“Borrow a Day from God”

This chapter examines the ways that religious doctrines, particularly those pertaining to “good” and “evil,” shape African-Guyanese perspectives on Blackness and their engagement with Come to My Kwe-Kwe. It particularly explores how Christian values, particularly “the myth of Ham,” (Johnson 2004:4) compel many African-Guyanese to reject African cultural practices, such as comfa, obeah, the traditional kweh-kweh, and Come to My Kwe-Kwe. This chapter reveals the strategies many African-Guyanese-Americans use—such as supporting ritual performances with biblical passages and borrowing a day from God to attend Come to My Kwe-Kwe —to accommodate seemingly disparate cultural and religious segments of their identities. Ultimately, this chapter shows how “Africanists” like the Faithists, who openly embrace African practices, create a space for Come to My Kwe-Kwe attendees including African, Guyanese, American, and religious, among other identities.

Picking Up the Pieces

This chapter takes an innovative approach to discussing the process of diasporization and rediasporization as acts of repair and renewal. It provides a life history of the fictional character, Dia, a woman ripped from her native village as a young girl and sold into slavery. By embodying the diasporic experience, this chapter gives voice to the complexities involved in the diasporic process, unmasks the pain that is often shrouded in academic discourse on diaspora, and compels the reader to think about diasporas not only as groups, but also as individuals with unique life experiences. More importantly, this chapter summons the reader to think about diasporization and rediasporization as both instantaneous and continuous processes.

“Where’s the Cookup Rice?”

This chapter examines how African-Guyanese-Americans police the boundaries of “Guyanese food” at Come to My Kwe-Kwe to “remember,” to articulate Blackness, and to facilitate rediasporization. It also demonstrates the delicate balance established between the desires of the attendees and the financial goals of vendors who provide Come to My Kwe-Kwe meals. Diverse cuisines are sold at Come to My Kwe-Kwe, but attendees who are accustomed to eating Guyanese food, or are familiar with the traditional kweh-kweh, often attend the ritual expecting to consume African-influenced Guyanese cuisines, like cookup rice, metemgee, and conkee. This chapter also explores how migration and the changing needs and desires of the African-Guyanese community simultaneously facilitate destruction and innovations of Guyanese cuisines. Ultimately, this chapter articulates Come to My Kwe-Kwe foods simultaneously to diminish the symbolic distance between diasporas and homelands and establish new distances through cost, culinary innovations, and a changing African-Guyanese community.

Conclusion: Wholly Fractured, Wholly Whole

This chapter synthesizes the arguments throughout the book to demonstrate how Come to My Kwe-Kwe has become increasingly important to the process of rediasporization in the African-Guyanese community in New York City, in large part because it constitutes a compound ethnic boundary marker that encompasses other crucial ethnic boundary markers, such as food, music, dance, dress, and religious and gender values. Beneath the consistent negotiation of identities and the policing of ethnic boundaries lies self-preservation. An increasing number of African-Guyanese support Come to My Kwe-Kwe to keep it alive for the next generation in order to prevent complete assimilation. Thus, while the ritual provides an opportunity for African-Guyanese-Americans to embrace their African and Guyanese heritage, it also creates a space for established traditional kweh-kweh practices to be celebrated, challenged, revised, and fractured to accommodate the innovative functions of the ritual, changing performance spaces, and the needs of a secondary diaspora.

Introduction: “Who Karkalay?”

This chapter examines the traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh as an African retention or African continuity that developed among enslaved Africans in Guyana, South America. It also demonstrates the ways that traditional kweh-kweh indexes indigenous African rites of passage, such as Ïgba Nkwü, a wine-carrying ceremony practiced by the Igbos of Nigeria. Moreover, this chapter explores how African-Guyanese migration to the United States necessitated the reenactment of the traditional kweh-kweh, and thus, an invention of tradition in the form of Come to My Kwe-Kwe, also known as Kwe-Kwe Nite. This chapter further demonstrates how the African-Guyanese diaspora in the United States (African-Guyanese-Americans) is comprised of smaller interconnected factions or diasporas, such as the migrated diaspora, procreated diaspora, and affinal diaspora. It also demonstrates how the celebration of Come to My Kwe-Kwe serves to transition the African-Guyanese-American community from an imagined community to a tangible one that is uniquely African, Guyanese, and American.