Guyana Dreams of Wales, Additional Work

Transkript

1 96 (104) Guyana Dreams of Wales, Additional Work Guyana Dreams of Wales Crosswords Solve the puzzle by changing the nouns below to adverbs. Across 1 Oppression (12) 4 Distortion (11) 5 Consciousness (11) Down 2 Possession (12) 3 Immensity (8) 7 Idleness (4) 6 Anxiety (9) 8 Hardness (4) 9 Goodness (4) 10 Youth (10)

2 97 (104) Solution

3 98 (104) Anagrams Rearrange the anagrams to find words or phrases from the text 1. Actual gurgle bag (hints: two words; adjective and noun; the part of your identity that you carry with you, deriving from your nation, language, etc.) 2. Ham cat tent (hints: one word; noun; a connection that fastens things together or a feeling of affection for a person or an institution) 3. A junk icon (hints: two words; noun; the name of a well-known flag) 4. Platonic loos (hints: one word; adjective; a word that describes the condition of countries, cultures, etc that used to be ruled by a European imperial power which has now withdrawn) 5. If I ain't Olaf (hints: one word; noun; another word for association, attachment ; the connection or involvement that someone or something has with a political, religious, etc organization, affiliation) 6. Splash choir (hints: one word; noun; an amount of money that is given to someone by an educational organization to help pay for their education) 7. Oxtail not pie (hints: one word; noun; a situation in which you treat someone unfairly by asking them to do things for you, but give them very little in return) 8. Try canes (hints: one word; noun; the members of your family who lived a long time ago) 9. I made Cortez (hints: one word; verb; to change the way in which a country or government, etc is organized, so that it is more democratic) 10. A grimy concept (hints: one word; noun; word invented by the author of the text to describe a system of government where certain skin colours rule) 11. Barny duo (hints: one word; noun; another word for a line or border that separates things)

4 99 (104) 12. Clint is a fiasco (hints: one word; noun; process in which you put something into the group or class it belongs to, or the group that it belongs to)

5 100 (104) Work in pairs. Take turns explaining and guessing the words on your lists. A B 1. Exploitation Scholarship 3. Boundary Union Jack 5. Pigmentocracy Classification 7. Ancestry Attachment 9. Cultural baggage Postcolonial 11. Democratize Affiliation

6 101 (104) Rewrite one or two of the passages below, using a third person narrator in the present tense Example: I like the idea of return. I think this funny myth passes down like a beautiful poem in many black families She likes the idea of return. She thinks this funny myth passes down like a beautiful poem in many black families. 1. In my thirties, seeking some resolution to this big why?, I decided to go back to this country where I had never been and planned a cautious exile to my father s land. I had some sense that my youth in Wales would now be completed by a voyage of self-realization to a black country that only lived in the scrapbook of stories from my childhood. A passionate sense of spiritual return home, nudged along by those thousand little sentences, Where do you come from then?, that overrode a certain knowledge that I had never truly known any other culture, any other land in any intimate way but Wales. Yet still there was longing for some reconnection with something other, something that surely was my birthright. 2. I had been in Guyana about a year when my dreams turned into black dreams. It suddenly struck me one day the extent to which my thoughts, my way of thinking and even my dreams were peopled almost exclusively by white people. I was dreaming about my house in Wales. A beautiful woman was descending our staircase. The shock of the normality of this act coupled with the normality of her blackness and in my Wales house was immense. How could my brain have so wholly stolen from me any imagining of black people? How could my world be so white that I could only dream white dreams? Now the black people I experienced daily began to inhabit my dreams. 3. I took to distancing myself from anything white from anything that reminded me of the place of my kind in this country s slave history and now from its New Colonials to whom I was intimately wedded. Heh Sista, wha you do wi Babylon? a Rasta man asked me on the sea wall one evening. You slavin on dis white fok? he continued, not waiting for any reply. This incidental but charged confrontation turned my own eyes to relook at the small town Welsh boy I had married all those years ago in my hometown. Married? to he?!! 4. The Kitty story crashed hard into my identity pattern and added to a growing number of bruises that damaged my yet fragile sense of self. The women in the market affectionately called people like me reds Com buy here daarlin, com Reds look meh nice plantains a description rather than anything pejorative, I was later told, but a clear marker of my ranking in this society. A

7 102 (104) dear black woman who I tried to befriend, ultimately treated me with the cautious mistrust that existed between nigger woman and coloured. Yet I knew my great-great-grandmother had the experience of slavery, that my grandmother had been in colonial domestic service and I thought of the hundred nigger women who were my ancestry. 5. Rati wasn t telling me I m not black: she was telling me I didn t know how to be Guyanese but that I could be if I wanted. I understood from her that my cultural baggage wasn t right even though my face and my body fit were quite fine. I recognized that what joined me to this country was far deeper: that my history was the history of this country but this was only part of my journey and that if I dug deep enough I could find the Africa of my origin; that I could join as any black person to black person anywhere in the world, but the temporal divide was culture. 6. I was reminded of my university days when at the height of the Welsh student protest, Welsh speaking students refused to stand with the English speakers for our graduation photograph. As the only black person in the cohort I was not at all clear where I should stand was this a cultural affiliation, a language grouping, a Welsh/English divide was I Welsh enough to join them? I thought about Wales often during these Guyana days. I thought about a Wales in which my way of being fitted on an everyday level but where my black history was punctuated and my Welsh history hadn t anticipated me. I thought about the big noise I was going to make on my return to make a place for the black Welsh in the welsh consciousness.

8 103 (104) Explain the following phrases and expressions from the text in English and find corresponding Danish expressions When something does not usher in any alarm To have second generation status When something is withdrawn The fine line between the beckon and the wave When someone or something is nudged along When something is characterized as the middling normality When something is characterized as high brow and low brow When someone has a second class citizenship When something suits you To be consumed with something To immerse oneself in something When someone is called to account for something When something is at issue for someone When you take to do something When something is to no avail Make sentences about the text using each of the expressions.

9 104 (104) What Are You? Link the expressions with their right definitions 1. I m cautious a. My religion teaches me blacks deriving from slaves will return to Africa, the use of marijuana is a holy ritual, that I must not cut my hair, and Haile Selassie, the late ruler of Ethiopia is a god. 2. I m passionate b. I m very careful about details. Everything I do is carried out with painstaking meticulousness. 3. I m coloured c. I m rather delicate, so be careful with me I m easily broken. 4. I m a Rasta man d. I m not welcome where I go. I intrude and interfere in places I should rather leave alone. 5. I m a New Colonial e. I consider the West as the superior civilisation. Hence inferior and underdeveloped peoples must be governed and taught by the West. 6. I m paternalistic f. I supervise people at work. 7. I m fragile g. I always take care when I do things. I never make swift decisions or drive recklessly. 8. I m tense h. I m not sure I want to go along with the plan, I m not too keen on it hesitation is called for. 9. I m thorough i. I m quite edgy, I go about like a cat on a hot tin roof. 10. I m reluctant j. I m often dominated by powerful emotions and I have a burning desire for a lot of the things that I do. 11. I m an interloper k. As the superior being that I am, I feel obliged to protect and direct less fortunate people who cannot really take care of themselves and all that, of course, in a fatherly manner. 12. I m an overseer f. I am mixed race - a nice coffee with cream; my father is white, my mother black.