Spiritual abuse as tufts of rabbit fur and twine feathered the nest of my familial home. My father was prey to Lutheran missionaries who set up shop on a plot of land belonging to his father in the village of Crabwood Creek, Guyana. To survive decolonization in 1966 and immigration to the United States, the only path he saw included his being devoured by empire’s acting arm: Christianity.
The British never imagined Guyana as anything but a place of extraction, never a permanent home for people—but the coolies of the Empire were not yet human, indentured to serve (officially five-year) contracts that bound them to plantations and their economies through pitiful, demeaning wages and reliance on colonial power structures. It would make sense that, to get an education in this rural Indian village, my father had to convert to Christianity, at least nominally, to go to the missionaries’ school, where...
