Jombii Jamborii

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield

Jombii Jamborii is a wild party. In Guyana’s Creole language, Creolese (or Kriiyaliiz), jumbi (or jombii) can mean “wild” or “of low status.” These pejorative attributes have been similarly ascribed to Creolese through a coloniality of language centuries in the making. Jumbi, however, are also cherished and feared ancestral memory, often understood, if reductively, as “ghosts” or “spirits” offering both the promise of healing and threats of hurt. A mass of unwieldy revenants, these jumbi-words cavort together back and forth in both Creolese and English, mirroring multigenerational movement and song bridging worlds of ancestors, young, old, and those yet to be born or re-membered.

'Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s Jombii Jamborii was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.' – René Esaú Sánchez