Search

Sheorani Kilawan's Wedding Ceremony
This photograph was taken during Sheorani's wedding ceremony in her home in Albion, Guyana in 1986.

Mohaiyuddin Khan, trader
Khan left Guiana at the age of ten and traced out a seaman's or trader’s trajectory over the course of his life, traveling across the Malay States, India, South America, Africa, Japan, China, Switzerland, Ceylon and Italy. Khan had become a naturalized U.S. citizen the year before. For six months in 1921-1922, he traveled to London to buy skins and hides as an agent for an A.M.

Mohaiyuddin Khan, 1921
The U.S. Census, passport applications and naturalization petitions unfold the story of Mohaiyuddin Khan, a commercial trader who married, then divorced, a German-American woman.

Handwritten letter from Mohaiyuddin Khan
This handwritten petition for a passport in 1921 provides a glimpse of Khan's transnational life and the circuits he traveled, from London to Calcutta to Brooklyn.

Mohaiyuddin Khan Photo, 1919
At 5’11’’, Mohaiyuddin Khan was tall and striking, with an aquiline nose, a pointed chin and an oval face. His passport photos show a man who could have passed for Greek or Italian. Indeed, when he landed in New York in 1913, in his mid-twenties, he declared his intention to naturalize and gave his “color” as “white” and his birthplace as London.

Photo of Mohaiyuddin Khan with his wife Gertrude
Mohaiyuddin Khan's passport applications suggest that he was often away from his wife Gertrude’s home in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In 1920, the census showed him living in Brooklyn with her and her German immigrant family. The 1930 and 1940 censuses record her shorn of the surname Khan, using her maiden name again and working for an insurance company, with Mohaiyuddin no longer living with her.

Ramu by Moses Bhagwan
Moses Bhagwan wrote "Ramu," a moving tribute to an archetypal figure in Guiana's history, the sugar cane cutter carrying his cutlass home from the fields, in 1964. At the time, Bhagwan was a political prisoner in a detention camp run by British colonial authorities. He wrote the poem, another one dedicated to his wife, and another invoking freedom in a notebook given to him by his sister.

Poem, "Ramu" Manuscript
This is the original manuscript for Ramu, composed while Moses Bhagwan was imprisoned by the British for his role as an anti-colonial leader, in the youth wing of the Guiana's People's Progressive Party.

repeat movement until by Nadia Misir
"repeat movement until" was composed by Nadia Misir, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens College. The poem gives elegaic voice to a wedding ring handed down in a family and evokes its experience with labor, with skin, with surfaces, with temperatures, with grandmothers and granddaughters, with death.

One Last Bag by Elizabeth Jaikaran
"One Last Bag" was composed by Elizabeth Jaikaran, the author of the short story collection Trauma. With its buoyant wit, it levitates what is otherwise heavy: the weight of an overstuffed suitcase and, through the figure of a migrant trying to please her Queens cousin, the weight of family expectations.

Current search

Filter by theme:

Filter by subject:

Filter by collection:

Filter by source:

Filter by creator:

Filter by period:

Filter by state:

Filter by type: