Martin Carter’s House, Lamaha St., Georgetown, Guyana (author’s photo, taken February 2024) “This is the dark time, my love”. Martin Carter (1927-1997), Guyanese poet. Carter wrote this poem sometime between 1953-54 during British rule in Guiana (pre-independence spelling). A time when Churchill’s Government sent troops to a country that had recently elected a socialist government, posing … Continue reading Is this the dark time, my love?
What happens when friendship lasts?
Image credit: Ela Muñoz A lot happens. Women friends offer support, provide learning opportunities, foster acceptance that goes beyond empathy and open up pathways you never knew existed. I have had the great fortune to create sisterhood with women in the Black Women’s Movement in the UK that continues to connect me to the struggles … Continue reading What happens when friendship lasts?
Where is your optimism?
Author’s image: Boy on Lake Echternach This young boy leaped into the future, convinced he will succeed. If our grandmothers, their grandfathers and all our ancestors before them were not optimistic, we would simply not be here. You and I would not exist in all this chaos and disfunction, pain and joy. They continued the … Continue reading Where is your optimism?
Where were you at 10?
Author’s photograph: Peter Rose & Anira Streets, Queenstown, Georgetown, Guyana. The nuns busied themselves trying to learn as much as they could about a country that was, like sand, fast slipping through their fingers. They were a group, of many, who ardently preserved the last bastions of British colonial rule in our country. I was … Continue reading Where were you at 10?
Whose language?
Is it English, Spanish, French or German? Perhaps Italian, Portuguese or Danish? These are all languages of the colonists; people who left their own lands in search of wealth and power, conquest and extraction. Once the colonists had taken what was given and, when that was not enough, removed by brute-force, gold, diamonds, bauxite, lithium, … Continue reading Whose language?
What’s in a name?
Source: UN News. Kumbukumbu Ya Historia Ya Watumwa - A slavery memorial in Stone Town, Zanzibar, United Republic of Tanzania James, the title of this month’s read at the Panafro Book Club created much discussion, critique, and questioning both to each other and deeply inwards. More than twenty of us sat around a large table at the back of a … Continue reading What’s in a name?
Is this real?
Image taken 24 February 2026. I took this photograph a few days ago on a walk close to where I live. A lone tree surrounded by life; woods, fields, wild animals, a few humans and an abundance of life, both above and below ground. I wondered if the tree still lived or if it had … Continue reading Is this real?
Who is watching you?
This cat lurks around our house. It does not belong to anyone but it is around us all. It prowls behind the mound of earth at the back of our yard towards the dark woods, watching and waiting. Sometimes it bravely looks into our house, past the large window and then into our home, watching … Continue reading Who is watching you?
I am grateful for …
the bird with the pale-butter underbelly and dark wide wings that flies overhead, dipping and soaring above my home freshly roasted peanuts, still warm and ready to be shelled, that remind me of my father and our ritual on Saturday afternoons, the empty coffee jar waiting to be filled for my mother’s delight the opportunity … Continue reading I am grateful for …
How can our memories create optimistic futures?
Some more reading material – author’s collection As a young black woman in North London in the 1970s, the present looked bleak. The ‘SUS laws’, dating back to the Vagrancy Act of 1824, were in force. Black and other minority groups were stopped, searched and arrested on the suspicion of loitering, or on the assumption of … Continue reading How can our memories create optimistic futures?
Patricia Angoy 