[11/01/25] Cambridge-Mayfield, Joan & Peretz, Jeremy Jacob: Jombii Jamborii

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

"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

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’s (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.

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.