Collection 01: Jumbee & Rum. 2022

Jasmin Nessa Ali’s debut collection, Jumbee & Rum was the final showcase in The 2022 Multi-Media Event: Heatspell, and also served as her undergraduate thesis project at Maryland Institute College of Art. The collection personifies the jumbee, or spirits, that haunt and inspire Jasmin’s Guyanese matrilineage.

Jumbee \jUHm-bee\: (noun) SPIRIT

An unbreakable thread flows through my Guyanese matrilineage. It runs through desert, forest, field, and in a way, two oceans. On our timeline, my mother and I come after an extraordinary double migration. We remember the widowed Jahajee that was tricked into voyaging from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean: her first ocean. She cut down sugar cane as her language changed and her beliefs were molded by Christian imperialists. Then, we saw my grandmother leave everything behind to move her daughters across yet another ocean. Now, I am the same age as my mother when she immigrated from Enmore, Guyana to New York City. I see the spirits that made her: that haunt us. 

We are made of: the curse of alcoholism, the hesitance at the airport, the sweat of the sugar estate, the darkness of inequity, the loss at the wedding. 

I am the first to be born in a new arena. I am breaking and fulfilling generational legacies. Our timeline has met me with a strange homesickness for a place in which I’ve never resided, but my power source is just as rich as that of the women who came before me. I am fueled by maternal prayer, wisdom, and protection. So, I explore a different form of Jumbee, one of grace and pride. In my collection, lighter spirits follow the wicked ones. Altogether, the line is a tether between my mother and I and all of our homes. Its purpose is to make her feel beautiful and powerful. 

I tell her that we are made of: the tenacity of the city, the nostalgia of hand-me-downs, the dignity of the flag. She is regal. She is strong.