Interview + Reading with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield and Jeremy Jacob Peretz

Editor’s note: The following text is an edited transcription of a longer conversation conducted over Zoom, available in full below. Joan Cambridge-Mayfield reads “Guava Season in Exxon Guyana’s Cash-Grant Line” (Volume 67, issue 2) from 39:38–41:50, and Jeremy Jacob Peretz reads Grace Nichols’s “Blackout” (Volume 35, issue 3/4) from 43:50– 46:11.

Tell us about yourselves, your relationships to writing and translating (especially Creolese), and to one another.

[Joan Cambridge-Mayfield]:
We met at the first ever course in the Guyanese Creolese writing system at the University of Guyana.

I am Guyanese—I was born here a long time ago. I’m an octogenarian child trying to embrace my second childhood: leading with imagination, as children do. I’m lucky to have a piece of the last of Amazonia, called Yukuriba Falls; I’ve been trying to establish it as a place where ideas can be let to live, and that’s where I’ve been writing.

Jeremy has promised to be my biographer, and he’s pulling all of [my stories] out of me. In the process, we’re utilizing what we learned from the University of Guyana: the Creolese writing system. In these times, people [in Guyana] still slap their children on the mouth and say, Talk English. So we are trying to dignify Creolese, lift it up. I speak English perfectly, but I think Creolese. It’s a thrill to write in Creolese because I don’t have to edit anything before it reaches the page.

[Jeremy Jacob Peretz]:
Unlike Auntie Joan, I did not grow up speaking Creolese. I’m from California, and was raised there with English and came to Creolese late.

I didn’t start reading and writing until I was a little bit older, and then once I got really into it, I got interested in poetry. I primarily write nonfiction, more ethnographic and historical, in academic venues. So my work bridges looking at poetry and literary practice, as well as ethnographic practice; really working with Guyanese communities, understanding about the jumbies that are the title of the chapbook [that the two poems are taken from], Jombii Jamborii.

What also drew us together is Creolese language work, and also thinking about the ways that language is a spiritual thing too, and is connected to the ways that we are who we are. I’ve been studying Guyanese religious practices for a number of years, but those years have been in parallel with our engagement together.

[Cambridge-Mayfield]
Yes, and that’s where the jumbies come in. We’ve sat down and discussed together these jumbies, those spiritual beings, like Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Walter Rodney, Martin Carter; I can keep on calling the names because there are lots of preeminent people in the world who are Guyanese. We came up with this idea of having the jumbies get together in a jamboree, you know, a creative thing with drama and dance and all of that… But the words that we write on pages can be a jamboree in itself, and do the same thing.

Bookshelves inside Cambridge-Mayfield’s house. Credit: Nazima Raghubir.

What was the process of co-writing and co-translating these poems like?

[Cambridge-Mayfield]:
I have to tell you about Jeremy: He’s very humble. He knows much more than I do about this. I’m a crazy creative person. My crazy ideas just come out of me.

Jeremy’s [English] poems are very abstract, and it’s like some kind of contortion, like a pretzel, to get it into Creolese. We work in that kind of crazy way, what Wilson Harris said: “Those labyrinthine passages,” about creativity. We come out with what we come up with.

[Peretz]:
And Wilson Harris was quoting the labyrinthine passageways from Sir Walter Raleigh, who was writing about Guyana’s waterways, trying to understand that. What else do we call [our process]? The crazy quilt. Some of the poems start in Creolese, some of them start in English.

[Cambridge-Mayfield]:
We don’t fit the English into Creolese. We fit the Creolese into English, often.

[Peretz]:
It’s been a very open, kind of flowing process without too many rules or restrictions. We go back and forth with drafts. We talk a lot.

[Cambridge-Mayfield]:
And we fight a lot.

We’re winging it. We’re tuning into the evolutionary process that Guyana is going through right now, and trying to get to the masses, to get to their minds.

Can you talk about the context behind these poems, specifically the presence of Exxon Mobil in Guyana in recent decades and the cash-grant line?

[Cambridge-Mayfield]:
Jeremy is more informed about Exxon’s limitations and atrocities in Guyana. I am with the masses of the people who are experiencing the travesty. I am with them, I think with them. I’m with them.

The cash-grant line was donating $100,000 [Guyanese dollars/GYD], which is $500 US [to each Guyanese adult citizen]. $500 US. Now, I will tell you that $100,000 in Guyana is nothing in terms of the prices, because everything is predicated on the US dollar here, and [the exchange rate] is 200 GYD to 1 USD. A poor person cannot go into the supermarket with $500 and last for a week or two. You pay $100 for a green mango, things like that.

In the cash-grant line, it was humiliating the way people were climbing over each other. You know, that’s why I pointed out the old woman who caught a stroke in the line and had to be fetched away.

[Peretz]
There’s a new book, Predatory Welfare, which is a sort of thing that we were trying to explore with the poem, and how [Joan] said feeling that sense of embarrassment, or shame being there. A lot of people we spoke to don’t collect theirs at all out of protest.

The guava season is like a Creole metaphor for economic bad times, when there isn’t food except for unripe green guavas or tamarinds; famine food. It’s a way of thinking about those hard times, even with the abundance, supposedly, that oil is supposed to be bringing [to Guyana], with the fastest growing GDP on Earth.

There’s a web of poetry and people across your poems, which is more obvious in “Rememory Repeating Myself” because of the epigraphs (one of which is by John Agard, who is married to Grace Nichols). Still, I was struck by the thematic similarities between Grace Nichols’s “Blackout” (1994) and your “Guava Season…” (2026). How intentional were these connections and the dialogue between the two pieces?

[Cambridge-Mayfield]:
Jeremy brought Grace Nichols’s poem to my attention. I had written “Guava Season,” never saw that poem. I mean, she could have been writing that poem today, as I’ve written “Cash-Grant.” It’s as though we’re in a time-warp in so many ways.

[Peretz]:
And, “Rememory Repeating Myself, or Alzhaima / Laangh Taim Stoorii” also has to do with this, the way situations like the blackout that Grace Nichols described are still such a present reality; that this inheritance of the plantation, of colonization, of racial capitalism, is a re-memory, a repeating cyclical process.

There’s also a way that the thinking about history and history’s contemporary manifestations is a way of thinking about the jumbies, and the way that memory functions in terms of transmission.

Peretz’s son and Cambridge-Mayfield, his godmother.

What projects are you two working on, now?

[Peretz]
Auntie Joan already mentioned her memoir/autobiography/biography that we’re still thinking through and and working on, which in part is based on on writing that she’s already done that’s held at at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, along with her late husband’s papers, the Julian Mayfield papers.

JOAN CAMBRIDGE-MAYFIELD is an Afro-feminist environmental protector, former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home. Joan’s writing has appeared in the Antioch Review and Asymptote and has been anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders, and was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow to Julian May-field, forever following his profound jumbi wisdom, strength, and guidance.

JEREMY JACOB PERETZ‘s scholarship, writing, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized with grants and fellowships including from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy’s essays, poems, and films are available through such publications as African American Review, Anthropology News, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Africana Religions. Jeremy holds a PhD from UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance and teaches in the faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.