Jombii Jamborii

Jombii Jamborii

November 2025

Jombii Jamborii

$14.00

In stock

SKU: 978-1-946604-46-0 Category:
"The call and response, to and fro, two-tongued, double-dutch, ring and clink, of this sing-thing, pot pourri, Jombii Jamborii should challenge, delight, inform, and transform all who read it, hear it and can’t help but feel it."
— Fred D’Aguiar

About the Book

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 agents of ancestral memory, often understood as “ghosts” or “spirits.” 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 remembered.

Authors

Joan Cambridge-Mayfield

(Georgetown, British Guiana, 1940) is an Afro-feminist environmental protector, former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home (Ticknor & Fields/The Women’s Press). In the 1970s Joan worked for Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. By the 1980s Joan had walked away from an appointed scholar’s desk at the Library of Congress to head for the Guyana rainforest where she spent nearly two decades immersed in her environment, researching, writing, and working on her parcel of the “last of pristine Amazonia” at Yukuriba Falls on the Essequibo River. In the 1990s Joan’s musical drama, Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, Schoolbell Ring: Di Bush Tun Reenforest, received support from the United Nations. Her writing has appeared in the Antioch Review and was anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (edited by Margaret Busby; Jonathan Cape/Pantheon) and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders (edited by Epifania Akosua Amoo-Adare and Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa; DIO). Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow to Julian Mayfield, and is forever following his profound jumbi wisdom, strength, and guidance.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz

(San Francisco, USA, 1987) scholarship, writing, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized with grants and fellowships including from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy’s essays, poems, and films are available through such publications as African American Review, Anthropology News, Asymptote, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of Africana Religions, New West Indian Guide, and Postcolonial Text. Jeremy holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.

Praise

How you sound has a lot to do with how free you are. Every language brings its own luggage and history. This is what one finds in Jombii Jamborii. The book consists of linguistic duets waiting to dance with the ear. Here is a hot pot of Guyanese Creole. A reminder that the tongue is for tasting as well as for speaking.
— E. Ethelbert Miller
Jombii Jamborii makes it perfectly clear that despite Europeans’ plan to erase African languages, subversive resilience was at work that not only kept some of the native tongue but added and subtracted and created a whole other language, full of innuendoes and nuances that aptly express our ethos. Jeremy and Joan’s collaboration speaks to the multilingualism of the Caribbean, full of codes, richly cultured.
— Opal Palmer Adisa, author of The Storyteller's Return
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
I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.
— Hilary Ilkay
It was a joy to read Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s submission and extremely gratifying to see it here in the issue. I loved it for its phenomenally energetic soundscape that gives entry to intricate questions of language, identity, self-fashioning, place, and family.
— Daniel Yadin
...enjoy the dazzling wordplay of Jombii Jamborii…
Asymptote

Praise for Previous Work

Joan Cambridge brings a truly fresh and original voice to American literature.
— Gloria Naylor
Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home made a thudding hit with me. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it charmed me with a language so new to me that I felt I was learning how to read for the first time in my life. Joan Cambridge is a talent to be reckoned with.
— Nolan Miller
Clarise’s situation is poignant, and Cambridge describes it very well indeed, refusing mere victimization for her character, allowing her struggle and growth. . .Clarise’s dream-search for gold connects her to her homeland and signals her realization that she is at sea in [the United States of] America. Her body and her soul need the connection with land and place represented by home.
— Michelle Cliff
Most notable among [recent novels by writers from the Anglophone Caribbean] in terms of more authentic usage of the native language, not only in dialogue but also in narration, is The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) by the Trinidadian author, Earl Lovelace, and more recently Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home (1987) by Guyanese writer Joan Cambridge. . .This novel ushers in a new era in Caribbean literature in which not only is the nation tongue validated at the level of character and narrator, but the nation, home, is given credence above the metropole as a place more suited for one’s spirituality.
— Opal Palmer Adisa
Komfa Work, Jeremy Peretz’s dissertation, is a triumph—beautifully written, embedded within a range of comparative phenomena, and with a rich understanding of the role of politics, race, and ethnicity in shaping the meanings of Komfa. The theme of anti-blackness. . .offers a powerful critique of the plural society framework. . . [providing] an excellent sense of the labor histories that gave rise to Guyana’s complicated postcolonial ethnic dynamics."
— Caribbean Studies Association, remarks for biennial Best Dissertation Award

Excerpt

Laibeeyshon                                                              Libation

fa dem wa wish wi wel                                                 for those who wish us well
di res a-dem kud goo to hel                                         the rest could go to hell

dem-se                                                                        they say

[eshuu / eguun                                                             [eshu / egun
maantop]                                                                           mantop]

wi kyaan si yo                                                               we can’t see you
bot wi doz sens ya to                                                    but we can sense
noo-se dat yaal de-bout                                                you are here with us
laik briiz a-bloo-chruu                                                   we know you are
dis-ya bombatika fares                                                 like the breeze wafting through
neem laif.                                                                      these forest thickets called life

le dis-ya juu-drap faal                                                   accept these dewdrops
pon di maas a-ya brik-fared                                         on your forehead of mossy stone
an aal-a-ya huu waan wii praaspa                               all who want us to prosper
wit moo-moo-moo fyuucha                                          with more more more future
DIS WAAN IZ FO-YUU!                                               THIS IS FOR YOU!
FAIYA WAAN WID WII!                                               FIRE ONE WITH US!
Aal-a-ya huu a-bloo god-win pon wii                           all you blowing good wind on us
di-res-a-ya kyan gwaan go-wee                                  the rest will keep wandering
far-faar from dis-ya jamborii                                        far, far from our party

Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-46-0
, 48pp, W:5.25in x L:8.25in
Publication Date: November 1, 2025