13. A Daughter’s Journey from Indenture to Windrush

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen opens her memoir-essay, ‘A Daughter’s Journey from Indenture to Windrush,’ with the passport portrait page of her father Paul Kaladeen. The black and white portrait is stamped in 1961, the year Paul left British Guiana for the United Kingdom. He would return some forty-five years later with his daughter. The passport photo is a document of agency, of one’s freedom, or lack thereof, to move about the world. The portrait of Kaladeen’s father, taken in a moment of great transition for a young man, is full of possibility and promise. Yet, for many decades after his migration, there was silence about his homeland. Without a sense of her family’s roots to ground her identity in, Kaladeen writes of the racism she endured growing up in the United Kingdom as a daughter of immigrants and the pressures, including from her parents, to shirk her cultural identity and be monolithically ‘British.’ It was Kaladeen’s desire to know the land of her father’s birth that served as the catalyst to end his four-decade estrangement from Guyana. Their intertwined story illustrates the fractures and fissures migration creates in relationships and simultaneously, the sheer willpower required to rebuild a bridge between two lands and between a father and daughter.