The Unconventional Country Boy Do we ever really leave our past behind? The author explores his sense of belonging and identity when confronting his childhood home and the expectations he’s left behind. BY DARREN A. MC ALMONT
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f you ask my people who I am, you will hear many things.
Perhaps you will learn that I am an awardwinning thespian and playwright, or that I have traveled to cities and countries that many will only dream of. Maybe you’ll even hear them say in their most polished English that “he attends York University in Toronto.” Now, all these things are true, but what they will tell you is very different from what I hear. Let me give you a bit of my backstory. I grew up in a small countryside village with Guyanese culture, so why do sometimes feel like an roughly 300 people. We didn’t have electricity for outcast among my own people? I am a young, Black most of the years I lived there. To get water for even man who has defied the odds of what my life was our most basic needs, we would have to line up at the supposed to be coming out of small countryside vilone standpipe that served my street with our buckets lage on the West Coast of Demerara. in hand to fetch back and forth. I slept on a doublesized mattress with my two younger brothers and older cousin. Before I hit the double digits in age, I had I made it a point to break the generational read countless juvenile and adult curse for the men in my village that novels. In fact, reading was my fashould not amount to any greater “Every bit of Guya- we vourite thing to do while all my than a labourer or construction workpeers played street cricket and footnese culture still er. I don’t drink or do drugs, and I ball. So, I always was always a bit myself in having never been arrushes through my pride different. rested. But these are only because I veins.” am on a mission to break the negative stereotypes of Black men. My purpose Now that you know a little is greater than the mud dams of my village. bit about my history from my own mouth, let me tell you the things I hear and get asked about myself from my own people who would proudly list for you my So, my people, don’t resent me. In my heart, I “accolades” and accomplishments. am still a “country” man, and every bit of the Guyanese culture still rushes through my veins. MM “Why [do] you speak American?” they ask, because to them, my not speaking in the mesolectal creole dialect of my people somehow makes me un-Guyanese and un-like one of them. “You’re a sellout,” they say, but Guyana is where they have buried my navel string – I can’t be anymore Guyanese than that. I still believe that there is no Christmas without pepper-pot DARREN A. MC ALMONT is a fourth-year English and professional writing major and a member of MacMedia Magazine. and ginger beer. And cook-up rice is still my favourFind him on Instagram at @darren_mcalmont ite meal to cook on Sundays. These are things rich in 7 | MacMedia Magazine
