Paper short abstract:

Not many Black women own a pristine piece of the Amazon rainforest in our protracted age of gendered and racialized extraction. This filmic meditation introduces audiences to one such person, Aunty Joan, who may not be just one person, and whose possession of 357 precious acres is far from settled.

Paper long abstract:

Not many Black women own a pristine piece of the Amazon rainforest in our protracted age of gendered and racialized extraction. This filmic meditation introduces audiences to one such person, Aunty Joan, who in reality may not be just one person, and whose possession of 357 precious acres of land is far from settled. Informed by Afro-Indigenous Guyanese Spiritualist—or Komfa—philosophies and practices, Joan is also Dolly, an ancestor spirit known to be bassidy, a Creolese word meaning something close to “beyond normality.” A journalist and novelist now in her eighties, Joan has for decades struggled along with her guide Bassidy Dolly to secure legal right to occupy Yukuriba Heights, a once-self-sustainable organic farm and arts commune situated deep in the Amazonian Essequibo region of Guyana.

The meditation presents excerpts of memoir in conversation conjoined visually with layered archival and original footage portraying extraordinary and mundane facets of Guyanese life. Scenes of labor in the colony’s diverse industries stretching back over the past century are foregrounded as sights and sounds of the peopled landscape, along with the “work” of contemporary Komfa ritual. A key component of the story woven with Joan’s biography is Komfa’s role in supporting Guyanese—specifically as descendants of colonized, enslaved, displaced, and indentured peoples of mainly African, Indigenous, and Asian heritages—in challenging and redirecting the basis of their subjugation under Europeans’ regimes of production that endeavored to commodify people as possessable property. In Kriiyoliiz (or Creolese), Guyana’s lingua franca, Komfa is a term reductively recognized as “spirit possession.”