KAIETEUR JASON LALLJEE (AB’20)
David Stanley, 2014
I picture her like this: running barefoot against the heat-packed soil, dirt red with hell beneath, flying toward some fixed, unseen point in the distance. I picture my grandmother like this because I’m sure she had some instinct that I don’t, sensing that something was happening that she needed to see. I picture her there: standing in the kitchen, peeling mangoes, or balanjay, or fresh hassa from their spines. Suddenly dashing the produce from her hands into the sink, running through the house, out the door, whole cities and bodies of water disappearing fast from under her feet. It makes sense that she’s there because all of Guyana seems close-knit to me. That’s the way stories about the Old World sound when you grow up hearing about it: a lean geography that stacks together like folding chairs, disparate points sewn together so that you could see all the landmarks at once if you spun in a circle, eyes unblinking, whirring faster and faster together into someone else’s memory. In my imagination Kaieteur Falls is there, everywhere, a constant companion of noise sent by the Blue Fairy herself, like it’s the conscience that will be your guide, like there’s no whale waiting inside to vanish you in the cave of its mouth. I picture the water vapor blanketing the air thick and dense like exhaust, not quite motherof-pearl white but cousin-of-pearl off-white, the kind of white you wear to your second or third wedding. I picture my grandmother running through it, jackknifing through a fog that descends over the squat houses and hides their rotting porches, the roofs longing to unhinge their jaws. I picture her running from the farm, from the two younger sisters and four younger brothers she needs to take care of. There she is, weaving through the miles of sugar cane separating her from the horizon, from what holds the answer, needing to see for herself the 5
