AyaRoots

“Lapeyrouse has an air of genteel decay about it. It is tropical Gothic – largely overgrown, rusty and beautiful. We don’t believe in lush, manicured lawns and tidy graves here. Our cemeteries are things of storybooks and magic, of spirits walking in the night, midnight lovers’ trysts and Lord KitchenerCalypsos. Even on All Souls’ when families come to clean their graves, when flowers are placed and candles are lit, our cemeteries never lose that mournful air. It’s as though we feel death should not be prettied up and sanitized too much – Death can be violent, majestic, tragic but never pretty.” Read More

From Walking in Lapeyrouse in my series, Stories My Mother Told Me - Ayanna Gillian Lloyd

My mother speaks of my great-grandmother as if she knew her, even though she died many years before my mother’s birth. “Garma was something else, yes,” she said to me with a smile. Garma was what they all called her, a child’s mispronunciation of the word Grandma before they were old enough to properly frame the word. For the rest of her life this is what she was called.  She is called Garma still in the tales told about her, in my prayers to the image I have of her in my head and the spirit that I feel she holds. Read More Here

“I realized that after years of looking at photos and dissecting the messages in images, performing commutation tests in my mind by replacing signifiers like hair color, skin color, camera positioning or model positioning, I ended up disliking the conventions that everyone used.  I never understood the contorted model poses, the super obvious flashy lighting techniques and the overall excessiveness of a frame that could have effectively communicated the same message with less than half of the things in them.” Read More