Description

After almost five decades away, Doreen, a retired senior citizen, returns to her birth country to discover whether she could spend the last days of her life in a place that had nurtured her and contributed to the woman she had become.  Indeed, she had departed just two years after British Guiana had received its independence from Great Britain, lowered the Union Jack, raised the Golden Arrowhead, renamed itself Guyana, and set out to chart its path as a cooperative republic.

At first everything seems new and exciting, but soon she finds herself sliding down a path of disillusionment.  The old culture resurfaces, trying to drown her in a morass, and soon her “first” world consciousness clashes with a “third” world reality.  Yet she finds pleasure in exploring and recording the history of the Linden area as well as the culture embedded deep in her psyche. Eventually, she finds herself stepping on the proverbial crack that would “break her mother’s back.”  After six months, she realizes that, like Thomas Wolfe, she “can’t go home again.”