Celebrations Guyana Style

Celebrations Guyana Style

Pam Henry

When I consider celebratory events, I am caught up into memory lane. Like it has been for so many others, it has been such a long time that we have met up with family and friends, in a group.

I started exploring my experiences of celebrations and picnics, childhood and older living in Guyana, South America as well as my mature years in the UK. This remembering has taken me on such a wonderful journey of conversations, meandering down, like the rivers of Guyana and the Demerara itself: pausing on people, food, places hidden around the bends of one’s mind. The remembered smells and pleasures were so strongly evoked.

Some time ago, I mentioned that Guyanese cuisine is representative of its “Land of Six People”: a glorious melting pot of rich cultures and that you might recognise, any given culture, to a greater or lesser degree, at any time.

So what do Guyanese celebrations look like?

There are many kinds, religious celebrations: embracing Eid, Diwali, and Christmas and with each of these being marked by a public holiday. Christenings, or baby naming, passing of exams, or acquiring a new house or job, engagements, birthdays, marriages etc. also have their fair share of festivities within families and friends.

Then there are the national celebrations like

“Mashramani” often abbreviated to “Mash” which marks the country’s anniversary of being a republic state. According to Wikipedia “Mashramani” is an Amerindian word and in Guyanese English means ‘celebration after cooperative work’. This year Guyana reached the relatively young milestone of fifty-one years and in normal times there would have been massive carnival-style celebrations, especially in Georgetown, the capital. Since as a girl I have been fascinated with the creole of the country and

would spend ages seeking out the local parables and practising these in the broadest of vernaculars, to the disgust of my older siblings, with admonishments to “speak properly!”

“Is Nah age whah shrimp nah gat mek he nah big like whale” or “wan haan caan clap”. The latter in English is one hand cannot clap, alluding to the need for cooperation and working with others. And so I can continue. Guyana is the only English speaking country in South America that was a British colony until 1966; in spite, of its Amerindian first people, early Spanish, Portuguese and French and Dutch occupation too, forerunning the tongues of Hindi, African and Urdu influences.

This combination of indentureship, slavery and colonization evolved into a linguistic richness. Even, today, the many Dutch-named places, there have Guyanese-like English pronunciations, unrecognisable to the Dutch speaker until you spell it! Bearing this in mind, one will find that in Guyana things can sometimes be named a unique way. For instance, our ‘Bakes’ are a type of fried dumplings ( if you are a Jamaican) but a dumpling in Guyana is never a bake, nor is it ever a ‘tray bake’ of either sweet or savoury food. I am very blessed in my family to be surrounded by some amazing home cooks, some of whom have had some formal training but mostly invested love and care into the range of the local ingredients that are available.

And although I have been having quite a memorable journey revisiting these times and bombarding my sisters with questions about certain details or practices of then and now,

So it is with special thanks to my sisters for sharing with me their experience and knowledge.