Photo: Cover of 'Dis Gyrl'.
Dis Gyrl: The Enchanted Life of Aunty Joyce Trotman
By Joyce Trotman
Dis Gyrl holds the memories of almost 100 years of someone who grew up in British Guiana, before the second world war, who lived a very full professional life in education there and in England, and now in her nineties has been a faithful Quaker for almost fifty years. It gives a glimpse into the world of a colonised country, which had been at the heart of chattel slavery and the plantation system. A world whose aftermath is experienced by a young girl living a poor and mainly rural existence in Demerara, with an unmarried mother and an extended family. A girl who is being educated to be more English than the English, and who, ninety years on, is able to write to Charles Windsor about the British slave trade and its impacts – and also to Keir Starmer in defence of Diane Abbot’s position on the significance of skin colour.
