An Unexpected Memory of Place
“Auntie, watch yourself!” Menakshi Babulall says to a cow standing in the middle of a dirt road.
We’re driving in the back of Queenstown village on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana, where Menashki has spent most of her early childhood. The windows are down, exchanging what little cool air we had from the AC for sticky, familiar heat. Menakshi maneuvers around the cow with a deftness reserved for locals. It’s clear she has been down this road, again and again. At the end is her work-in-progress, Vaksana—set to be Guyana’s first women’s eco-retreat center that’s unapologetically LGBTQ+ inclusive.
“I wanted to be explicit because it’s part of providing that safety. Like: You're not an afterthought. You're part of the foundation of what we're creating,” she told me in an interview over WhatsApp before I visited. “We're the only country on this continent where it’s still illegal to be homosexual. We don't have open safe spaces.”
When I learned about Menakshi, a queer “comebackee” who spent most of her youth in Queenstown, left for Toronto, and returned at the start of the pandemic to launch Vaksana, I knew I had to make it a priority on my reporting trip—not only for my story about how queerness and climate intersect, but to remember Guyana’s contours.
Guyana was the start of life as I now know it, the place where my husband Craig and I had all of our firsts. We met while both serving as Peace Corps volunteers two decades ago when I’d interrupted a burgeoning career in arts and culture journalism and opted instead to travel the world. My feelings about the institution are complicated, but they are not about this country, which I have loved since my first week there, when, during a blackout, locals kept telling jokes and dancing as the generator hummed and encouraged me to do the same.
A cow on the road to Vaksana near Queenstown, Guyana. Image by Celeste Hamilton Dennis. Guyana, 2024.
Save for last summer when I visited for Pride in the capital city of Georgetown, it had been years since I traveled around Guyana, swimming in its refreshing black waters or hearing the steady sounds of frogs at night. With Vaksana, I could do both.
