice Cultural Rhetorics and resist my dependence on solely traditional frames of scholarship. I offer an approach that examines how intellectuals can and (re) imagine community-based research within Caribbean Rhetoric and the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. Building on the theories of Buxtonian women, in this chapter, I listen to Tamika Boatswain’s stories to weave the Buxtonian women’s theories into academic discourses through a decolonial and land-based framework. Thus, we forge a tributary of inquiry that shows how relationships between practices, land, and body can allow intellectuals to query how they participate in decolonial inquiry. 48 I weave women’s theories into scholarship so that women of any race or social standing can speak on their own terms as these issues are not experienced identically as other minorities globally, yet they co-exist in the world. Hence, this chapter helps complicate the cannon of women’s rhetoric.
Weaving Our Stories as a Decolonial and Land-based Practice
Listening to the theories of the rural Black women such as Jennifer, I exercise a decolonial and Cultural Rhetorics tactic of embodiment useful disassembling the fixedness of colonial rhetorics and producing counter narratives for social justice. I use the oral history methodology of “asking” and listening as a living practice of the Buxton community. As a weaver or braider, I make the process and material used for writing transparent so that we can learn how like in “You Blaze a Trail” (Jennifer’s Story), and Tamika’s upcoming story “Girl
Child Training” women build theories showing their relationship to land, bodies, and practice.
I relate this weaving to the practice of the weaving or the braiding of hair that young girls in the village customarily learn to do by braiding their sister’s hair. Females continue this practice on other women inside and outside their families. Braiding often occurs outdoors, in the
48 See Therese Monberg in “Listening to Legacies.” See Malea Powell in “Listening to Ghosts” Baird 86 yard, under the house, or on the porch. Females learn to braid each other’s hair by watching the fingers of the older females move, feeling the braiding process on their own heads, and listening and practicing on other female’s hair/head.49 When braiding, females are careful to pick up and secure each tiny strand of hair and to weave it in tight embrace of other strands to make the cornrow hairstyle. As they braid hair, they tell stories and build relational bonds that may last a lifetime. The braiding of hair is embodied. It allows women to touch each other. Touch is important for it teaches the one whose hair is being braided what it feels like. Regardless of the stages of knowledge making, women enact them with and through the body. It is on that feeling one knows how to braid. By practicing on another person one learns to master and model’s braiding to learn. I argue that while braiding women tell stories to learn—history, identity, and colonial impact.
As a weaver, I listen and hear, write, and feel to figuratively “braid” or “weave” together how the women and I remember and theorize lived experiences and academic Training.50 I listen to scholarly relatives and insert their relevant stories, akin to Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding
Sweet Grass who demonstrates how she weaves Indigenous knowledge of braiding sweet grass into environmental science, history, and oral history, to name a few. Like Kimmerer, weaving allows me to pull strands of stories together to make new knowledge that is woven into the traditions of communities like Buxton.51
49 For me, braiding is acquired by touch. I braid my own hair by feeling. I mimic the feeling I learned and remembered of my grandmother creating sections in my hair, and picking up the strands as she braided my hair. I also remember mimicking the hand movements of braiding even when I could not actually braid hair.
50 See Andrea Riley-Mukavetz dissertation, “ Theory Begins with Story Too”
51 In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrates how she weaves indigenous knowledge of braiding sweet grass into environmental science, history, and oral history, to name a few. Baird 87
Consequently, in this research, I see myself honoring land-based knowledge and theories
of blood memory to co-construct the historical narratives, and to retain village ethos.52 Together,
with the women and scholars, I provide a language for making our stories receive attention. For
Buxtonians and the academic community, my dissertation allows us to become more aware of
ourselves as persons building our community for survival through lived history and everyday
practice. Our relationships to land, body and practices count; they are closely aligned to the work
of education, representation, identity, and social justice. Thus, I am able to argue that we the
women of Buxton position ourselves as living archives of active citizens who bring all our
relatives into the discourses of women’s embodied rhetoric, to interrogate our responsibilities,
and to write histories that theorize how we exert control of our lives under
patriarchy/colonialism. By so doing, we can also continue to influence the future of the
communities.
Towards a Decolonial and Land-based Inquiry: Mapping Land and Making a Village
I asked Tamika Boatswain, the thirty-six year old Buxtonian woman that I introduced in
Chapter One, “How are you a Buxtonian?”
Here is one of Tamika’s stories:
I am proud of where I came from and the achievements of the community. Those
ex-slaves’ community spirit kicked in from early on so that “they [became]
actually the first group of people to receive their land titles because they were
able to pay off all that money quite quickly. They converted a plantation into a
village. Buxton is also one of few villages, probably the only ex-slave owned
52 These theories encapsulate the oral histories of how we interrogate the state of our histories and teach the young Buxtonians of their duty as a “nation,” an African concept of belongingness so that they may fight for social justice. In doing so, we strive to ensure our cultural survival (Shevan Forde Interview January (Interview January 26, 2015). I connect the stories to make space for meaningful engagement in community-based conversations that expand disciplinary methodologies. Baird 88
village that has been properly laid out with proper architectural, um, mapping in
terms of its quadrangles, squares; the village has been properly mapped out …
from an educated point of view [gaining their] economic independence from the
white masters is enough to make one feel proud of our heritage.
I listen to Tamika and I hear her relating a theory of village identity—through a
relationship to the land, to bodies, and to practice that is fundamental to the village movement in
Buxton Village under colonialism. Tamika’s theory encompasses embodiment or physical
activity connected to African’s performance and thoughts about, on, and with the land. The ancestral Africans acted: they pooled their monies, made payments, and mapped out a village in an educated way, says Tamika. Mapping involves dividing the land into house lots and farming lots that would support a community that would grow.53
These early activities of the formerly enslaved African can be seen as land-based used for
birthing and building. These knowledges are used in response to the colonialist denial of
Africans’ citizenship and well-being based on race and class for no racial group in British
Guiana had to buy themselves a homeland. Thus, the Tamika’s theory that the motivating factor
“community spirit” is integral in understanding that birthing the village is integral to a creole
indigenous “home making.” Symbolically, in the birth of the village, women have had roles in
the making of a home for the community. Birthing a village necessitates a spiritual act of
“kicking.” I listen to Tamika’s allusion to giving “birth;” babies “kick [in’]” and think of her
gendered language. In the context of the village her language choice reveals a literacy that
53 See Tim Merrill in Guyana: A Country Study adds that by the 1700s the Dutch had a well-established land management system that Africans maintained. He writes the following: [It] entailed the use of a front dam, or facade, along the shorefront. This dam was supported by a back dam of the same length and two connecting side dams, which formed a rectangular tract of land known as a polder. The dams kept the salt water out, and fresh water was managed by a network of canals that provided drainage, irrigation, and a system of transportation. The labor for the ““polderization”” of Guyana's coast was provided by the Dutch colony's African slaves. See Buxton Friendship in Print and Memory. Baird 89
teaches us that village making is unifying. The men and women have the shared experience of
kicking in the womb as babies. Furthermore, in Buxton, we declare ourselves rightful citizens
there because our “navel strings” are buried there. After the umbilical cord falls off babies, it is
customary for it to be buried under a tree in the yard. Hence, Buxtonians are figuratively and
materially tied to the land.
I also hear Tamika building a relational theory of village identity. She invokes blood
memory, a topic I discussed in Chapter Two to establish a land-based knowledge identity. Blood
memory is integral to the understanding the notion that Caribbean rhetoric’s distinctiveness
hinges on conscious and unconscious links African ancestry. Making this link to ancestral
activities and her own pride in them, Tamika demonstrates how Caribbean rhetoric showcases
the Africans negotiating power through collaboration with each other and land.
As I hear Tamika building her theory of community actions of the early villagers, I am
reminded that the villagers do not demonstrate what Franz Fanon calls “dependency complex” in
Black Skin, White Mask (83). Her epistemology shows that persons are cooperative and invested
in the common good that comes from communal practices for survival. The ancestors advocated
for themselves and did not wait for handouts. Tamika also adds another tenet in her theory an
understanding of the birth of a community birth. She uses an African spiritual consciousness to
create an image of kicking. The term “kicked in” retains a robust image of people struggling and
kicking to survive alongside, with (in), and through colonial domination after the institution
slavery had denied their African ancestors their humanity since the year 1616, in Guyana.54
Drawing on this survival and identity theory, I am (re) learning that village knowledge-
making practices are entangled with active resistance. This village resistance must become part
54 Three petitions were filed by Bacchus, Ogle, and Webster and read in the Court of Policy. See Court of Policy Minutes at Walter Rodney Archives in Georgetown, July 1862. Baird 90
of the narrative I tell to continue the African spirit and knowing that keeps our history alive
throughout and beyond chattel slavery. 55 Thus, I weave theories. I remember the oral history
narrative Buxton People Stop Train I mentioned in Chapter One and Chapter Two, in which the
women of Buxton show themselves to be “militant” and “stand [ing] up for their rights”
(Mete’gee 15). They place their pregnant bodies on the train tracks causing a train carrying the
Governor to stop. They protest the colonial government and the conditions that caused flooding
that destroyed their farmlands and home. That said, Buxtonian women’s theories provide a
significant extension of the movement toward including women who represent different’s spaces,
places, and histories. Doing so, helps intellectuals provide space that is differentiated, raw, and
necessary for women. Consequently, I call on intellectuals to not shy away from fronting the
humanity and the rawness of the women’s actions in protest, in sacrifice, and at work in the practice of making community where working class citizens are engaged in combat for survival.
As I listen to Tamika, along with Jennifer who says that Buxtonians must “blaze a trail,”
and I am reminded to weave into Tamika’s relational theory of village identity notions of her of
land-based knowledges or literacies of empowerment. Such knowledges are not readily visible in
many literary works on African women.56 Thus, I understand that the women and I are weaving
into oral history counter-knowledges as an independent subject. Counter-knowledges intersect
race, gender and empowerment that are missing in Black Caribbean women’s literature and
disassemble institutionalized ways of not “seeing” women. I listen to Violet Barriteau who says,
“Much of black/African-American and West Indian history has focused on the activities of black
55 Three petitions were filed by Bacchus, Ogle, and Webster and read in the Court of Policy. See Court of Policy Minutes at Walter Rodney Archives in Georgetown, July 1862.
56 Wah De Story Seh? In her work African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. Alexander says that globally and historically Black woman continue to be characterized as “ignorant, “and “violent beast” (56). She explains that “because of that long stereotypical history, women are denied citizenship” (56-57). Baird 91
men,” in (“Relevance of Black Feminist Scholarship” 17). I hear Barriteau saying that Caribbean
scholarship has had an overly male focus in history. The author attests that Caribbean Feminists
have begun to confront this trend and have been including research on black and East Indian
women’s history (17).57
Valuing Land: Cultivating a Relationship for Growth
The Buxtonian women’s theories include the valuing of their relationship to land; it
engenders pride and impetus of gauging long-term community engagement and growth. They are
proud of the ancestors’ purchase and development of Buxton as a village and home. Doing
physical work, making villages, and being proud of these working class activities, that are
directly connected to formerly enslaved peoples, further inform the meaning of rhetoric. When
these stories become part of the tapestry of Rhetoric and Composition and by researchers on their
own communities, the community members can be seen as leading and demonstrating a richer
more complex form of knowledge-making.
Tamika says,
economic independence from the white masters is enough to make one feel proud
of our heritage.
Jennifer says,
The slaves made a way for us. They opened the way, so you know, if you’re in
your field you open the way for those coming
Together these theories are crucial to intersecting conversations on community empowerment for current and future communities. In my research, I found the names of women including Jenny Ann Scott, Isabella Ralph, and Harriet D. Thomas who fought for survival by
57 Bariteau cites Rhoda Reddock (1985), Lucille Mair (1986), Hilary Beckles (1989b), Verene Shepherd (1993), Bridget Brereton (1994) and Patricia Mohammed (1995) as authors who have written women into history. Baird 92
owning land. Women of Buxton are original purchasers of land along with 125 males in 1840.58
Their ownership of land marks a shift in women’s rhetorics of empowerment that is decolonial.
The do not fall evenly under patriarchy as some Caribbean historians suggest.
Wah De Story Seh?
Regarding regional historical traditions, Christine Barrow, a renowned Caribbean social
scientist, reveals in Women and Change in the Caribbean reveals that in the Caribbean,
researchers proliferate narrow conceptions of the rural Caribbean African female. She iterates
that because some historians tend to go along with dominant westernized research frameworks,
their narratives narrowly define rural women’s roles. Thus, “Afro-Caribbean rural women have
had a hard time emerging from the invisibility or Eurocentric stereotypes in research and policy-
making” (181). Barrow brings attention to how consequences of researchers working in
colonizing social systems that inscribe narrow cultural orientations. Listening to the theories of
the rural Black women such as Jennifer must be understood as a Cultural Rhetorics tactic useful
for disassembling the fixedness of colonial rhetorics and production of counter narratives for
social justice.
Although they were under patriarchy, these women by 1856 embody change that
illuminates a gap in black Feminist and Caribbean Black Feminist theories. Buxtonian women’s
land-based knowledges that are theories of survival and identity include multiple realities visible
in practice: women engage in commerce and own land;
1) Buxtonian women own land independently patriarchy—men and colonists
2) Buxtonian women hold the land they purchase in their own names
58 See the 1856 Map of Buxton that lists all the names of the 128 original land owners. Three women’s names are easily discernable English/British female names of women. This means that there could be other women listed whose names did not appear to be female. Baird 93
3) Their names are written down compared to American Blacks who in the nineteenth
century when Black women in North America remained under-valued and
disenfranchised. 59
In sum, theorizing land, bodies, and practice, I am reminded of Black Feminist theorist
Patricia Hills Collins. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment Collins theorizes that black women theories must show the simultaneous effects of race, class, and gender because the foundations of their theories are shaped by multiple realities. Weaving these experiences with Tamika’s theory, villagers pooling money, I hear theories in which rural African Buxtonian women’s village identity involves their building of the community from the ground/land up—even if it means breaking bricks as Jennifer shares. In essence, together I hear Jennifer and Tamika theories intertwining multiple issues: black women working, making, struggling, achieving, questioning, mothering, and (not) knowing.
Land, Bodies, and Practice: The Women Who Planted
I asked Tamika: “What stories did you grow up hearing? The nicest stories? Meaning the stories that have impacted you somehow. Whatever stories you grew up hearing that were remarkable to you or memorable” (Interview January 18, 2015).
Here are a few stories:
To lend to the stories and I’ve heard the stories about the olden days, I’ve heard
stories where, for instance, the plantation owners, um, they used the slaves in all
sorts of ways even the women. I was even told the story once about two Buxtonian
women were the trench corner, the story was told to me recently—I can’t
remember who told me it—of some women. And this massa, this slave master
59 See the speech “Ain’t I a Woman” by Sojourner Truth. Baird 94
[who] wanted to cross the trench and wanted the women to carry him over on
their shoulders. And I thought that was so awful. Right? 60
Me: uhn, uhn (affirmative)
There were other stories where women were beaten. Women were punished, but
more inspiring were the stories of women who planted, women who had farms in
the Backdam. They would go and sell their produce and the bravery that they had
to exhibit in terms of getting their products sold because it wasn’t always easy. It
was a struggle at times. Sometimes even, for instance, getting out because they
had to move in the dark of night, [also] very early in the morning. And it was
scary sometimes.
Tamika weaves in land-bases practices of telling “Dem Seh Stories” evidenced by her saying “I can’t remember who told me it.” She cites common knowledge that women farm in the backdam, and sell their produce. By so doing, she adds common knowledge of women’s husbandry, commerce, and struggle to her theory. Sharing common knowledge of the women’s practices, Tamika shares multiple realities wherein a woman makes a living and how she is regarded for her work. To Tamika, women’s physical condition to do farming, in the Southern end of the village or the “Backdam,” and return home late in the evening are acts of
“brave[ry].”61 Further, making a living by planting crops inspires Tamika and by this acknowledgement, I argue that women inspiring other women become an integral to Tamika’s
60 Sister Agatha Mosely told me this story in conversations we had at her home in Buxton on September 2012 and February 2013.
61 The Southern end of the village is where the farm lands are located. No housing existed there for many years. Women can be seen at dusk rowing their canoes in the trenches going home with baskets of mangoes, coconut, bananas, vegetables and root crops. In the early 2000s, criminal elements invaded the village Backdam and the government leveled parts of the Backdam. Residents took opportunity to raise more corps given that the land was cleared. Baird 95 theory. In her theory we learn more about how women’s relationships with land show them as providers and caretakers of the ancestor heritage. By sharing these theories Tamika shows herself as a cultural carrier and caretaker of the land.
As I listen to Tamika build her relational theory of village identity with land, bodies, and practice, I hear her building her theory to include reciprocity; she recognizes and admires the ancestors. She is valuing women by acknowledging that they endured indignities. Valuing, recognizing, and admiring make women visible. Yet, these qualities intersect with negative emotions and are part of knowing. For example, Tamika also acknowledges that the treatment women endure is “awful” and she seeks affirmation from me. Her theorizing is one of feeling and empathy as she seeks my confirmation by asking “right?” She does not exclude the active researcher-villager, me. She seeks a relational response compatible to the “asking” methodology in which researcher and researched are intertwined in meaning making.
While trying to understand Tamika’s theorization further, I find myself incorporating additional discourses on land-based rhetorics. I am reminded of Gabriela Rios’ land-based rhetorical framework in “Cultivating Land-based Literacies and Rhetorics.” Like cultural rhetoricians, Rios draws from multiple rhetorical frameworks: Indigenous, Native, and Latin@ whose theories are made based on their relationship with the land. Given that Tamika’s “afro- ancestry” places her community among the colonized and oppressed, as do Indigenous, Native, and Latin@s among others, it is crucial to place her theories in constellation with Rios’. Rios, citing Gregory Cajete, in “Cultivating Literacies and Land-based Rhetorics,” defines land based rhetorics as:
an ontological position that sees humans as “the Earth being conscious of itself.”
This is an indigenous concept of relationality that is similar to the notion of Baird 96
ecologies—of networked relationships existing among various human and non-
human objects—however, this indigenous concept relies on a relational ontology
at the level of kinship quite literally. Indigenous relationality recognizes that
humans and the environment are in a relationship that is co-constituted and not
just interdependent. Additionally, Indigenous relationality recognizes the
environment’s capacity to produce relations. (64)
Rios implies that the “land” is part of a knowledge-making system that emerges from people’s continued relationship with it. Indeed, using blood memory we can understand that
Buxtonian ancestor’s had a daily and close relationship with the land, after all they were former slaves who had an ongoing interaction with nature through their work on plantations. As I listen to Tamika and Rios, I think that land-based relationships emerge as integral parts of African
Buxtonian’s way of making kinships for survival, yet I cannot imagine the slaves embracing a constitutive relationship with land under slavery entirely. Tamika’s theory orients the relationship so that we can understand how the land is a provider and how women clear it, farm it, and sustain their roles in tending the ancestral land. That said, it is necessary to note that
African slaves, as do current Buxtonians, constantly struggle to co-exist with the land and water for livelihood because Buxton lies about seven feet below sea-level and is prone to flooding during the “May-June” rainy season.
At this juncture, I turn to historians to understand the complex relationship with land.
Here is one story:
During slavery, the colonials strove to engage the land for profit with the use of the
African body. Describing the magnitude of effort involved in co-existing with the land Walter
Rodney, in A History of the Guyanese Working People, reports that: Baird 97
The Venn Sugar Commission of 1948 estimated that each square mile of cane
cultivation involved the provision of forty-nine miles of drainage canal and
ditches and sixteen miles of the higher level of waterways used for transportation
and irrigation… This means that slaves moved 100 million tons of heavy, water
logged clay with shovel in hand, while enduring conditions of perpetual muds and
water. (2-3)
In Rodney’s description of the harsh conditions in the then British colony of Guiana, he
places the physical body—the slaves’ body in relationship to the land as exploitative. Adding to
Rodney, Tamika’s language describes actions that point to a necessary epistemology of making
that appears to transform the relationship to co-existing in spirit to physical life on the land.
Instead of just living on plantation style land layout, the villagers transformed their relationship
by (re) marking the land and in so doing engendered pride in a descendant, Tamika, one hundred
and seventy-five years later. It stands to reason that land-based literacies of survival will
continue to shape Buxtonians’ spirits and their relationship to the land so that they realize it as a
place of renewal and pride after slavery. 62 Thus, by paying attention to these land-based relationships where people depend on the land and each other for food, shelter, and commerce the women and I weave theories that show the Buxonians not as helpless victims or violent people—characterizations that persist in discourses of diasporic African cultures.
When I weave stories, I practice oral history using land-based knowledge as part of my
scholarly identity; yet as Gian Pagnucci claims in Narrative Life: Stories As a Tool for Meaning
Making, academia works to discourage dissertation research that focus on areas family histories
62 See Community Literacy and Public Engagement by Linda Flower. Baird 98 and stories.63 As I weave these histories, I engage issues of power, class, and privilege and disrupt structures of power in academy that can stifle explorations of diverse ways of doing historiography in Rhetoric and Composition and in Caribbean historiography.
I am aware that I have a privilege to stand at the borderlands of village and the academic communities as Black rural women weaving stories to theorize as I practice. In so doing, in this space, I bring the issues of power and privilege of women into discourses alongside Black
Feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Toni Cade Bambara,
Patricia Hill Collins, Rhonda Reddock, Jenny Sharpe, Angela Davis, Patricia King and Mimi
Sheller, to name a few. These women have responded to the lack of adequate representation of
Black women’s rhetorics in scholarship. Offering insights of rural Black women that take into account land-based knowledges, I help to vary the tapestry of Black women’s realities and strengthen interdisciplinary knowledge-making with and for women. 64
Conclusion
To sum up, by weaving the histories written by Walter Rodney and Tamika alongside
Jennifer’s and other scholars,’ I understand how land-based relationships of reciprocity are entangled in colonial histories. That said, Buxtonian women’s stories communicate historical narratives and convey particular lived experiences through the framework of body, land, and practice that are crucial in decolonizing oral histories for village and the Caribbean. Women’s stories reveal how they make the land a place where struggles exist alongside pride, inquiry, and embodied literacies of social uplift.
63 See Narrative Life by Gian Pagnucchi.
64 I listen to Mimi Sheller who reminds me that “those working in the Caribbean in the 1970s came increasingly to recognize the need for local history that empowered Caribbean people” thus scholars began examining everyday resistance, oral histories, and life stories (198). Baird 99
Using a land-based and decolonial framework, I call on Jennifer and Tamika’s stories to argue that women are seen also as persons who do valuable work, share important knowledge through their lived experiences, and ancestral knowledge that is useful in weaving knowledge and diversifying theory and practice in the discipline. These women’s theories extend the notions of how to include women’s rhetorics in scholarship. Listening to women make relationships to land, body, and practice allows intellectuals to sit, stand, or move at the intersections of their disciplinary and civil interest. In those intersections, they can draw on their own resources to have meaningful engagements within and outside the academy. Such an orientation can foster new ways of welcoming difference, not just for contending difference sake, but to build on shared beliefs, and for growing our discipline. 65
In Chapter Four, I focus on Tamika’s theories of “Girl Child Training” and “Women are the Necessary Partners” alongside Cheryl Glen’s stories as I continue using a decolonial and land-based framework. Tamika theories are based on domestic routines and girl child Training.
These theories (re) orient the home as a space where rhetoricians can listen and think of how land-based knowledge is cultivated to interrupt colonialism. In the same manner as I listen to
Tamika invoke the body of the ancestors who engage “mapping” land with their hands, in an
“educated way,” I think of embodiment as decolonial. Thus, as I make connections to women’s domestic practices as part of embodiment and land-based knowledges. I complicate conversations on embodiment by Rhetoric and Composition and Cultural Rhetorics scholars by exploring not only mind-body relationship in their scholarship, but also in everyday activities in places such as the kitchen, and the yard as ways of transforming women’s oral historiography.
65 See “Growing our Discipline: An Interview with Malea Powell” by Andrea Davis. Baird 100
CHAPTER IV. TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF SURVIVAL
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians
Dear Young Buxtonians,
Wah De Story Seh?
In this letter, I share several stories from Cheryl Glen or Teacher Cheryl, a self-titled
“modern-day” Buxtonian woman. As I mentioned in Chapter One, Cheryl Glen is a mother of
three daughters and she is also a grandmother. Cheryl came to the United States in 2008 after
being recruited in Guyana by the New York Board of Education to teach Mathematics to
students, including Caribbean immigrants, in New York’s public school.
As a reminder, I have known Cheryl for over 25 years, having taught with her at the same
school in Guyana. When I interview her at her home in Brooklyn, she is eager to speak with me
(January 5th, 2015). We exchange Wah De Story Seh greetings and immediately begin
reminiscing about Ruth our school friend, who is Cheryl’s closest friend; Ruth had passed away
in the village a few days earlier. Cheryl shares her plans to return to Guyana the day after our
interview to attend Ruth’s funeral.
To get the interview started, Cheryl gestures with her hand for me to follow her. She
leads the way to a small room next to the living room where we conduct the interview so that we
do not disturb her husband who is watching sports on the television in the living room. It is her
daughter’s bedroom. I understand this movement into the inner part of her home as a warm
invitation that Buxtonians would customarily extend to a blood relative.
After the interview, I write a note to myself on my computer saying, “I am a researcher
sitting in a side bedroom of Cheryl’s home as I would in the village, although we are in New
York. It is remarkable that we find a way to do research in a place meant for sleeping. I feel Baird 101 comfortable. I feel like I can ask her delicate questions as a sister-scholar-friend.” I mention this note to let you know that in that moment, I realize that Buxtonian hospitality and kinship practices survive the move to the United States of America. I also realize that this story is also a part of a new story of kinship. It is a story of how Buxtonian women bear their culture of hospitality into new spaces.
Leh we talk story:
I asked Cheryl: When did you learn about the Buxton People Stop Train story? Who told you? And what do you think about the story?
My Grandparents Talked About That Story
My grandparents talked about that story and then I was able to make connection
and understand. And I say Buxtonian women are strong in the sense when I think
of my grandmother who made 12 children, and for the most part of it raised them
singlehandedly all by herself and raised them to be loving and caring adults. She
herself was very selfless in the sense that when she cooked, her food, her rice
always had to turn up in the stew pot after she made out everybody’s plate. And
that was one of the things that really baffled me and I always saw it that too many
kids could make you live in poverty. That was how I look at it.
And I compared to my grandmother and I always tell myself I am not gonna make
more than 3 or 4 kids because you are supposed to be able to raise your kids and
eat properly too if you are the breadwinner. But I don’t know if in her heart she
thinks it was a bad thing but she always looked so contented. I think she was Baird 102
happy that she had enough food to give everybody even though hers had to be
turned up. So, I saw that as being very selfless.
In this story, Teacher Cheryl likens the women of Buxton People Stop Train to her grandmother who is strong. Strength involves making many children and caring for them selflessly. I want you to know that to talk about strength, we have to talk about food. Eating
“turn up” as you know is scraping the pot to gather all the left over bits and pieces of food.
Women tend to do that; that is how they sacrifice to raise children. I see this as the land-based knowledge I have been telling the dissertation committee about. Remember, Buxton began with
128 land owners and Friendship with 168 landowners, as well as an undisclosed number of other inhabitants.
Suffice it to say that their population grew because of the women like Cheryl’s grandmother who produced a “tribe”—a large family—who inhabits the land to build it. Her struggle to feed the children is part of a survival system of how she ensures that the village population grows, carries on the bloodline and the legacy of the ancestors. Thus, Buxtonians are caretakers of the land; giving it community, a family, a son, a daughter. I think that Buxton is not only a place where people raise crops and livestock to sustain themselves, but also a place where they raise a physical heritage by which to identify themselves—Buxtonians. Using this knowledge, Teacher Cheryl compares her life as a modern woman to her grandmother’s and thinks that her grandmother’s way of life is remarkable, yet poverty stricken. As a result, she vows to have few children; she will change her generation beginning with herself and her children. One of the things I want you to learn from this story is that Cheryl and her grandmother are attempting to stop trains as well—trains of poverty and responsibility—in different ways. Her stories are interventions on the myth of village identity, as Shevan notes, in which Buxton people Baird 103 are stereotyped. Getting back to the story of Buxton People Stop Train, as you know women stopped the train. I wanted to know more about Cheryl’s thoughts about the roles of males and females, given that she says that women are strong. So I asked Cheryl: Do you think there is any difference between you as a Buxtonian woman and a Buxtonian man?
Here is her story:
Buxtonian Women are Very Strong
There may be differences. Now for instance, what I have seen over the years,
Buxtonian women are very strong. They work hand in hand with the male
counterparts. Some of them even work harder than their male counterpart. They
strive to fulfill the needs and I say needs and not wants…. Many of them are, even
though they work outside the house are great homemakers. The men on the other
hand, I think have this attitude that they bring the money and (Cheryl shrugs her
shoulders), the wife has to do what has to be done.
I ask Cheryl: Can you provide an example of how you’ve seen this in your life and, you know, what story would you tell a young Buxtonian about gender difference? Cheryl shifts the position of her head. She tilts it to the left side as if she is pondering.
That is the One that [‘s] Gonna do Something for You
I would say, my grandmother is a mother of 12 kids. I have seen her work very
hard to raise them. And when I listen to the stories she’s told of being on her own,
and questions I have asked like, for example, “why would you keep making kids
for a man who doesn’t appear to act like if he cares for you (Cheryl shares in
another part of the interview that her grandfather also had 12 children by another
woman in the village as well). I even think at one point I had asked her, so Baird 104
“grandmother, they didn’t have abortion in your time?” And I think she said “girl
sometimes you always thinking in your heart that that is the one that[‘s] gonna do
something for you.” In that way she means something that would lift you up out of
your poverty situation.
In this story, teacher Cheryl shares that men and women in Buxton do have gender roles. You may understand these roles are crucial to a way of life before women had a chance to go to school. In those days, child-bearing was a woman’s way of getting out of poverty—children were social capital.
Next, I asked Teacher Cheryl: Have you ever told your children the Buxton People Stop
Train Story. Where, when, and why?
This is her story:
I Have Never Told That Story
I have never told this story, but what I know is that my daughter a couple of years
ago, went to a Methodist Church camp and they had to act out the story of
Buxtonian women stop train. And I remember her coming home very excited and
asking me,
Mummy you know ‘bout the Buxton People Stop Train?
How you never tell me the story?”
So I say, whey you heard de story from?
And then she said,
Oh we act [it] out at camp; we acted. Some of us had to play like we were
pregnant. Baird 105
And so she said that’s a powerful story. She was always a child that would pay a
lot of attention to history so I think she was very fascinated by it. Now, I say they
weren’t ready for it at that age. Candace [Cheryl’s second daughter] learned
about it when she was about 11 plus (almost twelve years of age), so before,
maybe at 7, 8 years, I didn’t think it was necessary to tell the stories, [of my]
being a more modern mother and a teacher. Also, the stories at that time came
from books.
Cheryl does not tell her children the story because she thinks that the time is not right to do so. In exercising her choice not to tell the children the story, another village woman does so. I want you to know that in passing on the traditions through stories is not a task of just individuals; the women among others in the village ensure that children learn them.
Next, I ask, “What stories do you tell your children?” When I ask Cheryl, this question, I must confess that I expect her to include the Buxton People Stop Train. Instead she tells me intergenerational stories of women in her family. I am surprised because I believed that all parents told the story to their children. I was wrong.
Success is Supposed to Breed Success
One of the things I usually say to my children is that my mother was a market
vendor and I became a teacher so I am not settling for less from them. I say that
in a way that success is supposed to breed success. So, if your parent is better
[off] than you – is better based on where she came from- why would you want to
be less than that person?
She begins with a story of success based on her mother’s occupation and her own occupation. I want to stop here and ask you to consider “what tools do you use to learn about community- Baird 106 building, identity, survival, and success?” As you know, the old people do not provide all the answers to young people’s questions; they provide stories for you to ponder and find your own answers. I have given many stories to ponder. I invite you to listen in as I weave Cheryl’s stories with Tamika’s stories in my discussions with the Dissertation Committee.
A Letter to the Dissertation Committee
Dear Dissertation Committee,
Land-based rhetorics of people once marginalized by the social sciences bring attention to how Eurocentric and indigenous knowledges can co-exist to honor communities’ ways of knowing. Indigenous people’s stories of the land help unsilence the voices of their people who endure the indignities of colonialism. Marie Battiste in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision notes:
as the twentieth century unfolds to a new millennium, many voices and forums
are converging to form a new perspective on knowledge. Many of these voices
belong to the indigenous people who have survived European colonization and
cognitive imperialism …. The voices, once predominantly silenced in the social
sciences, have been not only resisting colonization in thought and actions but also
attempting to restore indigenous knowledge and heritage commitment by
indigenous peoples to have their voices heard and hence restore their heritages
and dignities. By harmonizing indigenous knowledge with Eurocentric
knowledge, they are attempting to heal their inherent dignity and apply
fundamental human rights to their communities. (Reclaiming Indigenous Voice
and Vision, xvi) Baird 107
When I listen to Battiste, along with Native scholars and Indigenous intellectuals, some of whom
I have already connected with in this project, I understand that we need to continue conversations
that interrogate colonial approaches that undermine specific communities’ ways of knowing
content and methods of traditional knowledge and practices. In particular, by (re) learning how
knowledge is constructed, theorized, encoded, and passed on to future generations in specific
communities we continue to decolonize education; we challenge members of some communities
to research not on and about us, but with, for and alongside us at any level, including the university level; we write ourselves in.
Like many Indigenous peoples who make the voices of their people heard, I listen to women’s stories with the consciousness of how land-based knowledge impacts meaning making at the physical, cognitive, spiritual, and practical levels, through a decolonial framework. All activities on, with, about, and for the villagers are land-based; land connotes spiritual and physical space. It is where we dwell, die and are buried, have our umbilical cords buried, derive our food, and raise our children, experience successes and struggles. Thus, as I listen to the excerpt above from Cheryl Glen, who is a grandmother, I hear her defining a land-based notion of success that accounts for her intellectual relatives—dead and living from whom she draws her theories and values. Cheryl offers a gendered theory of success linked to fecundity; success is supposed to breed success—gendered like a mother ‘raises” or breeds children. She means that offspring must be better off than their parents considering the parents circumstances.
Cheryl builds her theory of success not only from economic progress, but also from her awareness that success is “bred” or cultivated with family units where members model personal ambition, care, and work ethics. She does not offer a deficit theory; she offers a theory of success Baird 108
founded on strengths. Her theory brings attention to how knowledge is constructed, theorized,
encoded, and passed on to future generations.
I take the opportunity to ask more questions because we were engaging in a relationship as sister-
scholar-friend. Hence, in a Wah De Story Seh “follow up” conversation with Cheryl. I ask her to
help me theorize her methodology for constructing her stories.
I say:
Cheryl, your stories are difficult for me to interpret.
She asks:
Why?
I reply:
I am not sure how to interpret what you are doing when you tell me about
your grandmother and mother’s stories within your own story.
Cheryl responds:
My story interweaves a network of micro-stories of my mother,
grandmother, family members, notable villagers, and my own struggles.
Cheryl’s methodology of micro-stories informs the structure I use for conducting community- based research. Drawing on Cheryl’s practice, I continue weaving Tamika’s stories. By “asking,”
I have opportunities to listen and I hear the women using a framework that includes intergenerational relationships to build theories of success.
As a reminder, in Chapter Three, I explored the theories of Buxtonian women through a land-based and decolonial framework. In this chapter, I continue doing so by examining Tamika
Boatswain’s stories to show that practices of home-based training provide knowledges or literacies that are land-based as well. These land-based knowledges, when juxtaposed with Baird 109 school-based knowledge, reveal aspects of knowledge change that take place. Further, land- based knowledges, when co-constructed as I do with the women and scholarly relations in the chapter bring visibility to Buxtonians’ village identity, social change, heritage, responsibility, and reciprocity. Additionally, by weaving Tamika’s theories with scholarly relatives, I create new narratives of rhetorics that intertwine to transform oral history.
Girl-Child Training
When I asked Tamika, “What story do you want me to tell young Buxtonians? Tamika answers, ‘Everybody Struggles.” I was curious about what she meant, so engaging in the Wah
De Story Seh practice to gather more stories I asked her—“Can you tell me a story that shows how you know everybody struggles?”
Here is a story from Tamika:
You getting older now, it’s time we learn a skill.
That is what my great aunt said to me.
She lived with us and she was the elder woman; superior to my mother.
And she taught me a lot.
I spent a lot of time talking with her,
Moving around her,
we spent a lot of time together and she taught me how to bake.
And May-May’s main reason was, I’m a girl child, and I need to be
independent. It was important that I have a skill––baking, cooking,
sewing whatever. Baird 110
So from the age of eight I was told I needed to start doing housework. At
8, I was made to design my first wedding cake so that I can have a skill. I
learned to cook as well.
Listening to Tamika, I think that the domesticity of women in Buxton is a decolonial space for
learning how women enact public-private community service. The kitchen is not used to keep
women in their place, unlike the colonial and patriarchal perspectives. The dynamics of
cultivating womanhood at an early age ... an imperative not constrained by forced labor; they are part
of the process of surviving and resisting; thereby, in the everyday activities they are the mechanisms
for decolonizing social situations.
I think of how the education system in British Guiana informs the education of girls and I
turn to Odeen Ismael, a Guyanese historian who has worked for many years in the Guyana
Diplomatic Service. Here is a story he writes in “The Transition of Guyanese Education in the
Twenthieth Century”:
Christian churches and almost total domination of both primary and the limited
secondary education in a multiracial society where almost half the population was
non-christian …. People were educated to be loyal to the British and to serve
British interests in Guyana. (16)
Education in Guyana went through several phases. In the pre-emancipation era, education
was non-existent for Africans; Africans were not educated. Schools were created to educate the
children of the colonials. In the immediate post-emancipation era, with the introduction of the
Negro Education Grant by the British, the Africans received an education, but was not the same
quality as the colonials. In the post-emancipation era education was generally limited for
Africans. Baird 111
I listen to Ismael’s story and I think of my elementary education that included education in domestic arts. Many villagers regarded this education as part of how to equip girls to become home-makers, housemaids, and housewives, a sentiment shared by Jamaica Kincaid in “Girl.” In many cases, if girls did not clean and cook well, as they are taught in home-making or home economics classes, their parents might ask, “Is that what you going to do when you get married?”
I also theorize Girl-Child Training as a response to colonialism and patriarchy in that given that
the situation where colonials did not educate women and girls to become independent, Buxtonian
women’s access and power was curtailed. Thus the story of limits can be traced to limited
formal education through the evolving church-school system. Even when girls got an education,
many of them received church-school education that did not cater to their own interests. In the late
nineteenth century/early twentieth century, as education became available to more people and non-whites began to participate in government, they regarded education as a tool for upward
mobility in government jobs.
Furthermore, the theory of Girl-Child Training complicates stories of educational
resistance to show growth and transformation. Buxtonian, E. F. Fredericks established the Buxton
Scholarship that would allow one promising village student to attend an elite school in the city of
Georgetown.66The scholarship fund commences in 1924 and in 1963 Jennifer Lee becomes one
of the recipients. By the late 1950s a church-school education becomes well entrenched in
Guyana, but only those who could pay for it have access beyond elementary school. It remains
customary for unwed females with limited education to take up jobs as teachers, but only within
the schools that belonged to the church they attended, thereby, limiting their roles. Many women
66 Edmund Fitzgerald Fredericks founded the Buxton Scholarship in 1924. He taught in Guyana, became a principal of the Black School in Mooresville in the early 20th century, in North Carolina; became an attorney in London. He returned to Guyana and became a prominent politician. See ‘Fredericks Made History, Left an Impression” and “‘Fitz’ Made History with Mooresville’s First Black School” by Joel Reese. Baird 112 begin to take up jobs as civil servants in government, private jobs, and self-employment enterprises. Thus, as part of land-based knowledge we can hear how in the history of Guyana, villagers take initiative to work within the oppressive system to create small acts to keep them in their place.
In the twentieth century, when Guyana became an independent nation in 1966 and shortly thereafter, and school-based education became free for all Guyanese from kindergarten to university, more women began taking higher education and assuming jobs as civil servants: teachers, nurses, accountants, builders and the like, in government jobs. Nevertheless, many women continue to farm the land, work on sugar estates as weeding gangs or water bearers—as
Cheryl’s grandmother does. Many women such as May-May became owners of cottage industries that include bake shops and dressmaking businesses out of their homes. Yet others became seamstresses, market vendors, cooks, housekeepers, midwives, and launderers.
I tell these stories to mark that under colonialism there emerged a working class of women whose co-existence on the land was comprised of school-based and home-based educational structures emerged. These activities are important aspects of community-based inquiry by which people are visible. These social conditions inform the world within which the academy is nested. These spaces are also where the academy meets the village and overlap with lived experiences among intellectuals. In particular, intellectuals can come to learn a variety of relational practices that formulate methodologies for seeing and hearing women. Women teach children and on the story map we need to examine what they do. I think of Ms. Ivy Jacobs and
Teacher George Young as educational activists who composed the Buxton Battle Song that teaches children to honor themselves, and their village by becoming educated: Baird 113
Thou wilt not cower in the dust
Buxton my own native land
Thy glorious name shall never rust
Oh Buxton my own native land
Remember Fredericks, Yes we must
The Buxton scholarship his thrust
And now he slumbers in the dust
In Buxton my own native land
And now may every boy and girl
In Buxton my own native land
His heart and brain all day employed
For Buxton my own native land
To add to our illustrious line
Of sons and daughters, who all time
Gave of their best that you may shine
For Buxton my own native land.
I tell this story to mark that in the rural areas such as village, it is necessary to interrogate the notion of Girl-Child Training as a pedagogical site from which women are nurtured as knowledge bearers—the ones on whose success others must breed their own success. Girl-Child
Training is integral to the giving of our best so that “they may shine.” Thus I mark Girl-Child
Training as Caribbean rhetoric and a space for (re) visioning the role of learning domestic Baird 114 chores. Girl-Child Training which involves young girls learning domestic skills is customary in the Caribbean. At surface level, Girl-Child Training may appear to be for the purposes of taking care of the living conditions in the home or to train a girl to become a wife, as Jamaica Kincaid notes in her short story “Girl,” whose setting is in the Caribbean.
By valuing these domestic activities as history-making, intellectuals may foster new perspectives on the methodologies they use to make relationships to land, bodies, and practice.
For instance, although Caribbeans may be familiar with dominant resistance movements in the post emancipation era and equate them with slave rebellions, by listening to women such as
Tamika, Shevan, Cheryl, and Jennifer, I can hear survival stories. It is important to think of these stories from the links they make to land-based rhetoric that takes into account the inherent struggle of the ancestors to emerge from under the yolk of domination and death. Thus, at the village level, Training on domestic skills is a way to struggle; ways of walking through can become a unifying metaphor for cultivating intergenerational economic change because struggle continues as a legacy which transcends economic strata among the working class in the village.
Girl-Child Training: A Land-based Methodology and Pedagogy
Recalling Cheryl’s theory that “success must breed success,” I think of Girl-Child
Training as a methodology for enacting land-based knowledge that empowers budging women.
Methodologically, Girl-Child Training involves older females instructing young girls, directly through apprenticeship and indirectly through storytelling. Girl-Child Training varies: it is mother instructing her daughters to reflect on the histories of females in their family and striving academically to better their social status. It is an old woman, not a blood relative, who tells a story to young girls at church and having them act it out. It is also a girl being taught skills in the home by an experienced female who models and instructs her on how to bake and cook. It is a Baird 115 girl who learns by moving in a kitchen—measuring with the eyes, estimating weights with the bare palms or “hefting,” and creating dishes without recipes. These practices are built into the structure of Girl-Child Training so that it can be understood as pedagogy of apprenticeship that is a land-based rhetoric.
In the case of Buxton, through apprenticeship with older women, girls learn how to embody knowledge structures to equip them to survive at home and abroad. By teaching these knowledge structures, these females, I emphasized, engage in an intergenerational knowledge sharing between women for survival homes in the village. As in the case with Jennifer, Tamika, and Cheryl, they use their training to survive in the homes in the United States. By considering
Girl-Child Training as both methodology and pedagogy, we are able to imagine how the land- based rhetoric of apprenticeship sustains community spirit, encodes ways of knowing, and empowers citizens. By considering Girl-Child Training as both methodology and pedagogy, we are able to imagine how by connecting people to practice we enhance learning across communities.
If these community-based practices can enhance the discipline, I feel compelled to ask,
“What is the power of these land-based methodologies and pedagogies in interdisciplinary academic discourses?” When placed at the intersections of cultural rhetoric and Caribbean rhetorics, land-based and decolonial rhetorics of apprenticeship can orient us to tactics for mapping, teaching, and learning practical skills. These skills demonstrate what is knowable and doable, interculturally. As the Buxtonian women show, knowledge is demonstrated in the lives of people. The discipline is comprised of people from different or similar backgrounds, who when they come together and listen to each other’s stories, have opportunities to continue to challenge western notions that knowledge-making histories and practices are universal. What is Baird 116
at stake, is the idea that land-based knowledge can decolonize rhetoric and challenge systems of
power, that marginalize people who enact varied cultural practices.
By engaging in intersectional exchanges among people, I theorize, intellectuals can
cultivate vibrant collaborations that represent various communities’ knowledges or literacies. In
telling their stories on their own terms, people ensure their own survival as a people, a culture, a
community, a discipline. For example in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully weaves indigenous
knowledge of braiding sweet grass into environmental science, history, and oral history, to name
a few. Kimmerer asks:
What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if
you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say?
Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement
tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you
would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives. (128-9)
Kimmerer’s notion of pedagogy focuses on the importance of indigenous ways of transmitting knowledge that resists cognitive imperialism.
Likewise, in many ways, creole indigenous peoples such as the Buxtonians exemplify rhetorics by any means—including house chores. For instance, at first glance it looks solely as though Buxtonian women and girls are simply performing chores within their expected and traditional roles. On the contrary, in practice they are performing land-based pedagogy to transmit and transform oral history. Baird 117
Village Perspectives and Dominant Academic Perspectives
Buxtonian women’s ways of doing rhetoric show a few differences between village perspectives and dominant academic perspectives on location of knowledge-making, entrances to
knowledge-making, knowledge-making authorities that can mark Caribbean rhetorical features.67
Location of knowledge
In the Academy: Knowledge-making is the work of scholars and is categorized into disciplines.
In the Village: Knowledge-making practices manifest everywhere, extending to even the most
mundane of places where women function in society. In my study, women transpose the
activities and conversations into present time, thus closing the gap between past and present—
academy and village. The topics they address can be of interest to academics in various
disciplines—anthropology, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, feminist studies, Cultural Rhetorics
to name a few; they do not conform to any single discipline. Thus, it is crucial to note that as I
make the women’s story-making practices more visible and relatable to academics and
Buxtonians alike, I adopt interdisciplinary frameworks using Cultural Rhetorics to mark how
intellectuals can speak to, about, with, and from both communities.
Entrances to knowledge making
In the academy: For research, intellectuals need to follow protocols and prepare questions
to ask specific individuals, using prepared sequences, so that they do not “harm” subjects.
Entrances for the research are restricted and pre-planned.
In the Village: Women decide the topics and stories they wish to tell. They do not
hesitate to question my motives or tell me who to ask for the information I need. They give me
67 What counts and constitutes knowing gets lost in transition from the village to the academy. These observations are akin to Unaisi Nabobo-Baba’s observation of knowledge making in the “village” and in the “academy” (31-34) Nabobo-baba identifies five areas of difference includes: balance between subjective and objective; the concept of time; authority and consent; entry to the research; research approach; categories of knowledge; ownership of research / knowledge. Baird 118
others’ phone numbers without first consulting them. The stories and connections are entrances
they make available to the discourses that I initiate in the interviews. They follow-up in
conversations as friends and neighbors. These channels operate as village protocols. Through
Cheryl’s practice of these protocols, we can listen to her tell her mother and grandmother’s
stories as her own stories.
Knowledge authorities
In the academy: The academy intimates that it must sanction who can make knowledge; this is a system of power to control who can make knowledge and under what conditions.
Researchers must engage in university approved protocols for authoring and transmitting knowledge.
In the Village: When people tell stories, they assume the authority to tell the story, to teach, entertain or give advice. It appears that a villager’s conduct indicts family and the village traditions on knowledge-making. For instance, Cheryl theorizes that her grandmother’s conduct is a way to mark knowledge-making, so she assumes the role of author and transmitter of the stories of her grandmother that she, Cheryl decides to tell. Cheryl’s own approach to Girl-Child
Training, exemplified by the story she tells, indicts who can tell. As a reminder, she does not teach the Buxton People Stop Train to her daughters, and not doing so is a way to mark authorship of story-making. She selects stories that demonstrate knowledge-making that complicates who has the power to speak, how, and about what.
Apprenticeship in Girl-Child Training: Methodology and Pedagogy
Given that the notion of village and academy perspectives are ways to mark intersectionality. In this section below, I explore the role of apprenticeship in Girl-Child Training in teaching and learning. I feel that apprenticeship informs issues such as embodiment, power, Baird 119
access, and social change at the intersections of Caribbean rhetoric and Cultural rhetoric. It can
become a part of the heuristic of land-based rhetoric useful for exploring Caribbean rhetoric in
the area of oral history development. Hence, I will explore 1) how Girl-Child Training informs
pedagogy and methodology and 2) how as land-based knowledge-making, Girl-Child Training is
a survival and caring practice. I will further explore how cultural rhetoricians and Caribbean
rhetoricians theorize this practice as embodiment, but first, I listen to Tamika’s way of building
her theory on Girl-Child Training.
Here is a story Tamika tells:
I spent a lot of time talking with her [May-May], moving around her,
we spent a lot of time together and she taught me how to bake.
When listening to Tamika talk about May-May, I hear her emphasize actions or movement. I think of the “moves” involved in making relationships. Tamika spends time, she talks, she moves “around’ her. I mark these movements as ways to enter Caribbean discourses in which collaboration will include closeness with the community members who practice. That closeness will mean that the communities must meet where things are made where experienced people teach less experienced people. Returning to Tamika’s story, I reflect on my own Training as a girl. Akin to Terese Monberg, I mark this practice of reflecting to provoke “active nostalgia in order to establish, maintain, and develop relationships” to my communities; this is an important factor for weaving strands that can become entrances for learning from community members
(“Building Bridges” 167). While reflecting with some amount of nostalgia, I envision May-May and Tamika’s bodies in action around the kitchen: talking, moving, mixing icing, creaming butter, cutting cloth, whispering, laughing, questioning, instructing as the women in my village do when spending time, and teaching and learning with each other. Baird 120
Having learned domestic chores myself, I come to think that in the context of the village, the older woman and the younger woman work together to carry on tending to the legacy of the elders and these practices are a creole making. I understand creole making as inclusive of actions, materials, values, and practice that transform one’s ideology to make one create a native identity. It involves as negotiated physical and spiritual space in which people mark or brand the space in which humans create actions that express indigenous constructions and interpretations of what makes home. The Buxtonians creole making in particular is marked by those activities that transform a “land” of horrors to a land of creativity, peace, fecundity, and value for human life; among these are the teaching of girls. Teaching girls marks communal responses to emerge from oppression for survival. I think of how we are taught to create the dishes such as cook-up rice, a unique dish of left over vegetables, meat, herbs and rice and do what Caribbeans say, “you tun you hand, you mek” and “make something from nothing.” 68
When I listen to Tamika’s story, I hear that land-based knowledge is practiced in a collaborative and distinctly creole indigenous setting for the survival of the rural African community in their diasporic home of Buxton. What I would like to make visible for you is that by writing down Tamika’s story of Girl-Child Training, I am weaving her voice into oral history of the village, the nation, and the region, paying attention to everyday ways of making community from the kitchen up.
Owing to a relationship I see between Tamika’s understanding of collaborative practices with May-May, and my understanding of creole making, I also see an opening for inserting
Caribbean rhetorics in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. Caribbean rhetorics can teach us to understand the interconnectedness of knowledge, practice, and ideology. For example, in
68 Currently, Caribbean women continue to make cottage industries the tourist industry by making sweets and sauces from fruit that would be considered “nothing.” Baird 121
the disciplines, like the village, collaborative practices are considered part of community-based
practices. Already, scholars such as Suresh Canagarajah and Michael-Luna, among others are
exploring how “community knowledge and academic knowledge would develop reflexive
understanding of the strengths and limitations of a wider range of knowledge systems”
(“Multilingual Academic Literacies” 71). Taking these scholars notion of integration or the
meshing of multiple ways of knowing, I make a space to weave home-based learning into
multicultural composition discourses. What this learning brings to the discipline are embodied
practices of civil communities whose knowledge structures allow intellectuals from those civil
communities to teach us how to merge knowledge, practices and ideologies.
Paying attention to Tamika’s theories is a way for me to extend the notion of meshing to
include a creole making. A creole making, as explained previously, is based on African resistance and survival which is an integral to Caribbean culture. I understood survival and resistance as relational practices. When included in the discipline, we move the knowledge- making practices across relational networks of village and academy to make sense of social justice in Caribbean women’s rhetoric. What this movement across disciplines does is increase the visibility of women and their oral history contributions to the discipline.
Girl-Child Training as Embodied Land-based Practice
When I listen to Tamika’s theory, I am also reminded of theories that emphasize embodiment and it compels me to ask this question: What structures mark the rhetorics of
Buxtonian women that inform not only oral history, but also community-based practices? The relational structures women rely on provide a way for practitioners in specific communities to connect tenets of embodiment, training, and reciprocity. Baird 122
Here is another story Tamika tells:
Dresses Might be Different, but it was the Same Material
She [May-May] was superior to my mother. She provided for herself until she
died, and she showed me from that money she would buy me, like, cloth to sew
dress. Easter Sunday we dressed alike. And I think that was one way of her
influencing me to become the way I am. Because, um, when she bought that cloth,
it was brought home with pride. You know? I worked hard, I spent my money, and
look I bought something nice. You and I can dress alike and even go to church on
Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday we dressed. We went to church dressed alike.
We had on the same material, cloth. Dresses might be different, but it was the
same material.
In Tamika’s account of May-May’s life story, May-May herself would have been the recipient of
“girl child” Training for achieving independence. Thus May-May is able to demonstrate
independence—struggling daily by baking, sewing, and selling to take care of herself until she
died. May-May’s work-life experiences are expressed in the words of Tamika. When I think of
how the value of words about our relatives are rhetorical, I think Lee Maracle’s theory of words
in “Coming to Oratory.” Maracle asserts that to Indigenous peoples:
We regard words as coming from original being — a sacred spiritual being. The
orator is coming from a place of prayer and as such attempts to be persuasive.
Words are not objects to be wasted. They represent the accumulated knowledge,
cultural values, the vision of an entire people or peoples. (3)
Building on Maracle, I understand Tamika’s theory as one that transmits the values of the women in previous generations, that influences the values of current generations of women. Baird 123
I also think of Lee Maracle’s theory of doing in which she explains, “the proof of [the] thing or idea is in the doing” (“Oratory” 3). I feel like when words are not heard, we can look for actions.
Thus, when I think of Tamika witnessing May-May’s success and independence, I am inclined to think that as a result of practice one comes to know that independence looks like making things, learning, and practicing, among other lived experiences.
Regarding the discipline, I am also reminded that, in order to continue traditions we need to practice and teach in the manner of apprentices, to learn from, and alongside each other. What
Tamika’s theory brings to Maracle’s explanation is that where people engage in “doing” may include physical spaces in which they meet and talk, and move, and make things like baskets, food, stories, or conduct interviews; these spaces are where we field opportunities to partake in relational activities for community-based engagements. In this space, there are opportunities for intellectuals to listen to particular experiences shape peoples knowledge, broaden their thinking and adapt different world views. Thus, I see greater opportunities for embracing dialogues among members from the disciplines of ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics to create more intercultural communities of learning in the discipline, as scholars such as Gwendolyn
Pough advocates in her call for interdisciplinarity at the Conference for Composition and
Communication in 2011 (“It’s Bigger Than Comp/Rhet”). Pough believes that the language we use to do rhetoric varies and as such the discipline in its diversity is well placed to reflect interdisciplinarily. In this space that Pough opens up, I understand that the Buxtonian women’s theories bring opportunities for more intercultural exchange. Like the Cultural Rhetoric Theory
Lab, I intervene for the women from the village community to shed light on rhetorics that appear to be outside the United States and the academic discipline of rhetoric and composition.69
69 The Cultural rhetorics Theory Lab intervenes in community-based discourses and works to include various communities— American, Indian, Crafting, workplace and others with shared beliefs. Baird 124
Women in my community are teaching in ways that are useful in negotiating methodologies for
sharing beliefs, and struggles that can have transnational implications. These methodologies can
become heuristics for how we bridge divides between traditional, indigenous, creole indigenous,
and contemporary history-making.
I Have Options
Carving out spaces for voices of women anywhere is part of the work cultural
rhetoricians do within and without the academy. Black Feminists within the Caribbean have
begun that work to lend greater visibility to women and the region. While listening to Buxtonian
women’s stories, I think of Richards-Greaves, who in “Kwek Kweh” brings attention to women
spiritualists, Kwek Kweh performers, activists, and community organizers whose work bring
greater visibility to the ways women think and do. Learning the way they think and do leaves
maps of how they chart their cognitive history so that others in the village or region may learn
and follow if they choose. These maps are not imperialist mapping; rather they are constellations
of lived experiences that travel within and beyond the regional community. These maps may
situate rural African Caribbean women in social movements of globalization, industry, and social
transformation. As reminder, Tamika is working as a teacher, not in Guyana, but in the Bahamas.
She uses her academic Training and holds Girl-Child Training in reserve.
Here is a story:
And if I don’t have a job, I can always make a business and I don’t need any
qualifications. I have options.
While May-May was trained to cook, bake, and sew to achieve independence in her girlhood days and taught Tamika her acquired curricula, Tamika emerges with not only a dual orientation:
“independence” and “options” but also an understanding that May-May’s Training does not Baird 125
constitute “qualifications.”70 She builds her theory drawing from traditional Training and formal
schooling and experience such as working as a teacher and learning from May-May. Embedded
in her is cultural knowledge that makes her a village trained business woman. With these assets,
Tamika theorizes that the mixing of these educational expertises provides confidence. She is
confident that if her academic career does not work out, she can depend on her options—Girl-
Child Training—to survive. Through her theory, I hear how colonialism impacts education and
shapes land-based rhetorical practices to the point where the formal education trumps home-
based education.
Tamika’s theory of Girl-Child Training is complex because of how Tamika compared
May-May’s Training to her school-based Training. On first listening, her comparison worries me
because I feel that she is moving away from reciprocity and valuing of the education of the elder
woman. I am reminded of Mignolo’s (Darker Side of Western Modernity) and Perez’s
(Decolonizing Methodologies) contention that we are all complicit in colonial rhetorical
practices. Thus, in trying to tease out the complexity of her theory, I listen to the convergences
and divergences in her philosophy of education under colonialism. I hear her building a
decolonial theory of survival in which Tamika includes how each kind of education manifests itself in its rhetorical situation. This distinction speaks to the need for intellectuals to understand the tight weave of colonial cognitive imperialism that still occurs in the mind of a Girl-Child turned woman, one of Buxton’s finest minds. To me, mapping these kinds of experiences of
women and girls brings attention to the appeals of Caribbean scholars, such as Carolyn Cooper
70 Although Buxtonians valued skills or the blue-collar worker, they came to value formal education as means for upward mobility. Thus, as noted earlier, they negotiated with the colonials in the early 1900s for a Buxton Scholarship so that their children could be educated to improve their social status. In 1924 the Buxton Scholarship was instated. It allowed one child per year to attend prestigious church schools in the city (these schools were created for the children of expatriates and persons not of dark complexion). Baird 126 and Mimi Sheller to do more to decolonize the mind, and (re) center education to fit the region and its needs so that young people can value land-based knowledge.
On subsequent listening, I am compelled to listen to her as a villager who has similar
Girl-Child Training and formal education. I reflect on the roles of these Trainings as I listen to
Tamika. When listening, I consider how formal education and degrees are regarded as
“qualifications,” in the village culture and how Girl-Child Training might be considered as “no qualifications,”—or nothing. I also consider that her notion of “independence” can be a metaphorical “Bam-bye,”71 while she uses her degrees for her career.
I think it is important to make apparent that school education of “book learning” and community education intersect in land-based learning and can be seen in intergenerational women’s performances and theories. What marks Tamika’s theory as integral to intersectional and intergenerational rhetorical theory is the notion of a rhetoric of options being decolonial. In how she thinks of her education, she shows the movement of intergenerational knowledge and how it manifests in human experience—I have options. On the surface, it would appear that
Tamika is just an “educated” person with a job in the Bahamas. In her, however, there is a hidden curriculum that is necessary for theorizing visibility even when May-May’s Training is not on display. In this theorizing moment, I want intellectuals to see how Tamika makes her moves as a cultural carrier navigating the way with and between various educational Training.
Such knowledge can alert intellectuals to re-vision rhetorical pedagogy and consider what more we can learn from the citizens who populate our disciplines. As we can learn from Tamika, armed with May-May’s Training and Tamika’s formal education, Tamika has options that May-
May never had. Through Tamika, May-May lives on; in Tamika’s body is the hidden knowledge
71 Bam-bye (bye and bye) is a Guyanese word for left overs. People often cook more food, usually lunch, than they can consume so that they can have some for later. Grandmothers usually serve Bam-bye to grandchildren who show up after school looking for a meal. Baird 127 that she knows; she also knows its power and potential. In her awareness of that knowledge,
Tamika ensures that May-May’s legacy is valued and not forgotten.
Tamika’s theories remind me that it is necessary to value how we come to know and demonstrate knowledge. This valuing broadens the scope of our knowing, honors all our relatives; thereby, rendering us a people less focused on individualism. Our knowledge-making is a composite of community values and bonds, which helps us become an interconnected people. Further, intellectuals can see and hear how women defy narrow stereotypes especially about who a village woman is and what her contributions are in her private thoughts and public actions. Public intellectuals such as Linda Peake tell stories in the chapter “Political
Organizations in Guyana” that constellate with Buxtonian women’s stories (Women and
Change). Peake says that women worked in several self-help and charity organizations as early as 1913. Tamika’s story extends Peake’s theories on women’s decolonial activities and methodologies showing us that women and girls operated within a self-help system.
As I think of the methodologies of Girl-Child Training, I am compelled to focus on
Tamika’s theory of girls who are seen as part of the women’s movement to revolutionize domestic Training and turn it into cottage industries for self-efficacy or self-help and survival of the family.72 Intellectuals need to understand Tamika’s theory as making visible particular identity negotiations in the shadows of women’s struggle for agency through girls for economic gain. We can see girls emerging as makers of the village economy.
72 During the mid to late 1900s women formed organizations such as the “Women’s Auxilliary,” among others, in which they taught each other crafts and skills. Many engaged in gardening, pig rearing, sugar cane farming, and planting fruit trees to secure monies for their “old age” retirement (See Women and Change in the Caribbean by Janet Momsen; See Buxton Friendship in Print and Memory by Eusi Kwayana). Baird 128
Making Space for the Domestic in the Academic
Academic spaces can be disconnected from real life; however, opportunities for learning how domestic Training theories are part of academics can bridge that gap by honoring “All our relations” (Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab). As noted with Girl-Child Training, domestic
Training inculcates cultural knowledge that is passed down from old to young, and female to female. By considering that domestic Training can exist alongside academic Training, we complicate what counts as knowledge. We honor the traditional, the formal, and the informal knowledges that make up our complex lives that intersect in multiple nested social spheres. 73
Such an acknowledgement allows intellectuals to “see” communities as makers of multifaceted individuals who keep the home culture alive along with the school culture.74
Domestic training contends with wider conversations of making in the disciplinary subfield of Caribbean rhetoric, which flies under the radar of scholars in rhetoric and composition (Tropic Tendencies). Making as a domestic practice of rural women in Caribbean and creole indigenous community-based research is one space intellectuals can rally to listen to and do. If these intellectuals were to ask: “How can we listen in order to value women’s land- based rhetorics as intercultural engagement?” I would argue that they might listen to how women and girls draw from their embedded “domestic” intercultural communities’ frameworks– academic and civic—to do domestic work. By doing, intellectuals can imagine that the location of the village is any place that is physical or spiritual, as Tamika does when she remembers her apprenticeship with May-May.
73 Nedra Reynolds in “Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference,” and hear her argue that the discipline needs to integrate the rhetoric of its constituents, drawn from the working class, inclusive of farming people. See “Growing the Discipline” by Andrea Davis.
74 See Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance.by Gerald Vizenor, who discusses the rhetorics of survivance. Baird 129
The Mindful Body
As we listen to Tamika and her domestic stories with May-May, we are privy to an emerging relational theory of creole making. In this theory, what appear to be women just
making cakes, clothes, going to church—are deeper civic engagements—in which women are
engaged in making a village, a nation, and region, and a discipline. One contribution of her
relational theory of creole making to the discipline is that it destabilizes the reductive concept
that non-western bodies exist without minds–savage and ignorant. I pause to reflect on Buxton
People Stop Train, and “They used to Throw Box” (Jennifer’s Story) and “We are a patriotic
nation” (Shevan’s Story) and women at work in their homes and communities (Shevan and May-
May). I think these stories draw attention to how we can map relational spaces. We can
constantly engage in rhetorics of remembering by studying how women engage their minds and
bodies in everyday life. Doing so, we can learn from places of resistance, care, and community
how women are studied, purposeful, and progressive.
Women in the discipline have intervened on behalf of non-western rhetorics. Thus, I will
listen to how cultural rhetorician Gloria Anzaldua among others, intervenes in and disrupts
notions of mind-body separation, to make visible the mind-body connection that is involved in
Tamika’s theories of making, evident in apprenticeship and Girl-Child Training.75 In
considering that women’s performances are embodied as a whole. I am able to bring Caribbean
rhetoric into rhetorical studies and make apparent how women can be seen and heard. As we
listen to May-May teaching and Tamika learning, we are making the physical work for social
uplift and caring for themselves and village as a means for seeing all our citizens or relations. In
the community, relatives blood or not are valued; hence it is right that I think of discourses in
75 Several scholars including Daisy Levy, Malea Powell, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Janice Gould, Craig Womack, Qwo-Li Driskill, Judith Butler, Nedra Reynolds, and Gabriella Rios among others are already doing this work. Baird 130
which mind-body knowledge-making is taken up in the discipline that highlights these
contributions of relational theories. Non-western relational theories are what Gloria Anzaldua
advocates for in Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, where a mind-body disconnection is a western notion. Evident in her theory of writing, for instance, she explains the western and non-western disconnect:
Wah de Story Seh?
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the
head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and
stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the
imagination as it does to real events. (37)
When I listen to Anzaldua in constellation to Tamika, I understand that our practices are a package. May-May and Tamika “write” their rhetorics with practices of and from the mind and
body. May-May plants the ideology in Tamika that independence is something she should want,
train for, and reap benefits from. Considering that this “writing” is not alphabetic, intellectuals
can fall into the trap of not seeing women the same way they see themselves.
Further, Anzaldua causes me to rethink the concepts of objectivity and the distancing of
the body from the mind that remain prevalent in our discipline. In relation to Tamika’s theories,
seeing the rhetorics of the body as not separate from women’s lived experiences makes visible
women’s process of creating their reality in a non-western way. For instance, we can understand
how a consideration of the mind-body connection allows Anzaldua to condemn the notion that
one writes through or by means of the body and not from it. Indicting the western ideas of a
separation of body and mind, Anzaldua says, “I don’t know of anyone who writes through the
body. I want to write from the body; that’s why we’re in a body” (Interview 63). By marking Baird 131 how the body is more than its function of its separate parts, she invites us to consider how intellectuals inhabit our bodies, relate to them and use them.
I also think of Daisy Levy, who in “This Book Called my Body” says that writing from the body calls for an acknowledgement that writing is “a physical and material practice” that
“carries agency” (25). Minds and not “material sites for meaning and intelligence” and bodies
“mere matter or machines,” as Dale Spencer notes in Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment 17).
Studying the physical body of practitioners in our discipline has been gaining recognition as evidenced by the work of Levy and others in Queer Studies, Feminist Studies, and Critical Race
Studies among others.
Considering the relationship among body, land, and practice in conversation with scholars, I echo Levy’s question, “If rhetoric is always about power, then what the body’s purpose is?”—my rural African body no less (25). Reflecting on Levy’s notion of the body and power, I feel that my body must be considered as rhetoric in this space—the way it thinks, feels, and makes things. Consequently, as I reflect on the Buxtonian women’s stories, as I remember with my body, I focus on what it feels like as I listen to stories in the village. In listening to the stories from the women, I speak the words out loud, to feel them in my mouth, let them resonate on the walls of my mouth and the room. I write them down, a mouthful at a time. I make hand written notes. I write how I feel on my feelings: I remember what it smells like—warm Atlantic salty air as I map the stories by remembering the places they women talk about.
These feelings, memories, and maps not only connect me to the land that I am writing about, but also provide ethos for our stories. I think that I am writing for the ancestors. I often speak to the ancestors especially when I am hard pressed to write their stories with care. Such considerations for relationality open the door for multiple ways of understanding and Baird 132 appreciating the rhetorical practices of people who use non-alphabetic ways of making- knowledge. I feel then that I am writing in the spirit. What I mean is that I write from the consciousness of my body that history, theory, land, people, experience, and ancestry are connected.
My work forges a relationship between Caribbean rhetoric and cultural rhetoricians who use story to intervene in cultural discourses that make space for community-based rhetorics asking, for instance, “How does meaning-making work in our specific cultures and/or communities of practice?” “What are the rhetorical affordances of those practices? What situates those practices discursively? Historically?” (“Aristotle is Not Our Father”).76
Linking back to Anzaldua’s discourse and those of the cultural rhetoricians above, I am compelled to ask: What are the affordances of writing from the rural African woman’s body teach? What situates embodied practices discursively? I feel that integrative stories of blood memory, community, and identity speak to ordinary people’s experiences. These land-based practices co-exist with academic practices even when they are not acknowledged. By honoring these practices, community members bring relational ethos to knowledge-making to the attention of others. Regarding the village, we learn what we take for granted. When we do not include homemade everyday practices in rhetorics, we contribute to erasure and invisibility of communities and knowledges. As I write, I attempt to write in the power of these rhetorics that help us interpret our self-worth and contribute our ability to function in global communities, as
Jennifer, Tamika, Lorna, and Cheryl.
Regarding the Caribbean, theories of writing from the body as part of land-based practices help us to situate Caribbeans as subjects actively contesting colonialism and making
76 Scholars who are already answering this question include Angela Haas, James Clifford, Qwo-Li Driskoll, Geneva Smitherman, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, and Keith Gilyard, to name a few. Baird 133
ways to assert economic and political independence. The making of the rhetorics of selfhood by which villagers become seen and heard bring fresh possibilities of the places in which intellectuals can enter discourses, land-based discourses on shared beliefs across the region and in the diaspora.
Our discipline has written extensively on listening as a practice of embodiment and relationality. I think of Ratcliffe in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Whiteness and Gender,
who extends the notion of listening as a bodily function to a rhetorical stance. On a practical
level listening rhetorically involves an orientation to self-awareness. In her own experience in
relationship to her own whiteness, gender, and privilege, she explores identification. Considering
her own narratives Ratcliffe contends that rhetorical listening can hinder or help intercultural and
cross-cultural discourses in areas of identification, dis-identification, and non-identification. I hear her making theories of listening that appear to be a way of making relationships that inform how we can listen relationally through attention to difference, commonalties, or non- commonalities. In “Rhetorical Listening with Krista Ratcliffe” a podcast of Syracuse
University’s Colloquia “This Rhetorical Life,” Ratcliife further explains that “listening is a trope, and when I talk about rhetorical listening, it’s a trope for a way of positioning yourself with a text!” (8). When I listen to Rattcliffe, I also listen to understand how rhetorical listening to the
Buxtonian women is practice: they listen for stories. Those stories are peopled with relatives and spanning across communities of kinship; not as relationally cold as “texts” can sometimes appear.
Drawing on the women, I too listen for stories that position me to trace rhetorics to, from, with, in, across and alongside other stories. Thus I am beginning to learn and interrogate how we make inter- and intra-cultural relationships in spaces such as the community and the academy. Baird 134
What is at stake also is whether these relationships I trace can be read as material “texts” or
objects or embodied acts. Speaking with Ratcliffe, I note that rhetorical listening is embodied
listening. I am compelled to extend from Ratcliffe and to move towards relationality to be
accountable for recognizing the traumatic rhetoric that leaks out of resistance stories. I connect
relationship to rhetorical listening and embodiment to practice being accountable for doing all
rhetoric. Thus rhetorical listening looks like “asking for” and “listening for” the Buxtonian
women’s stories; allowing intellectuals to perform ethical “reading/s” of women to see see/hear
them not as text; seeing and hearing the women as people engaged in civil life and the issues that
face them each day; understanding that the women are not disconnected from themselves and the
lives of their families; women are invisible to those who do not see and hear them on their own
terms.77
As the Buxton People Stop Train story shows, the Buxtonian women speak with their
bodies making life and death decisions. Their rhetoric spurs action, which as Ratcliffe suggests is
a part of rhetorical listening, but to me rhetorical listening goes further. Rhetorical listening
means that I when I listen for stories, I listen to go where the women go and try to situate them
and their meaning-making in context. Many times, while conversing with several of the women I
asked them to tell me what their stories mean. This listening takes time, for in my experience, I
did not always want to listen and follow the trajectories of the stories because sometimes I did
not understand their messages, or sometimes the stories were too painful. For readers, do not everyone can, should, or is willing to connect to the trauma that stories provoke. I expect readers to hear these stories using whatever tools they can use to access them. Doing so, elevates the
rhetorical capital of stories for Thomas King in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative theorizes, stories are dangerous. Regardless of whether stories are heard or felt, once heard,
77 See “Embodiment: Embodying Rhetorics” by Maureen Johnson, Daisy Levy, Katie Manthey and Maria Novotny Baird 135
stories cannot be unheard. Readers then have options to do what they will with the stories to
which they listen.
Additionally, I think of the way Cherie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and others situate
embodiment in This Bridge Called My Back. In this collection of stories, women constellate
radical stories of how their bodies are implicated in rhetorics of trauma and violence and by these
means they show themselves visible. For Buxton, violence is the bridge to galvanize the
Governor’s (in Buxton People Stop Train) attention to economic and social conditions during the early development of the village. Thus, I hear that women are heightening performances of self- sacrifice to resist colonialism and patriarchy at every level and with every “body”—even the
bodies of girls. By incorporating Caribbean women’s and girl’s experiences in civil life, listening
becomes a means to travel beyond the confines of America and issues of race that dominate
intercultural and multicultural conversations.
I listen to my own stories of being African Guyanese and Caribbean person. In my
experience, institutionalized racism in our social institutions is not a dominant factor in the
Caribbean setting, even though race relations are evolving and are being contested. Hence when I
listen to my own black body, I listen to my life stories with an ear for understanding our
community’s concerns with colonial impact that are a part of the legacy of western capitalism.
For instance, I listen with an ear for understanding a creole relationship of gender in a nested
context of my African ancestors, who when working within parameters that required them to
decolonize their practices and take up gender roles, so that they work for the good of the village
on their terms. Extending the stories, I listen to the ways in which Tamika connects to the body
and its power to negotiate gender roles, decolonialism, and land. Baird 136
Here is a story:
Women are the necessary ones. Women are the strong ones, [they] set the tone.
When the men return from the bush, they fit themselves into the household that is
like a well-oiled machine. They do not want to upset the status quo. The woman is
always the necessary partner.
What this story shows is that my cross-cultural orientation, in conversation with Ratcliffe, hinges on the context of acknowledging “all my relations.” I descend from women, whom
Tamika informs, take on a man’s role when he is away; in that role and circumstance she is
“male.” 78Roles are fluid and negotiated based on who is presence on the land. As a women, she acknowledges and honors the male and not denigrate his role not sacrifices her reality that women are necessary in the partnership.
Consequently, I listen to my scholarly relations with Maureen Johnson, Daisy Levy,
Katie Manthey and Maria Novotny in “Embodiment: Embodying Rhetorics,” whose theory of embodiment is a space for listening and constellating or making connections. The scholars encourage intellectuals to cultivate an awareness of a mind and body connection akin to
Indigenous peoples and other intellectuals, who practice constellating by delinking from the disempowering systems by being militant and persistent. Practices of delinking involves
“cultivat[ing] awareness of how power structures and bodies are tangled” and “persist daily in un-tangling them” (41). Continually troubling stories, practices, and lands of all ones relatives dead, alive, and unborn are ways of contesting colonialism and nurturing activist habits of mind.
As practice of cultivating mindfulness, I listen to Buxtonian women forging old and new kinds of ways of making story—I hear them making oral history and I understand them as being
78 See Libation: An Afrikan Ritual of Heritage in the Circle of Life by Kimani Nehusi. Baird 137
mindful when they are by employing strategic uses of their bodies while performing in the
course of daily activities. 79 In turn, as I write in the academy, I let my body carry its agency
extending it in constellation with others as I make relationships across communities. While
writing, furthermore, I weave stories of and with and from our fighting and trail-blazing women.
I contemplate their lives, motives, and impacts as I weave women, who have lived before us into oral history and make space for those coming after us. By consciously weaving our stories, the women and I are co-constructing history; we are performing acts of resistance; we are (re)
moving a veil of invisibility of women everywhere, who wish to be seen and heard.
Conclusion
Overall, by connecting to the land, bodies, and practices as the Buxtonian women and I
do through oral history, we extend conversations in the discipline of rhetoric and composition on
embodiment and land-based knowledge from a non-western perspective. “How can intellectuals
access the theories of Buxtonian women? And what are the affordances for the communities?”
For communities like Buxton, in Guyana, and the Caribbean, a decolonial and land-based
reading of women’s relational theories, ask intellectuals to learn from the practices of rural
African women communities. Instead of approaching communities as places to draw knowledge
from, we can enter to listen and “ask,” to constellate each other’s knowledge structures, and to
co-construct ways of making stronger, more mutually beneficial community-based engagements.
79 See Dale Spencer in Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment: Violence, Gender and Mixed Martial Arts. See Feminist perspectives on the Body in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Baird 138
CHAPTER V. WHERE I HAVE BEEN AND WHERE I AM GOING
A Letter to the Young Buxtonians and the Dissertation Committee
I wanted to do something uplifting – something more educational to galvanize that village out of that dark period [2005] ... To teach the young people because they don’t know (Interview, Lorna Campbell, 2015)
Dear Dissertation Committee and Young Buxtonians,
This is the first time that I am speaking to you together. In order to communicate to you
in one space, I invite you to the Conversation Tree.80 The Conversation Tree is a physical,
spiritual, psychological, and philosophical space where persons can meet to converse, share,
news, and begin lifelong relationship. Here is a story.
Under the Conversation Tree
At the junction on the East Coast Demerara highway, that connects the Bel Air Road to
the City of Georgetown, in Guyana, is a small triangular piece of land on which grows a tree called “The Conversation Tree.”81 My grandmother used to tell me travel stories of how she
traveled to the city. Long ago she and her sister used to walk the twelve miles from the village to
Georgetown. They would leave home at 4:00 in the morning and they would stop at the
“Conversation Tree” to rest, drink water, and share news—Wah De Story Seh—with other
persons going to the city or returning from it. When I think of how the elders journeyed and
communicated, it behooves me to invite you to the Conversation Tree space that I make in this
project.
80 It is believed that the tree was first a Sandbox tree planted by Napleton William King in 1876 to celebrate the birth of his son Napleton Walter. When it died, a Flamboyant tree that most people in recent times remember was planted as a replacement. That tree was eaten by termites and died. At present, the tree is a mere sapling. “The late Ms. Dorothy ‘Bunny’ King, a descendant of William King, suggested that the name may have come about as a result of the villagers practice of gathering there to chat from time to time” (“The Conversation Tree”). Today, people call the Bel Air City road ‘Conversation Tree Road.”
81 Trees such are the Flamboyant are believed to be spaces where the ancestors dwell and there are many myths of ghosts of jumbies living in the trees. Baird 139
In this project, I hear Buxtonian women’s relational theories challenging, connecting, and situating the gaps between home/village community and academic community. The Buxtonian women are important, for through their conversations, we can learn that the rural African village setting where the Buxtonians come from, is a place for us to understand rhetoric that is non- western. Young Buxtonians have already been socialized into academic ways of learning, which are continually changing. Under the Conversation Tree space, however, I invite them and other intellectuals to reflect with me on women’s stories, to connect, to map, and to build theories.
Doing so, I understand that we are making a new space to communicate from our overlapping and intersecting communities, as my grandmother and many Guyanese did long ago, and continue to do philosophically, psychologically, and spiritually.
As we move forward, I envision that both Buxtonians and academic intellectuals can broaden the repertoire of ways to study rhetoric within Rhetoric and Composition as they listen to each other. It is crucial to listen to how intellectuals compose and inhabit stories. In the village, they ask the ‘ole people, they (re)tell stories, they listen, and sometimes they do not speak (as Jennifer says when she asked her mother where the men are when women break bricks:
“I don’t hear anything”). Within these stories are memories of all our relatives: mothers, their grandmothers, grandfathers, their fathers, and their daughters, and scholarly relatives. By listening using a Cultural Rhetorics approach, we render women more visible.
Regarding the academy, I imagine the Conversation Tree to be anywhere people assemble formally and informally to share: the water cooler, the hallways, the conference tables, the lunch table, the kitchen tables, and the break-out sessions between classes. Like the
Conversation Tree in Guyana, its significance to longevity and survival is important. The original tree is gone. The story of the tree tells us that there were two trees, and at least two Baird 140 lifetimes. The current tree is a sapling. Comparatively, I liken this project to the sapling in its a new life cycle. A new sapling has opportunities to grow and serve. It will be buffeted by the winds of the Atlantic and the recurring floods, but like the Guyanese who keep replanting it, the sapling will survive because it signifies a history of relationality between nature and humans for survival. Thus, I mark the relationality as part of the heuristic for Caribbean rhetorical conversations. Relationality provides a way for intellectuals to conduct conversational cultural rhetoric by means of asking, listening, and speaking.
With regard to my scholarly relatives, I want them to know that as I listened to them at the intersections of the village and the academy, I learned that stories from the village theorize intellectual spaces; they are knowledge markers or ways to begin and continue conversations on how we listen to our own and others’ stories about languages, cultures, land, and worldviews as I have done in this project. This kind of listening helps me connect to a relational network of people, land, culture, and practice to honor each other’s humanity. Additionally, using Cultural
Rhetorics, as Riley-Mukavetz and others do, I engage in relational listening to bring out an understanding of practice and action that is relational in Buxton and the academy. Relationality allows members of various communities to imagine how they can participate (or not) in networks of knowledge making beyond individuals and the classroom.
Under the Conversation Tree, I argue that a Conversational Cultural Rhetorics approach to Caribbean rhetorics, is a way to provide a relational approach to rhetorics of specific communities to teach the academy about survival, story, and creole indigeniety. A
Conversational Cultural Rhetorics approach to Caribbean rhetorics makes space for overlooked community members and their relationships to knowledge to be valued in the wider the scope of what is possible to think about respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and rhetoric. Considering a Baird 141
relational conversational Cultural Rhetorics approach and looking forward to future
relationships, I inclined to ask rhetorically, under the Conversation Tree: In what new ways can
intellectuals make inter- and intra-cultural oral histories from the locations of everyday life?
Wah De Story Seh?
Using the collective conversations in my project, Dem Seh, everyday life stories inform
rhetoric; thus, it is important that intellectuals make their relational processes visible. Relational
visibility shows the making of connections as intellectuals form a rhetorical pathway. This
rhetorical pathway brings a plethora of knowledge making options into the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. For example, as a reminder, I marked everyday life stories as maps by tracing how I connect non-western practices among members of the African diaspora in Buxton, in
Guyana, and in the Caribbean.
Additionally, as I explained to Young Buxtonians in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, stories are ways of knowing and being in the world. What’s more, when their stories are not visible in dominant literature, Young Buxtonians and readers are likely to tell themselves stories—ones that say their stories and practices are not valuable. If people’s stories are not valuable, then people themselves are neither valuable nor visible. Likewise, it has occurred to me that if Caribbean history books do not tell stories of all the members of a particular community, including the village, the authors may appear to be telling Caribbeans that people in certain regional communities do not matter and that their ancestral knowledge and relationships are not valued. They might also imply that languages such as Creolese, Jamaican creole or patois are not the means for theorizing, transmitting, and discussing themselves and others, as Carolyn Cooper notes. Baird 142
Furthermore, when cultural values, codes, relationships, people, and the things they make are hidden from history by those who compose them using dominant scholarly methodologies in dominant cultural stories, significant sections of society disappear or appear undervalued and labeled. For example, scholars like Ong contend that oral cultures are not literate because they do not privilege alphabetic literacies and such an indictment places large portions of the world—and women in particular—under a cloak of invisibility.
Under the Conversation Tree, I speak back to Ong inviting others to tell multiple stories in conversation with intellectuals at the intersections of Cultural Rhetorics and Caribbean rhetorics. By engaging in intersectionality, I am making my people and their relationships visible, not because my people are invisible or think of themselves that way; I do so to disrupt
Ong and add our stories to global stories on knowledge-making. I listen to how bodies connect with practice and land, as a start to these conversations. I encourage intellectuals to do so too, for when all of us see and hear how we make connections and theories, we would be hard pressed to compose histories, singular histories, devoid of visible codes that undergird our knowing of ourselves and the world.
Buxtonian women moving the conversation
Even though some people in Buxton might not read the alphabetic text of this project, it
is likely that they will become aware of it by word of mouth.82 For example, a woman such as
Lorna Campbell, the daughter of Miss Gwenny Ifill whom I introduced in Chapter One, shows
how she is transforming oral history in the community in the twenty-first century.
82 As I compose this project, I share stories from the women in the Buxton Friendship Express as reciprocity. Cheryl and others who are featured have already told me that family and friends in London and other parts of the world have been in contact saying they like what she says. Some people are making their own emailing lists to distribute the newsletter beyond Lorna’s list to persons in Asia and the Middle East. Baird 143
Here is a story from Lorna:
A Buxtonian is a member of that community and family. It’s very important and
we should always preserve that relationship wherever we are. It’s very important
that we preserve that kinship – Buxtonian kinship. I think we should always be
inspired by our ancestors, our fore parents. So, I built a website
[buxtonguyana.net]. Then I did Facebook because Facebook was just becoming
popular with the young people. Then [I started] the newsletter. The newsletter
came naturally because the older folks are not on Facebook. They’re not gonna
be on the Internet and I thought it was important that we communicated our
message. And we started this monthly newsletter Buxton Friendship Express. And
I came up with the name.
It is important to mark her as a village intellectual and modern-day woman who is not only concerned with the past, but also with teaching others that the community is compelling, resourceful, and adaptive. As I listen to Lorna, who stresses that she brings the community together using Facebook, the Internet, the electronic newsletter, and the print newsletter Buxton
Friendship Express, I hear her pulling all her relatives together with conventional and modern technologies. In a sense, time for Lorna melts into multiple storied spaces. Through Lorna, we learn how women are using the spaces and actively preserving, promoting, and inspiring communities. These spaces extend from the yard to the Internet, which functions as the new
Conversation Tree. Thus Buxtonian women’s story-making practices including this project incorporate various platforms to connect Buxtonians, ensuring that the “lifeblood” flows incessantly within and outside the community. Baird 144
Towards the future: pedagogy and practice
Outside the Buxtonian community, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, a
variety of scholarly elders in Rhetoric and Composition including Victor Villaneuva, Keith
Gilyard, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Geneva Smitherman, to name a few, have integrated
Cultural Rhetorics by civil communities. Akin to those scholars, I am weaving in the discipline
of rhetoric and composition by working towards a Cultural Rhetorics approach to Caribbean
rhetorics to continue to shed light on the value of community-based research. What my project
adds to the discourse under the Conversation Tree is a relational approach to pedagogy from the
Buxtonian perspective.
Wah De Story Seh? Teaching and learning in the Buxtonian community is not only the
responsibility of the school, or parents. The community members, the old people, regardless of
blood kinship, are part of the system of teaching and learning. Pedagogical instructions that
members receive are understood as land-based and creole indigenous—we make them to meet
our needs. These pedagogies are not understood as school-based and they present challenges to
how students, teachers, and administrators think of teaching.
Here is a story: Recently, in the conversations about inclusion and representation of
minorities, African American scholar and former Chairperson of the Conference of College
Composition and Communication, Adam Banks argued for a more precise approach to pedagogy
in higher education.83 Banks wants every student who enters universities in the United States to
“hear and see themselves and their home communities in the writing curriculum” (Council
83 “Composition and rhetoric is in the unique position of touching almost every student who comes through any college anywhere. On the one hand it’s a tremendous service obligation and responsibility. It’s also a real opportunity to help rethink what higher education means. To open the doors of higher education and really make it welcoming to all. We need to include the “rhetorical techniques and traditions of marginalized groups. Part of what we’re doing in the first year writing courses is to prepare students to navigate college. A crucial, crucial issue for me is how we collectively [not just composition faculty] get higher education to actually look like America in all its range, its diversity with respect to, not just race but ability/disability, sexuality and gender” opines Banks. (16) Baird 145
Chronicle 16). He wants them to be able to use “rhetorical techniques and traditions of marginalized peoples.”1 Here is his story:
a black student, no matter where she comes from, whether that’s the hills of
Appalachia, or Chicago or Philly, should be able to hear her voice or the voice of
people she comes from or an indigenous young man, whether coming from a
reservation community or from Any City in the USA, should see something in
writing instruction that leaves him feeling that he and his people’s traditions are
being honored. (16)
Banks wants to include students or a young people in these discourses, just as the women and I want to do. The concern for Banks is: How do we go about including students? What methodologies can be relied on to make sure that “intellectual partners including the voices that are often muted” are heard, as Banks notes (16). By listening and making connections between the women and the scholarly relations, as I do in this project, we can create social change in the company of likeminded intellectuals; we can unmute voices and unstop the clogged ears of intellectuals in various communities where people are not heard and seen.
While reflecting on what intellectuals can learn about a decolonial approach to pedagogy of how to write ourselves into rhetorical studies to unsettle colonialism, I feel compelled to place
Lorna Campbell, Adam Banks, and Marie Battiste together under the Conversation Tree with
Kwayana and ask Kwayana, “What is our responsibility in education, rhetoric, and life?” I ask
Kwayana, enacting the custom of consulting the scholarly relatives in the village for knowledge.
As a reminder, Kwayana is a Buxtonian intellectual, activist, teacher, father, and highly respected elder in our village. Here is a story he shares: In Gang Gang, regarding the students using Creolese (our native language) in school Kwayana says, Baird 146
Please do not fear, too, that the notice of creolese by my students in school will
“spoil” their English. In my experience as a fluent speaker and writer of creolese,
as well as a teacher of English up to high school levels, the best English students
were the best speakers of creolese in drama and folk songs. I do not advocate the
study of creolese. It should already be known, without books, from the
communities. It is not essential knowledge, but it is rich knowledge. It is essential
only for those who want to get closer to the culture sources. For good or ill, it is
disappearing. (“Foreword”)
In this story, Kwayana speaks of his experience as an educator to the people of Buxton. He does not believe that education in Creolese language is the purview of the schools even though students can use the language in schools. Having listened to Kwayana, in 2013, I ask Kwayana in a telephone conversation what he thinks about Adam Banks concern in relation to Buxtonians learning their oral history in schools. Here is his story, as I understand it:
To have an education that does not include oral history being taught in school
does not mean that you are not educated. The person who learns and knows his
own culture is a richer, more fluent person (Personal Communication September
2012).84
By listening to Kwayana, I understand a lesson for intellectuals across communities is
that without using the language people think, work with, and communicate with in their soul,
pedagogy can be reduced to just a façade that hides the vernacular spirit. Kwayana’s teachings
challenge the community to know that it can and should teach individuals its rhetoric and ways
of making it so that the community continue to develop its pride, legacies and responsibilities.
84 Kwayana has given me oral consent to use his words and conversations in my project. I have consulted with him on the telephone numerous times, just to get his support, his blessings, or to clarify issues that I do not understand. Baird 147
Returning to Banks, consequently, I understand his concern that there is a lack of continuity in school-based education regarding rhetoric and based on my research, people have rhetorical knowledge gained from all of their relatives within certain cultures. I offer the theory that everybody has story/ theory and students are a rich source of curricula. Students, the faculty come to the academy with cultural curricula. Institutions and their multiple intersections intertwine with students. The theory that “everybody and every “body” has story makes it possible to think that students can be encouraged to understand the power of their living bodies.
They archive cultural knowledge. Students can come to recognized themselves as a part of and
not apart from the curricula of higher education and Rhetoric and Composition. Thus, looking
toward the future, students need to see and hear themselves as contributing members who “(re)
write” the scripts for their education. For example, as I write these stories, as a graduate student-
scholar-villager, I am more aware of the link among body, practice, and making as a means to
value relationships among people, communities, and the environment to name a few. Thus doing
community-based rhetoric looks like a student or anyone taking opportunities to “go to the
people who tell stories,” as Tamika suggests and use the people’s frameworks for mapping their
histories with and about themselves using a Cultural Rhetorics approach.
In the company of the Young Buxtonians and the Dissertation Committee, and other
intellectuals under the Conversation Tree, I am reminded of Cultural Rhetorics, which draws
from various methodologies and frameworks for collaborations across various communities.
Through this community-based approach to oral history that I explore, I come away (re) learning
how the formal education and land-based knowledge I receive relate to the people in practice of
everyday living and are a continuation of my education. Thus this project is a making of meaning Baird 148 that works towards the goal of growth, renewal, and inclusion for intellectuals globally towards a more relational and democratizing education.
Reflecting on the women I ask, “What can women’s story-making teach us?” The answer is complex but clear: women’s story-making teaches us that some aspects of learning in the community are and should be the work of the community and not just the school. Taking
Tamika, for instance, teaching and learning take place in non-school places, but the results for the individual are different and in exploring difference we see the growth of a society in intimate spaces. With these knowledges, intellectuals can extend conversations of Krista Ratcliffe and
Gerald Vizenor, for instance, by drawing on how through meeting women in stories by women, we can teach ourselves curricula by which we value communities of knowledge and add to the landscape of conversations of how to do and know.85 Furthermore, looking toward the future, using rural oral history, I understand that through the familial and communal practices we can disassemble pat notions of who can know, have access to knowledge, and speak for others and ourselves. Intellectuals can rally around community-based relational methodologies and invite interdisciplinary discourse to constellate knowledge-making practices across difference and shared beliefs.
Caribbean rhetoric: being heard and being seen
Taking opportunities to speak and listen as a villager using knowledge from multiple communities makes me feel both intimidated and empowered. I feel the need to represent myself and my communities with respect, humility, accountability, and reciprocity. I continue to draw on interdisciplinary scholars whose work gives voice to the humanity of all people—queer, black, and native, indigenous and so on and learn from them some ways of making stories that
85 See “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct’” by Krista Ratcliffe. See “Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance.” by Gerald Vizenor. Baird 149 are useful for my Buxton community and beyond. These community relationships are companions who carry us on the journey to meet ourselves and the world.
I hope that the relational awareness that comes from asking and listening in the company of others help us stimulate ideas on how community engagement increases the depth of learning with and by women when conducting research that is useful to academic and civic communities.
I think and dwell on three easily identified benefits of relational awareness: 1) It establishes relationships of trust, reciprocity, and respect—I did not have to leave the old people’s stories behind. 2) It provides a broader base of literatures of peoples of the world—all our relatives can be included in rhetoric. 3) It provides opportunity to extend conversations of scholars such as
Malea Powell and other rhetoricians who call for greater diversity, to grow the discipline of rhetoric and composition—we can make the discipline a hospitable place for intellectuals of any kind. Hence by listening for stories in conversations with women and other intellectuals, I think that community-based research as a Cultural Rhetorics practice is beneficial for making visible the ongoing and evolving ways in which women are transforming oral history.
Conclusion
Oral history is just one “homegrown” practice by which village people are “heard and seen.” As a person from the Caribbean, I am positioned within Rhetoric and Composition to examine the relationships and practices within my home community and the school community evidenced in a range of expressions. In my community, I do not feel invisible or marginalized.
Thus I will continue my work as a continuation of a lifework towards becoming one of the ole people—especially women across the Caribbean. A Cultural Rhetorics approach allows me to extend this work into academic discourses on rural women entrepreneurs, and rural girls, not formally studied in rhetorical studies. Baird 150
I aim to increase the presence of rural women’s rhetoric that flies beneath the radar of rhetoric, Rhetoric and Composition, and even the newly minted Caribbean rhetorics. In a sense my work intervenes on behalf of women and girls anyplace. I will continue to use a decolonial framework that allows me to disrupt and to weave these women’s and girls’ stories into the conversations of Caribbean Black Feminist Theory or Cultural Rhetorics or Caribbean rhetorics, or Vernacular and Diaspora Studies, Girlhood studies or any space that does not formally include the rhetorics of women from the Caribbean demographics. A Cultural Rhetorics approach allows
me to extend this work into academic discourses on rural women entrepreneurs, and rural girls,
not formally studies in rhetorical studies. Thus, I pursue a continuation of a lifework towards
becoming one of the ole people—especially women in and across the Caribbean.
Walk good …86
86 “Walk good” is a parting greeting meaning I wish you well on your journey. It is not goodbye. Baird 151
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2004. Print. Baird 159 APPENDIX A. CONSENT LETTER
BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY
Department of English
RESEARCH PARTICIPANT INFORMATION AND CONSENT FORM
Story-making Practices of Buxtonian Women
You are invited to participate in a research study. I am required to provide a consent form to inform participants about the research study, to convey that participation is voluntary, to explain risks and benefits of participation, and to empower participants to make an informed decision. You must be over 18 years of age to participate. You should feel free to ask me any question you may have.
Study Title: Story-making Practices of Buxtonian Women Researcher and Title: Pauline Baird, PhD student Department and Institution: English, Bowling Green State University Address ad Contact Information: 1734 Clough Street Bowling Green, OH 43402 Advisor: Andrea Riley-Mukavetz
PURPOSE OF RESEARCH You are asked to participate in a research study that aims to collect stories of Buxtonian women living in New York and Buxton, Guyana. The collected narratives will focus on how Buxtonian women make the stories they tell in their everyday lives.
Potential Benefits: Your participation may contribute to increasing general knowledge about the various ways Buxtonian women living in New York and Buxton village make the stories they tell in their everyday lives. Moreover, this study may also generate recordings and other resources of value to other Buxtonians, Guyanese at large, Caribbean people, and researchers. You may benefit by being able to share your experiences, observations, reactions and opinions on how you make stories and how your stories function in your everyday life as a Guyanese and/or Buxtonian woman. There are no direct benefits such as money, gifts, raffle prizes, or course credit to individuals or organizations.
PROCEDURES I will organize an interview with you via the telephone, skype or face –to- face to discuss your stories. You will determine the amount of time you devote to an interview, but discussions lasting from 1 hour to 2 hours will be typical for these sessions.
• I will interview you by telephone, skype, in your home, office or a public outdoor space such as a park. You will be asked to give written consent granting me permission to record you prior to the interview. • In agreeing to be interviewed, photographed, audio- and/or videotaped, you consent to have your name, these recordings, photographs, and any written materials produced from
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them may be publicly shown. • If you wish to participate but you do not wish to have your image used for this project and in public showings of its publications, I will make necessary adjustments to data remove your image. You can choose to have an audio taped interview only. • You have the right to request that certain comments be revised. • Your participation in the project will be from the time of the interview to the time of the data analysis, between 3 weeks to 5 weeks. Within that time, I will transcribe the data and make my initial analysis. I will send you the transcript and my initial analysis. • If the project goes over the anticipated time, I will seek your permission to continue participating. • You will be able to examine the transcript and the analyzed data to elaborate on the interpretation for the purposes of clarification, revision, confirmation or adjustment. • If you request revisions to certain comments in the interviews or recordings, I will include the revised version only in dissertation and/ or presented at professional meetings, and in scholarly publications. I will still retain unrevised original master copies.
I agree to allow my identity to be disclosed in reports and presentations. Yes No Initials ______
I agree to have my interview video and audio taped Yes No Initials ______
I agree to have my interview audio taped only Yes No Initials ______
I agree to allow my video-taped image to be disclosed in reports and presentations. Yes No Initials ______
I agree to have myself photographed (I will photograph only you) Yes No Initials ______
RISKS There are no foreseeable risks associated with participation in this study.
PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY
• Data such as audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, transcripts and analysis for this project will be kept confidential. Data will be locked in a cabinet drawer in my office 427 East Hall, at Bowling Green State University, where I am the only one with access to a key. • The results of this study will be published in a dissertation and/ or presented at professional meetings, and in scholarly publications and you will be identified based on the permissions given. • Information about you will be kept confidential to the maximum extent allowable by the law. • At the conclusion of the project, all tapes, photos/images, written materials and transcripts will remain my property after the project is completed.
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• The tapes, photos, written materials, and transcripts will be used primarily for independent research and at professional meetings. After analysis, portions of the data (to include photographs, audio- and videotaped material) will be used to fulfill dissertation requirements, to publish, and can be seen by members of my advisory committee. • Upon completion of the research and/or publication, you will receive copies of the dissertation under the accepted copyright regulations.
YOUR RIGHTS TO PARTICIPATE, SAY NO, OR WITHDRAW • Your participation in this study is completely voluntary, and you can refrain from answering any questions • Whether you choose to participate or not will have no effect on your reputation. • The duration of the project, from interview to clarification of analysis is about 4 weeks, and you are free to withdraw consent and to discontinue participation at any time without penalty. • You are free to withdraw participation at any time. • If you decide to participate and change your mind later, you may withdraw your consent and stop your participation without penalty or explanation. • You have a right to say no. • You may choose not to answer specific questions. • Choosing not to participate or withdrawing from this study will not make any difference in the quality of service you may receive. • Choosing not to participate will not impact any relationship you may have with Bowling Green State University.
Summary of the participation process (anticipated 3-5 weeks):
From the time of our first contact here are the things you will do: 1. indicate interest in the study 2. schedule a time, in about a week, to discuss the study and give permission for me to send you the consent form and interview questions 3. read the form and interview questions and prepare to ask me questions 4. discuss questions and ask for more information about the study 5. ask questions about your rights, withdrawal, and confidentiality 6. sign the form and return it to me by email 7. schedule a time, place, and duration of the interview (I will call you after I receive your email) 8. participate in the interview 9. have photographs of yourself taken by me (as determined by the permissions you have granted) in the beginning, during, or after the interview 10. reflect on the transcript and analysis and elaborate on my interpretations, request modifications where necessary to make sure they are correct 11. request more time if necessary
CONTACT INFORMATION If you have any questions at any time about the study or the procedures you may contact me, Pauline Felicia Baird, at 1734 Clough Street, Bowling Green OH 43402, 419-378-
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9667, and [email protected]. You can contact my advisor Andrea Riley-Mukavetz at 419-372- 2531, and [email protected].
If you feel you have not been treated according to the descriptions in this form, or your rights as a participant in the study have not been honored during the course of this project, you may contact my advisor Andrea Riley-Mukavetz at 419 372-2531, and [email protected]. You may also contact the Chair, Human Subjects Review Board at 419-372-7716 or [email protected], if you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this research, [email protected]
CONSENT I have been informed of the purposes, procedures, risks and benefits of this study. I have had the opportunity to have all my questions answered and I have been informed that my participation is completely voluntary. I agree to participate in this research.
By returning this form by email to me at [email protected] with your name and date typed below, you are indicating your consent to participate in the project.
______Date ______Participant Name
Thank you for your time. Pauline Baird
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APPENDIX B. HSRB APPROVAL
DATE: December 18, 2014
TO: Pauline Baird FROM: Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board
PROJECT TITLE: [679152-2] Story-Making Practices of Buxtonian Women SUBMISSION TYPE: Revision
ACTION: APPROVED APPROVAL DATE: December 18, 2014 EXPIRATION DATE: December 2, 2015 REVIEW TYPE: Expedited Review
REVIEW CATEGORY: Expedited review category #7
Thank you for your submission of Revision materials for this project. The Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board has APPROVED your submission. This approval is based on an appropriate risk/benefit ratio and a project design wherein the risks have been minimized. All research must be conducted in accordance with this approved submission.
The final approved version of the consent document(s) is available as a published Board Document in the Review Details page. You must use the approved version of the consent document when obtaining consent from participants. Informed consent must continue throughout the project via a dialogue between the researcher and research participant. Federal regulations require that each participant receives a copy of the consent document.
Comments:
- The following sentence (added in the revised consent form) is confusing: "I agree to have myself photographed (I will photograph only you)". The Board suggests removing the phrase in parentheses.
- The Board also suggests removing this sentence: "If you feel you have not been treated according to the descriptions in this form, or your rights as a participant in the study have not been honored during the course of this project, you may contact my advisor Andrea Riley-Mukavetz at 419 372-2531, and [email protected]." The advisor's name and contact info has already been provided in the preceding paragraph, and the next paragraph gives the HSRB info for concerns over rights as a participant.
Please note that you are responsible to conduct the study as approved by the HSRB. If you seek to make any changes in your project activities or procedures, those modifications must be approved by this committee prior to initiation. Please use the modification request form for this procedure.
You have been approved to enroll 6 participants. If you wish to enroll additional participants you must seek approval from the HSRB.
All UNANTICIPATED PROBLEMS involving risks to subjects or others and SERIOUS and UNEXPECTED adverse events must be reported promptly to this office. All NON-COMPLIANCE issues or COMPLAINTS regarding this project must also be reported promptly to this office.
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This approval expires on December 2, 2015. You will receive a continuing review notice before your project expires. If you wish to continue your work after the expiration date, your documentation for continuing review must be received with sufficient time for review and continued approval before the expiration date.
Good luck with your work. If you have any questions, please contact the Office of Research Compliance at 419-372-7716 or [email protected]. Please include your project title and reference number in all correspondence regarding this project.
This letter has been electronically signed in accordance with all applicable regulations, and a copy is retained within Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board's records.
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