Kaieteur....................................Jason Lalijee

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

other side of the cane, where there’s a mass of brown bodies axled on their knees in prayer. I picture her like this: told explicitly to stay far away from that white man , from the brown American bodies that fan out from him in all directions like the outer rings of a spider’s web. I imagine that she needed to see it happen for herself (how could she not know it was happening, the stories of the Old World stack together and retrospect causes the Babel of it all to collapse) — If I were my grandmother, I’d need to know if they’d actually go through with it. I picture her speeding past the house, past inexhaustible chickens squawking in the adjacent field, Kaieteur protesting deafeningly from all directions, running straight into the arms of the sugarfield beyond. She starts in Canje and ends up in Jonestown because the cane is a wardrobe that leads to Narnia, she passes her fingers along top coats and hats, through towers of sugar— I picture the cane deferent in her path, pressing flat against either side like the Red Sea parted for Moses, like they were being forced down by the wind. I see her finally at the edge of the field in view of Jim Jones himself, his shared elixir passed around in communion. I wonder if she was parched; I wonder if she craved a sip. I feel her shock: the brown bodies caught still like planets in gravitational orbit, my grandmother hiding between the stalks and watching it all unfold. My grandmother still among the stalks in the nascent dawn, indiscriminate from one of the field’s own— I picture my grandmother watching these American bodies, dark like her own, thinking they could be the ghosts of relatives she never knew; I picture them holding their glasses to the sun, which glitter jewel-red in warning. I don’t know how the cult members are arranged. They might be clustered and willowy like the stalks behind them, or already composed as the photographs eventually document it: prostrated spirals of bodies that wrap into each other, like waves of oil into a sinkhole. I don’t know if she manages to watch its denouement, the bodies crumpling together, an igneous rock forming. I imagine she averted her eyes to Kaieteur but saw a geography beyond it, finally asking herself what America did to its brown bodies to drive them here in the first place.